How were funeral homes a good service during World War II?
Funeral homes and embalming in general were in greatest demand during wars (going back to the War Between the States in the 1860s) because families wanted to have the bodies of their relatives who died in wartime preserved well enough to bury at home. Before then, bodies were generally not embalmed or otherwise preserved but buried in the ground and decayed fairly quickly. Graves registration details in the US Army tracked when and where soldiers died and were buried in the battlefield, so that the remains or at least some of the soldier’s personal effects could eventually be returned to the soldier’s family. Funeral homes were the final leg of the trip for remains and personal effects from the battlefield to the soldier’s final resting place.
