Of the 4,414 Allied deaths on June 6th, 2,501 were Americans and 1,913 were Allies. Long knows that the Foundation’s list isn’t complete, but says that it’s the best figure that we have to date. For example, there were men still fighting in Europe and the Pacific in 1945, so those names had to be scrubbed.ĭozens of dead GIs are covered with sheets only yards from the seashore after D-Day, on June 17, 1944. She needed to confirm that each fallen soldier’s division would have been in Normandy on June 6th. Of course, Tuckwiller couldn’t automatically include all military personnel who died on Jin her record of D-Day fatalities. So many soldiers who went missing on D-Day-some bodies, for example, were swept out to sea or destroyed in violent plane crashes-had a death date on their military records of June 7, 1945, a year and a day later.
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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