When a person dies away from home, as a rule, his body is repatriated, that is, the ashes are returned to their homeland for burial. This can be done in various ways, for example, by freezing in a refrigerator. Sometimes a corpse is cremated, in this case the procedure is simplified - they only carry an urn with ashes, but this is not always acceptable for religious or ethical reasons. The most commonly used container is a zinc coffin. This scary phrase means a metal box in the shape of a parallelepiped, sometimes equipped with a transparent window.
The reasons why they are buried in zinc coffins are quite prosaic. Firstly, they are relatively cheap. Secondly, zinc is a light metal. Thirdly, it is easily soldered. Fourth, zinc has aseptic properties that prevent decomposition. Fifth, this metal is soft, and work with it.
Most often, the armed forces of countries waging war abroad face the problem of delivering the dead. In the thirties, Italian soldiers who died in Abyssinia went home for the last rest in hermetically sealed rectangular metal boxes. Of course, relatives buried their sons in ordinary wooden, albeit closed coffins, because, in addition to the hot African climate, the appearance of a dead warrior could disfigure battle wounds.
During the Vietnam War, practical Americans carried dead soldiers in plastic containers. However, then a zinc coffin was not needed: a huge amount of cargo was delivered to Indochina, dozens of direct and return flights were made every day, and the bodies of the dead were delivered very quickly. Today, the US Army still uses polymer coffins.
In the Soviet Union until the end of the eighties there was no established tradition of military funerals of those who gave their lives, protecting the interests of the country away from their native forests and fields. The Afghan war was the first armed conflict in which the victims began to return home. Then there was a reason why the zinc coffin was called the “200 load”. The main transport for this sad mission was military transport aircraft, which also had the sad nickname of “black tulips”, and air transportation to avoid overload is impossible without preliminary weighing. The zinc coffin, together with its contents, has a mass of not more than two centners, this figure was featured on invoices.
Secrecy also had some significance, they tried not to advertise the losses for political reasons, but already in the year of the Moscow Olympiad (thanks to word of mouth), practically all the population of the USSR knew about this code . Then another bureaucratic instruction appeared, prohibiting the opening of the zinc coffin (even to parents). Its implementation was entrusted to the military registration and enlistment offices, which were difficult to cope with this task. Having lost a son, sometimes the only one, mother and father were no longer afraid of anything and nobody.
In addition to wars, there are other cases when zinc coffins are needed. In early September 1986, the Odessa Electronmash plant received an urgent order for the manufacture of hundreds of metal boxes of specified sizes. It was not necessary to have special analytical skills in order to connect such a task with the death of the Admiral Nakhimov steamer near Novorossiysk.