Saving Private Ryan question about Tom Hank's character

Wait, Tom Hanks dies?! Thank for the spoiler, a-hole!!

Are us soldiers buried in dozens of towns across Europe?

They were usually buried in temporary cemetaries near where they fell. After the war, they were exhumed and reburied in larger cemetaries run by the American Battle Monuments Commission, like the one in Normandy. Or in some cases, returned to their families in the US.

Didn't know that...

There is a cemetery in Margarten, Netherlands that honors the remains of about 8,300 of our fallen servicemen.

Good article about that in today's Daily Advertiser.

My uncle was drafted for WWII, and at the induction center they were questioned about any special skills or experience they might have. He told them he worked in a funeral home part time when he was growing up. They asked him if he had experience handling dead bodies and he said yeah he knew how to embalm and used to lay out the bodies in the coffins, etc.

They assigned him to Graves Registration and his unit went to those temporary cemetaries and dug up the Graves and prepared the bodies for transfer to the designated cemetaries. He said a lot of times there was no identify of the body and they would take dental imprints and look for other clues of the identity.

I remember him talking once about in the aftermath of the Battle of the Bulge, when they tried to recover bodies, the bodies were frozen solid from the cold temperatures.

Not a job I would want, but it didn't seem to affect him that much, upon returning home he started what would become a very successful business. He died a few years ago.

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USS Arizona interments

It's unedited, but does have commercials.