A U.S. soldier who went missing during World War II has been accounted for more than eight decades after he disappeared, federal officials said Wednesday.
Willibald Bianchi, a former U.S. Army captain from New Ulm, Minnesota, earned a Medal of Honor for his wartime conduct,according tothe Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA, a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense that is in charge of finding and identifying missing American military personnel.
In 1942, while serving as a battalion commander on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines, Bianchi volunteered to help clear machine gun nests that belonged to Japanese armed forces and continued to lead the effort even after he was wounded, said DPAA. For those actions, he received the Medal of Honor, which is the highest honor a U.S. soldier can receive for "valor in combat,"according tothe Army.
Just a few months later, Bianchi was captured by the Japanese military and held as a prisoner of war in the Philippines until 1944, when Japan relocated prisoners using the transport ship Oryoku Maru, DPAA said. After that ship was sunk by U.S. aircraft pilots who did not know it was carrying prisoners of war, Bianchi was transferred to a different Japanese ship headed for modern-day Taiwan. That ship was also attacked and sunk by U.S. forces, and Japanese officials subsequently reported that Bianchi was among those killed on board.
Bianchi was 29 at the time of his death, according to DPAA. His remains were originally found in 1946 in a mass grave on a beach in Taiwan, although the American Graves Registration Command, which was tasked with recovering missing U.S. personnel, could not identify them at the time. The remains were declared "unidentifiable" and buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
DPAA disinterred unknown remains tied to the sunken Japanese transport ship from the Punchbowl between October 2022 and July 2023, according to the organization.
"To identify Bianchi's remains, scientists from DPAA used anthropological analysis, as well as circumstantial evidence," DPAA said, adding that additional scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner system conducted a variety of DNA tests, too, in order to confirm Bianchi's identity.
Bianchi's name remains on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines, alongside the names of other soldiers missing from WWII, said DPAA. He will be buried in his hometown in Minnesota in May, according to the organization.
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