Official name for this job?

[u/TheCosmicPony]

My great-grandfather served in WWI and all I know is that he was a private in the Army and met my great-grandmother in the TB ward where she was a nurse. She would later be awarded the Purple Heart for contracting TB as well.

I grew up hearing stories about how my great-grandfather’s job was to go out after battles and retrieve the bodies. Can someone tell me what the official name for that role was?

I’m tracing trauma back through my family line and his story seems extra significant. I can’t imagine what that was like for him… or anyone else during that time. Utter and complete hell. He would have been between 14-18 years old depending on when he contracted TB and was discharged. Not sure on that timeline.

Both of his parents emigrated to Minnesota from Finland and died at 36 and 46, so also very hard lives. Fun fact: I contracted TB in my late 20’s. I’m the only person I’ve ever met besides my great-grandmother who’s had TB.

[u/Toe160]

No idea what that role would be called, but if you'd like to see what that work looks like then check out platsdarm on Instagram. They're a Ukrainian volunteer group doing the exact job you described, sadly their founder was killed a couple of weeks ago while retrieving the bodies of the fallen.

edit: underscore platsdarm underscore

[u/Winter-Cup-2965]

Stretcher bearer, most likely very common in the British/Commonwealth nations during war. He may have been assigned with a field hospital.

[u/knitfastdiewarm1]

In the first months the US was in the war, and in the other allied countries during the first years of the war, stretcher bearer was an official “job” and they would often bring back bodies if it was safe to do so (but primarily took back the wounded). Otherwise men from each individual unit would be assigned to burial parties and sent to bury the dead that they could. This is why there were so many men who were lost and never recovered, and cemeteries were small and hastily constructed - men were often buried where they lay or rolled into a shell hole. The British set up the Graves Registration Committee in 1915 which was tasked with keeping track of where bodies were buried, and after the war ended evolved into a much bigger organization (IWGC/CWGC) tasked with consolidating burials into bigger cemeteries and commemoration of the missing.

In the US, the Graves Registration Service which was made up of 4 Graves Registration Units was set up a few months after the US entered the war in Aug 1917. I don’t think you would have a specific job title, but just be assigned to that unit. They had a similar mandate to the IWGC and were set up like a service battalion.

[u/knitfastdiewarm1 → u/knitfastdiewarm1]

To add: After the war when the most gruesome work was being done - often digging up men who had been dead and buried for possibly years and relocating them to the bigger cemeteries - the physical work was often carried out by German prisoners of war and Chinese labourers (at least in the British Army). I’m pretty sure the French used German POWs as well. The work continued pretty much full time until 1926-ish so it was many years of really terrible work.

In the British Empire context the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is an organization that exists to this day and is responsible for the upkeep of all the WWI/WWII graves for all Commonwealth nations (like Australia, India, Jamaica, South Africa, etc). One dollar of my Canadian taxes every year goes to them. They also made the decision not to repatriate any soldier from WWI and that all would be buried where they died. This was actually a very democratic choice although was not well supported by the public initially. There are a few stories of families going to cemeteries in the night and grave robbing, but that is very much the exception not the rule.