![]() ![]() Something interesting Tuckwiller learned was that the US military would officially declare a soldier dead after he was missing for a full year. ![]() Then she combed through what’s left of WWII military records-many were lost in a fire in the 1970s-looking for “after action” reports from the invasion that included confirmed D-Day deaths. Tuckwiller began with all of the grave markers at the Normandy American Cemetery inscribed with a June 6th death date. “Their mission was to win a World War against Hitler,” says Long, “not to keep records that would satisfy peacetime researchers 75 years later.” Commanders did their best under difficult circumstances to accurately register the fallen, but death dates weren’t always definitive in the fog of war. ![]() In the chaos of the beach landings, for example, some soldiers ended up fighting, and ultimately dying, in different companies. While military records clearly showed that thousands of troops perished during the initial phases of the months-long Normandy Campaign, it wasn’t nearly as clear when many of the troops were actually killed. Men from the Red Cross give a blood transfusion to an injured man on the shore of Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. ![]()
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