Veteran's Day 2024: MISSING IN ACTION
… Presumed Dead
Many military colleagues, veterans, and civilian friends are actively engaged in the continuing search for evidence of those team members, pilots, prisoners of war, and others unaccounted for after combat.
These efforts are not in vain. Even if a veteran who is listed as missing in action is found not to have survived, at least the family and friends of that veteran will now have a sense of closure.
To learn that death has taken their parent, spouse, lover, or child might be excruciating for the living, but not knowing is often worse. Over the months and years hope turns to sorrow, sadness to defeat, defeat sometimes to acceptance, and sometimes to anger and bitterness.
At least today we have the benefit of DNA analysis of remains that would otherwise be “Known but to God.” This was not the case in the biggest war of the last 100 years, World War II. It was particularly not the case in the War of the Pacific.
When I travel, I find a sense of continuity and camaraderie in visiting veterans’ cemeteries and memorials. I salute them all, those fallen who never lived to see a mustering out, a new life, a love found, or a child born, especially those whose fate was unknown and will likely forever be. We only know these warriors went to battle, and we only know they have not returned.
Nowhere is this emptiness in the heart of our nation more in evidence than the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in The Philippines, maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission.
Many of you have visited the Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. It is the final resting place for 9,388 American military members. Manila is even bigger; it is the largest of these cemeteries on foreign soil. In Manila, there are 17,184 US veterans that forever lie beneath this hallowed ground.
Row upon row, it goes on like an undulating sea, up a rise here and down around the bend over there. When you walk to “there,” you look over a plain with even more white crosses among the green grasses and trees, the only sound the birds and those who maintain these memories for us all.
“Here Rests In Honored Glory, A Comrade in Arms, Known But to God.”
It is humbling to walk among so many of the fallen. The Memorial on site might leave you in even greater awe. There are another 36,286 Missing In Action remembered at this tribute in the center of the grounds. Their names, rank, units they served in and where they are from are engraved on the walls of this memorial.
(A star indicates a Medal of Honor recipient; a dot represents a veteran whose remains have since been identified.)
The highly decorated Philippine Scouts, a Filipino unit of the US Army who served directly alongside their US comrades-in-arms, have their commemoration as well.
(Source:ABMC — American Battle Monuments Commission)
How have they managed to so appropriately honor so many? Imagine a sports stadium. Instead of bleachers, there are 2 semi-circles on the east and west sides. North and south are open to the cemetery beyond. Imagine now a massive wall roughly 15 feet wide and 18 feet high, scrolled with the names of the missing. Looking at even one of these walls, seeing the names and where they are from, gives new respect to the massive size and scope of this war.
My photo above shows five of the 96 tablets. There are some 2000 veterans whose lives are described in the shorthand of a dog-tag on just these five.
(Source:ABMC)
Now imagine 96 of these giant tablets. So many were missing in action, whereabouts unknown, in just this one theater of the war.
It boggles the mind that so many would be missing in action until we realize that “the fog of war” in these times and these places included the fires of war. Whole carriers, cruisers, and destroyers were sunk, with many or most of the crew perishing.
We can speculate that if sailors were assigned to a certain ship and were not offloaded because of illness or compassionate leave when the ship went beneath the waves in thousands of feet of water, they may be “presumed” dead. The Japanese did not rescue sailors who were American, British, Australian, Canadian et al.
By the same token, the confusion of the air war, whether from the decks of a carrier or the hastily built runways of the USAAF, meant that not every pilot who plunged into the ocean or the jungles was observed to have crashed. Too often, the strike force might have left with 37 airplanes; 22 returned. Only then could we determine who was observed in death and those who might have survived and were now “missing in action.”
As for the land war, the front lines changed so often and the enemy did not show respect for the bodies of those temporarily left behind. Those on-the-ground, one-on-one battles often meant that the combined Allied forces moved so swiftly that the men responsible for identifying and burying the dead Americans could not, to their dismay, always provide a respectful and solemn individual burial and identification of the dead. If there were no dog tags, letters from home or other identifying information, these members of the Graves Registration Service did the best they could, but many times had to bury some with a simple wooden cross with the words “Unknown.” Sometimes there were no remains to be buried.
I mentioned other nations above. The War in the Pacific was not solely a US struggle. The UK, British India, Australia, and others were at the forefront of the combat. Indeed, it was the Australians, with support from a smaller US contingent who, in September 1942 at the Battle of Milne Bay, succeeded in the first major defeat of Japanese land forces in the Pacific War.
And then there are the people of The Philippines and elsewhere who resisted throughout the entire occupation. The photo below gives one example.
Among the many displays at the Visitor Center is the story of Vicente Lim, the first Filipino to graduate, in 1914, from the US Military Academy at West Point. He rose through the ranks, attended the Army Command and General Staff College and the Army War College, and had a bright future. But in 1935, The Philippines became a Commonwealth of the US in preparation for full Philippine independence (granted on July 4, 1946.)
Col. Lim resigned his US commission and became an officer in the Philippine Army, later becoming a Brigadier General and Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army. When the US integrated command of both armies in 1941, Lim assumed command of the 41st Infantry Division.
During the battle of Bataan, his was the unit that tied up the most Japanese attackers, forcing a stop in the Japanese forward progress until they had to bring more troops, aircraft and supplies to bear.
For 3 months, the 41st Division fought under grueling hostile fire determined not to give ground. But soon after, hunger, disease, and low ammunition forced the defeat and subsequent Bataan Death March. Gen. Lim was later released to hospital care where the Japanese puppet government tried to get him to become an officer in the new false Philippine military. Instead, he funded and organized Philippine resistance, was apprehended by the Japanese, and executed along with 49 other patriots.
I mention General Lim as but one example of the enduring friendship between our two nations. The young man standing next to me is the Visitor Center Director, Vicente Paolo Lim IV, the great-grandson of General Lim.
While General Lim and his fellow patriots’ fate is known, so many families were never able to find the same relief from their grief. That is why I find it both compelling and heartening to silently honor those on the Walls of the Missing. Memorialized forever in stone, these long-ago men and women can now be presumed dead.
Yet they still live on as we view or touch these stone or marble walls. As long as we take the time to celebrate their valor, their fears, and their devotion to duty until they gave their last drop of blood, they live inside and alongside us.
These are the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
© Joseph L. Shaefer 2024
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I thank every employee of the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) for the brilliant job they do in making hallowed ground places of calm reflection and learning. ABMC maintains 26 permanent American military cemeteries and 31 federal memorials, monuments, and markers, located in 17 countries throughout the world -- including the US. A Wall of the Missing is included at every cemetery and many memorials. These are worth your time and contemplation. The three in the US are the…
East Coast Memorial: New York City, NY, honors missing American servicemen in the Atlantic during WWII.
West Coast Memorial: San Francisco, CA, honors servicemen lost in the Pacific during WWII.
Honolulu Memorial: Honolulu, HI, commemorates service members who were missing in action in the Pacific during WWII and the Korean War.
ABMC’s excellent website, where you can see many 360-degree visuals as well, is www.abmc.gov.