Lebanon, Tennessee — Growing up in a small town in Tennessee, Lane Martin saw daily pictures of his uncle hanging in the kitchen, but knew very little about him. He left Harvard Law School at the beginning of World War II. He joins the Marine Corps. He was killed in 1943 by attacking a Pacific atoll called Tarawa. His body was then placed in a gray steel casket after the war and returned home, buried in a clover-covered family plot.
But in 2020, Martin received a call from the Marine Corps. There was a mistake, he said: his uncle — Captain Edward Glenwalker, Jr. — wasn’t in the gray steel casket after all. Instead, he was found in an anonymous grave at a military cemetery in Hawaii.
The woman on the phone said the army was planning to return Captain Walker’s remains and find out who had been buried in Captain’s grave all the time.
“Honestly, I thought it was a hoax,” said Martin, who was born nine years after his uncle died and is now retired. “But they began to explain the evidence, and the tremors went down my spine, and I said,” My God, they have my uncle. “
Improved forensic techniques and DNA testing have made it possible to reliably identify killed in action that the military once thought would remain anonymous forever. But progress comes with a twist. The same technology that allows you to name an unnamed person can also reveal the confusion and failure that caused service members to be buried in the wrong grave.
After World War II, the US military had to sort out the bodies of nearly 300,000 killed in action. Most were sent home to their families or buried abroad in marked tombs. However, at that time, it was not possible to identify about 8,500 sets of bodies. These were buried in a U.S. military graveyard beneath the exact row of marble markers with only the word “unknown.”
For years, those tidy lines have hidden a nasty history. The identification process was sometimes so unplanned and unruly that unidentified men remained unexplained and, worse, sent them to the wrong family.
Digging into that tangled past can raise more questions than answers, as in the case of Captain Walker.
The Defense MIA / POW Accounting Bureau, a Pentagon unit responsible for identifying killed in action, hopes to remove its name from the list of 104 men still missing in the fighting in Tarawa in 2017. I opened a grave in Hawaii in the year. Instead, researchers found a captain who wasn’t on the missing list.
Things got even more complicated when the steel casket in Captain Walker’s tomb was lifted from the red Tennessee clay and pried open in 2021. Inside, wrapped in a pristine white wool blanket of the U.S. Navy, most of the left arm and leg, ribs, vertebrae, and skull were a neatly articulated skeleton that looked like a half-human. However, DNA analysis revealed that after a few months, the bones belonged to at least three men instead of one. Their bodies have not yet been officially identified.
Instead of removing the individual from the missing list, three more efforts have been added.
In recent years, similar findings have led the government to uncover misidentified war dead in Mississippi, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Maine, and even West Point, where government agencies quietly opened graves in 2019. It came to be. The first lieutenant of World War II was named Ira Cheaney, Classified 1950 Army Memo He warned that he probably had the wrong person. Researchers wanted to find a winner who had long lost the Medal of Honor, Alexander Nininger, but the DNA from the excavated bodies did not match either man.
Another name for the missing list.
The agency has long known that World War II era tombs probably had a swamp of past mistakes. Confidential notes cut into numerous classified files about the dead on Tarawa warn of the “difficulty” of the burial process, and each tomb marked “unknown” may contain several bodies. I warned that there was sex.
Part of the reason, for years, agencies avoided trying to identify the bodies that remained in those tombs, instead from grassy jungle fox holes and remote plane crash sites. Focused on field expeditions to recover the missing American dead. Little identification was done..
Things have changed since 2015, when Congress, dissatisfied with the slow pace of recovery, required agencies to nearly triple their production to at least 200 IDs per year. The only way to do that was to dig into an unknown tomb.
Since then, the agency has opened more than 1,000 tombs from World War II and the Korean War and created hundreds of new IDs. However, as the agency admits, it also frequently finds mixed, disagreeable, and misidentified bodies, although it does not give any numbers.
“As technology advances, we can come across mistakes from the past,” said Dr. John Bird, director of the agency’s laboratory. “We try to fix it in real time as the incident progresses, in order to include full transparency with the affected family.”
Captain Walker’s case and others like it reveal how difficult it is to solve past mistakes.
