America Left Them Behind. Now We’re Trying to Bring Them Home

One of the greatest tragedies of war is the lack of closure for the families of those missing in action. Of all the nations on earth, none places as much effort into locating, recovering, and identifying the remains of lost service members as the United States. Tens of thousands of Americans remain missing from conflict spanning more than a century of warfare. For many families, the fate of a loved one is still unknown. Some eventually receive answers decades later when a missing service member is found and identified. Others continue waiting. It is a burden shared by every nation that has sent men and women to war. The United States has devoted enormous resources to solving those mysteries. Government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, archaeologists, historians, divers, and volunteers search battlefields, jungles, deserts, mountains, and oceans around the world. They investigate old records, follow rumors, examine crash sites, and pursue every lead they can in an effort to bring America's missing home. How do they do it? Let's find out. Which organizations oversee locating and recovering MIAs? How extensive are their efforts? How successful have they been? Is the effort worth the time and expense? Hello, I'm Colin Heaton, former history professor, Army and Marine Corps veteran, and welcome to this episode of Forgotten History. The beginning of the toughest 26 days in Marine Corps history. The United States died this afternoon. There are children and women in here. Perhaps one of the most famous MIA cases was that of a B-24D Liberator named the Lady Be Good. Assigned to the 376th Bomb Group, the bomber departed on its first combat mission on April 4, 1943, as part of a raid against Naples, Italy. It never returned to base. For years, no one knew what had happened to the aircraft or its crew. Then, in 1958, oil exploration crews made a remarkable discovery. Roughly 440 miles, or 710 kilometers, inside the Libyan desert, they found the missing bomber. The aircraft was astonishingly well-preserved. Food, water, and working equipment were still on board. What they did not find were any bodies. That discovery led investigators to a startling conclusion. The crew had likely survived the crash landing or bailed out before impact. The tragedy was that the original search in 1943 had focused on the Mediterranean and the North African coastline because rescuers assumed the bomber had gone down at sea. No one imagined that it had continued hundreds of miles into the Sahara Desert. In February 1960, searchers found the remains of five crewmen far north of the wreck site. According to the National Archives, Army Quartermaster Mortuary Personnel returned to Libya, recovered the remains, and eventually identified the men. 4. The Families Involved Answers finally came nearly 17 years after the bomber disappeared. Cases like the Lady Be Good illustrate both the challenge and importance of the effort to account for America's missing. Today, the lead U.S. agency responsible for locating, recovering, and identifying American's missing in action is the Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA. Nearly every major recovery effort ultimately passes through this organization. DPAA is a Department of Defense agency whose mission is to provide the fullest possible accounting of missing U.S. personnel from past conflicts. To accomplish that mission, it deploys teams around the world that include historians, archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, explosive ordnance specialists, medics, and military support personnel. The agency's work spans World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, Iraq, and other designated conflicts. Whether a case involves a jungle crash site in Southeast Asia, a battlefield in Europe, or an aircraft resting on the ocean floor, DPAA is usually at the center of the investigation. Recovery is only part of the process. Identifying the remains often requires extensive forensic analysis. DPAA works closely with the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, or AFMES, which provides forensic pathology and DNA identification services. DPAA itself was created in 2015 through the consolidation of several earlier organizations including the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command and the Defense POW Missing Personnel Office. Families are supported throughout the process by service casualty offices, which serve as the primary link between militants and the agencies conducting the accounting mission. One of the most important partners in the identification process is the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, known as AFDIL. As part of AFMES, it serves as the Department of Defense's primary human remains DNA laboratory. Scientists there compare DNA recovered from remains against reference samples provided by family members, helping investigators put names to the unknown and return missing Americans to their families. Service casualty offices exist across all branches of the U.S. military and serve as the primary link between families and the government. While they do not typically participate in field recoveries, they coordinate family communications, DNA sample collection, case updates, and official notifications. A number of additional organizations support the accounting mission. The former Defense POW Missing Personnel Office helped coordinate policy and oversight while branching specific organizations