"Missing in Action" and found 50 years later

[BletchleyGeek]

Just read this - rather moving - piece by BBC News on the quite impressive efforts made by teams of volunteers to trace the remains of Red Army soldiers across the battlefields of Second World War

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25589709

Exploration is one of 600 groups of diggers from all over Russia who have found and reburied a total of 500,000 soldiers so far.

[John Kettler]

BletchleyGeek,

What a poignant, moving story. I FBed it and hope many go to the link and read that sobering article. We military buffs/wargamers tend, at times, not to think in terms of the incredible damage a single fatality can inflict, sometimes, through generations, and the Eastern Front had such astounding losses my mind has trouble imagining them. Indeed, it reeled at some of the Army and Corps level losses at Kursk, never mind the overall casualties. The survival expectancies of getting through the war in infantry and tanks were terribly low, to the point where, say, three men out of an entire Russian company survived the war. We here in the States simply have no overall frame of reference for such a) loss rates, which are broadly applicable to the vast mass of soldiery in that category.

Here's a look at what Germany is doing at the Federal level to locate, ID and bury her war dead in the East.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/germany-to-open-last-wwii-war-cemetery-in-russia-a-914093.html

The article notes the Germans lost 2.7 million men as KIA, while the Russians lost 7.9 million KIA and MIA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

Per the Wiki, total U.S. deaths for all of WW II amounted to ~416,800, or 15.4% of only German Eastern Front KIAs. Per the same Wiki, which is deeply researched, Russian military fatalities fall in the range of 8.5 million to 13.85 million, or 4.9% to 3.2% of total U.S. WW II KIAs.

The Eastern Front was indeed the meat grinder so many have described it as being.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Mord]

I haven't finished the article yet but what I've read so far is really interesting. It's fascinating work, on one hand they are helping to identify missing soldiers and the other they are literally knee deep in history. Thanks for the link.

Mord.