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The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) marked a significant milestone with the 100th identification from the World War II Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines.
Not long after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the enemy began attacks against U.S. forces in the Philippines. For more than three months, Filipino and U.S. forces engaged in defensive operations. Ultimately, the Bataan Peninsula was surrendered, Corregidor Island fell and forces in the Southern Philippines surrendered.
In April 1942, after the surrender of Bataan, thousands of Filipino and U.S. troops were forced to march over 60 miles in route to Camp O’Donnell, Tarlac Province. The soldiers, already weakened from starvation, illness and fatigue, faced unimaginable abuse. Many were subjected to beatings and gunfire or abandoned and left to die along the way. Throughout the march, the prisoners of war (POWs) suffered extreme heat and were often denied opportunities to rest, resulting in numerous deaths. Those who survived the march were confined to prison camps, forced to live in inhumane conditions.
The primary detention center for American POWs was Camp Cabanatuan, located in Nueva Ecija Province, which originally consisted of three separate prison camps. The number of POWs at Cabanatuan reached approximately 10,000. When the camp was liberated on Jan. 30, 1942, more than 2,700 POWs had already been buried in the Camp #1 cemetery. Following a postwar identification attempt, over one-third of these servicemembers remained unidentified.
“As a historian working on this project, I have a few different tasks,” said Dr. Aelwen Weatherby, DPAA historian. “One of those is to research the unknowns and figure out how they need to be grouped to be proposed for disinterment. Then I start writing the memos, which are essentially making the case to the approval authority for why we should disinter the unknowns and who they could be associated with. That gets the ball rolling on each unknown.”
In August 2014, ten unknowns linked to a common grave in Cabanatuan were disinterred for forensic examination, initiating DPAA’s Cabanatuan Identification Project.
“There had been a lot of family pressure at the time to disinter unknowns associated with Cabanatuan,” said Weatherby. “That, I think, was the actual driving force behind getting the disinterments going.”
Scientists collected DNA samples from multiple skeletal elements for analysis by the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL). Anthropological evaluation and DNA testing revealed that the unknowns were significantly commingled, making the identification process more difficult and time consuming.
“This is a really challenging project for a lot of reasons,” said Dr. Mary Megyesi, DPAA forensic anthropologist and project lead. “But now that we’ve made all this progress to get to 100, it’s really, really amazing. I’m really grateful that I’ve been part of this project this entire time and to watch it grow and to take this big puzzle and figure it out to make all these identifications.”
In addition to the commingling, the degradation of the unknown remains along with the lack of DNA Family Reference Samples made the identification all the more challenging.
“It’s really difficult to make an ID if we don’t have that family reference sample and because the bones are so degraded, effort to get DNA takes longer,” said Dr. Megyesi. “We are always making efforts on what else we can do. We couldn’t do this without the effort of an entire lab and an entire team.”
DPAA continues working to recover and identify the more than 900 remaining unknowns from Camp Cabanatuan, using advanced technology and historical research to ensure that those who gave their lives for their country are not forgotten.
“I’m very honored to be a part of this,” said Wetherby. “It’s such a collaborative project. There are so many people who have contributed to it. These men went through so many difficulties, and I really hope that we are able to bring many of them home. There’s so much that we still have to learn.”
| Date Taken: | 10.01.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 10.01.2024 13:47 |
| Story ID: | 482219 |
| Location: | DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, US |
| Web Views: | 13 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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