such as the Army Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Office, the Navy Casualty Assistance Division, the Air Force Missing Persons Branch, and the Marine Corps Personal and Family Readiness Division assist families and support recovery efforts within their respective services. Several earlier organizations laid the foundation for today's DPAA, the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, recovered and identified missing personnel for decades. The Joint Task Force Full Accounting conducted investigations and recovery missions, particularly for Vietnam-era cases. In 2003, those organizations were brought together under the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, before eventually becoming part of DPAA. Other government agencies play important supporting roles. The Department of State helps secure diplomatic access, host nation permissions, and international cooperation. These relationships are critical in countries such as Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, North Korea, Russia, China, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and across Europe, where recovery teams often depend on foreign governments for access to sites and records. The American Battle Monuments Commission, or ABMC, also contributes to the mission. Although it does not conduct recoveries, it manages American military cemeteries and memorials overseas. In some cases, unknown service members buried in those cemeteries are disinterred for modern forensic analysis. When a previously missing American is identified, a rosette is placed beside that individual's name on the walls of the missing, marking that they have finally been accounted for. The Defense Intelligence Agency provides another important piece of the puzzle. Through wartime records, intelligence reporting, foreign source information, and historical analysis, DIA has helped investigators locate leads and build cases that ultimately contribute to identifying Americans missing. The effort to account for America's missing is not carried out by the government alone. Several non-profit organizations, volunteer groups, and academic institutions have become important partners in the mission. One of the most prominent is History Flight, a non-profit organization that has worked closely with the DPAA on major World War II recovery operations, including efforts at Tarawa. DPAA has described History Flight as a strategic partner in recovering and identifying missing service members. Project Recover combines archival research, marine science, underwater archaeology, robotics, sonar technology, and diving operations to locate lost aircraft and missing Americans. Its teams have participated in searches throughout the Pacific and Southeast Asia, helping locate long-forgotten crash sites and underwater wrecks. Another notable organization is BENTPROP, which began as a volunteer effort focused on World War II losses in the Pacific, particularly around Palau. Through research, diving expeditions, aviation expertise, and cooperation with local authorities, the group has helped locate evidence connected to missing American airmen and prisoners of war. Universities also contribute to the mission. Academic researchers assist with historical investigations, archaeology, forensic anthropology, isotope analysis, archival research, and field work. DPAA regularly works with university programs and research institutions, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to support ongoing recovery and identification efforts. Together, these organizations extend the reach of the government's recovery mission and demonstrate that bringing America's missing home remains a national effort supported by professionals, volunteers, researchers, and families across the country. The effort to recover America's missing stretches across every major conflict in modern U.S. history. For World War I, one notable case involved Private Francis Lupo of the U.S. Army, who was identified in 2006. According to JPAC, it was the first successful identification of an American service member previously unaccounted for from the First World War. Another breakthrough came with 1st Sgt. George H. Humphrey of the U.S. Marine Corps. His remains were recovered near Rembracourt-sur-Marne, France, in 2009 and identified the following year before being returned home for burial. World War II remains the largest challenge. Tens of thousands of Americans were never recovered or identified and many cases involved difficult searches that spanned decades and crossed international boundaries. One such case was the Bintwiti war liberator, Tulsa American. On December 17, 1944, the aircraft was part of a bombing mission against enemy oil refinery targets in Odertal, Germany. According to DPAA records, the formation came under attack from German fighters actually emerging from cloud cover near the target. The Tulsa American was heavily damaged and attempted to reach the Allied airfield on the island of Wies, then part of Yugoslavia. It never made it. The bomber ditched into the Adriatic Sea near Wies. Of the 10 crewmen aboard, 7 survived and were rescued. Three men were lost with the aircraft. Pilot 1st Lt. Eugene P. Ford, Navigator 1st Lt. Russell C. Landry, and Flight Engineer Technical Sgt. Charles E. Priest. For decades, the wreck remained undiscovered. Then, in 2009, a civilian diver located aircraft debris off the coast of Wies. Croatian investigators documented the site and on May 31, 2010, divers recovered a data plate