What Happened To The Bodies From D-Day?

For as intensely organized as the D-Day invasion may have been to officials like Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower (via the National Archives), the experience for soldiers actually tasked with landing in Normandy could be chaotic. According to History, a combination of poor weather and intense German opposition not only made things confusing, but resulted in thousands of casualties. Ahead of the invasion, advisors told Eisenhower to expect a majority of the more than 150,000 soldiers to die in the attempt. For paratroopers in particular, they predicted an especially grim 75% mortality rate.

While it's clear that thousands of soldiers from both the Allied and Axis died that day, getting an exact number of fatalities has proven difficult. As History notes, it wasn't reasonable to expect commanders to carefully note when and where a service member died, especially if the individual ended up with a different company in the chaos. Moreover, missing soldiers were only declared dead a year after they disappeared, further adding to the confusion. 

Today, most memorials claim that there were around 4,414 Allied deaths, with the worst casualties on Omaha Beach of about 2,000 U.S. soldiers. At other beaches along the Normandy coast, around 2,000 British service members were killed, along with an estimated 340 Canadian soldiers. German forces faced somewhere between 4,000 to 9,000 casualties, of which many fatalities were buried in the La Cambe German military cemetery (via TIME).