“Everything is fubar and we use the terminology from that time,” said John Eakin, a Vietnam veteran of his cousin Pvt. Arthur Kelder, nicknamed Bad, died during World War II in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in the Philippines. Cabanatuan, With 2,700 other men. About 1,000 people have never been identified.
Eakin, a longtime aviation accident investigator, concluded from his own research that his cousin was probably buried in an unknown tomb A-12-195 in the U.S. military cemetery in Manila, which was tombed in 2014. I sued the agency to open and test. remain.
But that wasn’t easy. The prisoners who died in the camp were initially buried 10 at a time in the mass grave. After the war, less trained low-ranking U.S. forces tried to sort them out, but the bodies were often overlooked, mislabeled, and mixed, and Eakin said the family had little or no evidence. He said he was not sent the body based on.
“I was alone, so I don’t want to choose an untrained GI,” Eakin said. “But this is so dirty that if you get one ID correctly, it’s just unlucky.”
According to Army records, the casket that Mr. Eakin believed to contain his cousin may actually be retained. Mix of 10 soldiers.. Finding all of the agency-determined private kelders meant digging nine additional caskets. But it wasn’t that simple. DNA testing revealed that 10 caskets hold the bones of at least 15 men. Four of them, like Captain Walker, were thought to have already been identified and sent home.
Other names in the list.
Hoping to collect a complete set of ashes from the prison camp, the agency found more mix-ups that required further digging. Since 2014, the agency has unearthed 311 tombs related to the camp.
This is a unique American approach. Efforts by other countries that fought in World War II are unmatched by the scope and costs of an accounting agency with an annual budget of $ 130 million. Other countries generally chose to leave the complex reality of combat buried.
Few battles were as vicious as Tarawa. Approximately 18,000 Marines raided an atoll that had been fortified by the Japanese, but landing craft collided with coral reefs far from the shore, and Marines had to go through a machine gun blight. did not. More than 1,000 people were killed and 4,600 Japanese were killed. Captain Walker, who was selected in his high school class as “most likely to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,” was found at the water’s edge. On Christmas Eve in 1943, his mother received a telegram saying, “I deeply regret having informed you …”.
At that point, his body had already been rushed to burial in an open-air graveyard with hundreds of people. As the war intensified, the small atoll became the main US air force base and several open-air graveyards were paved. Only half of the bodies originally buried on Tarawa were rediscovered shortly after the war, and many were only partially recovered.
It’s not clear when the military lost Captain Walker, said agency historian Hannah Metheny, who worked on the case.
In 1946, a crew of low-ranking soldiers suffering from the heat of the tropics moved all the remains found in Tarawa to the Central Cemetery and a few months later to the Hawaiian Military Forensic Institute.
One set of ashes had a Captain Walker dog tag. Height, age, of another matching captain walker, There was gold dental treatment, but no dog tag. The dog-tagged set was sent to his family in 1947. The set with the characteristic dental treatment was classified as “indistinguishable” and buried as unknown.
Captain Walker may have been lost, but in 2013 a private non-profit group of archaeologists History flight As soon as they started digging Tarawa, thousands of bones were found and the group sent them to an accounting firm. The agency began excavating an unknown tomb in 2017, as collecting and identifying a complete set of bodies means comparing new discoveries with the unknown from Tarawa, which was already in Hawaii. .. However, it was a clear match with Captain Walker, a person who seems to have already been discovered.
Lebanon, the town he welcomed in Tennessee, treated this discovery as a homecoming. In 2021, his flag-covered casket was escorted to the graveyard by hundreds of veterans riding motorcycles. Cousins who haven’t seen the Honorary Keeper fire 21-gun salutes for years.
In a recent interview, Lane Martin said he didn’t feel bitter about the turmoil. He remembers how the disappearance of his uncle, a promising young law student, destroyed his mother and grandmother, and some of them believe he is resting in a plot of his family. I learned that I got the comfort of.
“If that’s not true, it doesn’t change anything,” Martin said. “Knowing that he was at home made them so comfortable. These men who had been in the grave for years gave it to my family, and I gave them it. appreciate.”