that positively identified the wreck as the Tulsa American. The discovery set in motion a major international recovery effort. During June and July 2017, DPAA conducted an underwater mission with support from Lund University, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and with the Croatian Navy. Divers recovered human remains and personal artifacts from the wreck site. The recovery effort was later featured in the PBS Nova documentary Last B-24, which followed the search beneath the Adriatic for the members of the lost crew. Using mitochondrial DNA, autosomal DNA, dental records, anthropological analysis, and a material evidence recovered from the wreck, DPAA and the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System identified one of the missing as 1st Lt. Eugene P. Ford. More than 70 years after this aircraft disappeared, Ford finally came home. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery and a rosette was placed beside his name on the tablets of the missing at the Florence American Cemetery in Italy, signifying that he had been accounted for. Two members of the crew, Russell C. Landry and Charles E. Priest, remain missing. Stories such as the Tulsa American illustrate both the success and the scale of the challenge. To date, 7,217 World War II MIAs have been identified, yet DPAA still lists 71,783 Americans from World War II as still unaccounted for. The Korean War remains another major focus of recovery efforts. In the years immediately following the conflict, North Korea returned more than 3,000 sets of remains to U.S. custody, resulting in roughly 2,000 identifications. Modern accounting efforts continue beyond those early recoveries. Today, approximately 7,367 Americans from the Korean War remain unaccounted for, and investigators continue searching for answers more than 70 years after the fighting ended. Vietnam remains one of the most active and challenging areas of the MIA accounting mission. According to DPAA, its accounting efforts have focused on cases from 1973 to the present and do not represent every casualty or missing service member from the entire conflict. DPAA's Southeast Asia accounting records show that 2,646 Americans were originally listed as missing across Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and China. Since then, 1,061 have been repatriated and identified. Current figures show 729 still unaccounted for in Vietnam, 288 in Laos, 42 in Cambodia, and 3 in China. The Vietnam War also produced one of the most enduring controversies in American military history, whether some American prisoners of war were left behind after the conflict ended. Over the years, investigators received more than 1,600 first-hand reports and nearly 14,000 second-hand reports concerning possible live American prisoners. Some witnesses interviewed by intelligence agencies were considered credible, fueling decades of debate among families, veterans, and policymakers. One analysis of government records argued that the evidence suggested some prisoners may not have been returned. Others strongly disagree. Senator John McCain, for instance, addressed the issue in the Senate POWMIA investigation, stating, and I quote, "...we found no compelling evidence to prove that Americans are alive in captivity today. There is some evidence, though no proof, to suggest only the possibility that a few Americans may have been kept behind after the end of America's military involvement in Vietnam." End quote. And see our video on John McCain and John Kerry regarding the POWMIA issue. The debate continues to this day, but regardless of where one stands on the issue, the effort to account for those who never returned remains ongoing. The modern accounting mission is much smaller than those associated with World War II Korea or Vietnam, but it continues today. DPAA's current war on terror-related cases include losses from the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Libya. Among the cases still being pursued are two Desert Storm Navy losses, three Department of Defense contractors from Operation Iraqi Freedom, and one loss connected to the 1986 military operations against Libya. Several American service members initially listed as missing during Operation Iraqi Freedom were later recovered and identified. Sergeant Keith Matt Maupin was captured following a convoy attack in 2004 and was identified through DNA analysis after his remains were recovered in 2008. PFC Joseph Anzac Jr., Staff Sergeant Alex Jimenez, and Specialist Byron Foudy were all recovered following separate operations connected to a 2007 ambush south of Baghdad. Staff Sergeant Ahmed K. Alteh, who disappeared in Baghdad in 2006, was believed captured, but he was identified in 2012. The Department of Defense described him as the final missing soldier recovered from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation New Dawn. Today, DPAA still lists three Iraqi Freedom contractors as unaccounted for, Kirk von Ackerman, Timothy E. Bell, and Adnan al-Hilawi. Afghanistan currently has no unresolved MIA cases. Recovery missions, archaeological excavations, forensic analysis, DNA testing, and international negotiations require significant time, manpower, and expense. Yet, for many families, even decades after a war ends, the search is more about than recovering remains. It is about finally learning what happened to a husband, wife, father, brother, sister, or child. Every identification represents a family receiving answers that may have been missing for generations.