Friday, June 17, 2005

WWII Missing in Action Soldiers Identified The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of two Army soldiers missing in action from World War II have been identified and returned to their families for burial.               They are Sgt. John T. Puckett, Wichita, Kan., and Pvt. Earnest E. Brown, Bristol, Va. Puckett will be buried tomorrow at the Ardennes American Cemetery, Neupre, Belgium.  Brown was buried last week near Bristol, Va.               On Jan. 15, 1945, during the Battle of the Bulge, Puckett and Brown were searching for German soldiers in a wooded area near Elsenborn, Belgium.  They were ambushed and came under intense enemy machine gun and mortar fire.  Eyewitnesses indicated they were killed, but their bodies could not be recovered due to enemy activity.               Following the war, remains of American soldiers were recovered and identified, but not those of Puckett and Brown.  Then in 1992, two Belgian nationals located and excavated an abandoned fighting position in the forest east of Elsenborn.  They recovered remains and other evidence and turned them over to U.S. authorities in Europe.               Scientists of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory used mitochondrial DNA as one of the forensic tools to identify the remains as those of Puckett and Brown.               Of the 88,000 Americans missing in action from all conflicts, 78,000 are from World War II.   (Department of Defense press release June 17, 2005) Pvt Brown's younger brother is still alive and had given up hope of giving his brother a proper funeral.  The story is told in the Bristol Herald Courier's story "Soldier Returns Home...60 Years Later": BRISTOL, Tenn. – After 60 years, Private Earnest Brown returned home last weekend, wrapped in the same type of Army blanket that kept him warm through two European winters during World War II. Every time Brown’s remains have been moved since 1992, he’s been carefully shrouded in a blanket, the folds held together with clothespins. Until that year, the bones were undiscovered, lying in an abandoned foxhole in a Belgian forest. Brown, who grew up in Clintwood, died in 1945 during the Battle of the Bulge, the last great fight in the European Theater of World War II. He was 31. The Army wrote him off as missing in action and unrecoverable. Over the years, his parents, wife, siblings and three children all died of natural causes until there was only one family member, younger brother Paul Brown, left. He said he still thought about his brother, but had given up all hope of a proper funeral. Indeed, Earnest Brown’s remains would never have been recovered if not for a remarkable confluence of coincidence and dedication. His identification took the combined efforts of a team of Belgian diggers who knew what to do with the remains of a U.S. soldier and a group of veterans and advocates who refused to allow Brown to be remembered coldly as CIL-1992-167-I-02... It's a remarkable story worth reading in its entirety. Military comment []12:29:23 PM   trackback []