Last Known Position
War dead missing for decades, found and named: read from the loss report, the excavation and the lab that closed the case.
Chaplain Emil Kapaun: How Unknown X-14550 Got His Name
On 2 November 1950, near Unsan, Army chaplain Emil Kapaun volunteered to stay with the wounded and was captured. He died in a Chinese-run prison camp on 23 May 1951. In 1954 North ...
B-17 Pilot Robert Barrat: A Grave for Six, a Name Back
On 9 February 1945, two B-17s of the 303rd Bomb Group collided in formation over Germany. Eight of the nine men aboard 2nd Lt. Robert Barrat's bomber were killed. In 1947, six of t...
Oryoku Maru: 286 Missing POWs and the 2026 Dive
In December 1944, U.S. Navy carrier planes sank the Oryoku Maru in Subic Bay, in the Philippines, unaware that 1,619 Allied prisoners of war were packed into its holds. The agency ...
Lima Site 85: How 8 of 11 Airmen Left Behind Got Names
Lima Site 85 was a secret Air Force radar site on a 5,600-foot peak in Laos. In the early morning of 11 March 1968 it was overrun, and eleven of the nineteen Americans on the mount...
Vietnam's Unknown Soldier: How 6 Bones Got a Name
On Memorial Day 1984, President Reagan placed the Medal of Honor on the casket of the Unknown Serviceman of the Vietnam Era and accepted the flag as his next of kin. The Unknown wa...
USS Arizona's Unknowns: How 12 DNA Samples Became 643
On 7 December 1941 a bomb reached the forward magazine of the battleship USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, and 1,177 of the 1,512 men aboard died. More than 900 are still inside the hul...
Colony Glacier C-124: How All 52 Men Got Their Names
On 22 November 1952 an Air Force C-124 Globemaster flying from McChord Air Force Base to Elmendorf flew into Mount Gannett, in Alaska's Chugach Mountains, with 52 men aboard. A gro...
B-24 Heaven Can Wait: How 4 of 11 Airmen Got Names
On 11 March 1944 the B-24 Heaven Can Wait went into the water off Awar Point, in Hansa Bay, New Guinea, with eleven men aboard, after observers saw flames erupt from her bomb bay. ...
North Korea's 55 Boxes: How 100 Soldiers Got Names
On 27 July 2018 an American C-17 flew out of Wonsan, North Korea, with 55 boxes said to hold the remains of Americans missing since the Korean War. North Korea did not say whose. T...
USS Oklahoma: How 394 Pearl Harbor Unknowns Got Names
On 7 December 1941 the battleship USS Oklahoma capsized at Pearl Harbor, and 429 of her crew died. After the war, 394 of them still had no name: their bones had been sorted by type...