Chaplain Charles Pierce and The Graves Registration Service

One of the most important purposes of military history museums like the Museum of the American G.I. is to recognize the men and women who have bravely fought for this country and to honor the memory of the war dead.

While we do have Memorial Day and other days of recognition that do so, American GI Museums also serve to bring the names and efforts of American soldiers in wars since the days of the Revolution back to life.

That process has not always been so easy, considering how many members of this country’s military who died during its formative years were never recovered or identified.

The Problem of Identifying the War Dead

Today, the process of identifying those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in battle is a detailed process.

Yet things were not always that way and it wasn’t until the Civil War that more priority was put on actually trying to identify fallen soldiers and give them a cemetery burial.

Prior to this time, war dead were frequently buried in specific cemeteries designated for soldiers but without being identified.

Though these plots across the country and even throughout Europe were reserved only for soldiers, it was never known exactly who was buried where.

The Quartermaster Department and Chaplain Charles Pierce

It was this poor handling of the soldiers who had sacrificed their lives during times of war that eventually led Congress to authorize in 1862 the Quartermaster Department of the military to organize a national cemetery system.

This system did bring control of the first national cemeteries together; however, it did nothing about the issue of identifying the bodies within them or being brought there.

Bodies were buried in temporary graves, then exhumed for hopeful identification before being relocated back to that unit’s point of origin, task that was daunting if not nearly impossible in many cases largely due to disorganization and lack of an effective process.

That all changed when America went to war with Spain over the rule of Cuba and also the Philippines.

In both instances, the task of identifying the war dead came to the forefront, as the goal in both cases was to return bodies back to the United States for a mainland military burial.

It was during this period in the early 1900s when Chaplain Charles Pierce of the Quartermaster Department and head of the U.S. Army Morgue Office of Identification in Manila realized that doing so required a system for both identifying and managing the bodies of the deceased.

Pierce Develops An Identification Process

Once in charge of the effort to identify the dead soldiers, Pierce developed a system for exhuming the bodies, then comparing whatever information was previously available about each soldier to slowly start determining who they were.

In addition to his process of identifying the bodies, he also began what became a tradition of embalming the soldiers, then dressing them in a new military uniform in which they would be shipped home and then buried.

Although Pierce became ill and was unable to remain in the Philippines to continue his work, his process continued on and in more ways than one.

His last recommendation to his superiors in the Quartermaster Department was for the military to issue identification tags to each soldier like those voluntarily worn in the Civil War so that identifying the dead would be a much easier task.

His idea is now known as the dog tag and was initiated in World War I and has been in use ever since to help ensure every lost soldier makes it home.

The Graves Registration Service

Even with dog tags becoming a standard issue as the U.S. entered WWI, the now renamed Quartermaster Corps recognized that there would be high casualties and the effort to identify them all would be massive.

Pierce was recalled to duty to continue his work and head the new Graves Registration Service, established in 1917.

In France, he began his duties with only two officers and 50 enlisted working with him, numbers that would grow to include 150 officers and more than 7,000 enlisted, all of whom identified more than 73,000 fallen American soldiers, registered their temporary gravesites throughout Europe, and arranged for their return trip back to America for military burial, most of which did not happen until many years after the war.

Though the process of temporary burials overseas ended when the United States entered into conflict with Korea and the military opted to immediately ship fallen soldiers back home due to threats from communist forces, Pierce’s process helped get American soldiers back home through both World Wars.

The dog tag is one of the most important items in any soldier’s gear, one that is still instrumental for identifying fallen soldiers to get them home again for an honorable burial.

With every soldier who joins the military and puts on a chain with those tags, there is a piece of history and of Charlies Pierce with them.