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Originally Posted by Jabo
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This site is only listing American buried in foreign countries, commited to the sea or still MIA. Around 160 000- 180 000 or the more than 400 000 American who died in WWII.
It doesn't give the age of the dead but is giving the precise unit (back to Regiment or Squadron) most of the time.
Be careful with death dates. I have found several occurences where the date shown in the database didn't match other sources. There may a dispcrepancy of some days (some US Army cases), I have not been able to find if that means that the man was fatally wounded on a given date and died some days after, so the two dates given.
US Navy cases are simpler. Men MIA (both air and ships) were given up for dead one year and one day after the date they disappeared. So seamen killed in Samar Battle may be listed on 25 October 1944 or on 26 October 1945 depending if they were listed as KIA or MIA. Anotehr example are the USN fighter pilots shot down over Guadalcanal on the 7 August 1942, all (or most ?) are listed as dead on 8 August 1943.
So far all USAAF personnel I have searched are listed on their actual date of death/missing.
As I said above, the base is showing around 40% of the American dead in WWII. Given the nature of sea and air battles, ratio is higher for seamen and airmen as many just went MIA or were commited to sea. Database is showing only 20-25% of the "grunts" I have searched so far.
By the way, thanks a lot Frank for pointing to the National Gravesite Locator. I found this once after a long search but had a PC crash before saving the link and was never able to locate it again.
Edited:
Just checked with a casualty list I have for an Army unit. I found two of 10 killed. The list has 22 names and only 3 are still buried in France and in the site given above.
Similar sites exist for:
_ Dutch WWII dead (
http://www.ogs.nl/reroute.asp?query=...subject_id=139). It list soldiers (with units, squadrons or warships), merchant seamen (with ships), Resistance fighters and Holocaust victims. Civilians victims of raids seem to not be included, as their graves are probably not cared by the Dutch State.
_ Finnish WWII dead (
http://www.mil.fi/tietokannat/index.dsp). AFAIK only military dead are shown. This one is a bit difficult to use. I am doing researches on the English/Finnish pages and then I have to go to the Swedish one to be able to see the details of the casualties.
Other way it is the best research engine: you can search by name, unit or death date. And it gives the reason of the death, the date of capture for deceased POWs and of wound for DOW.
_ Australian WWII dead (
http://www.awm.gov.au/database/roh.asp) and WWI soldiers (
http://www.ww2roll.gov.au/). Combinations of these sites is excellent. First gives all dead with reason of the death, place or area, service number and so on. Second will give personnal details (date of birth, of enlistement and so on). Also the ASW has a huge photographs database and you have a chance to find a picture of the casualty (or of his burial).
There is no comparable site for French. The best one is the Memorial GenWeb project (
http://www.memorial-genweb.org/html/fr/index.php3), that is listing people commemorated and is a gathering of local searchers/helpers. Few details of people are given most of the times, so it is usually of little value for history searchers. But it also lists people doing contributions and that allowed me twice allready (the two times I tried) to learn more about local WWII history of plaves I wanted to investigate.