Seven months after the pivotal D-Day invasion of the French coast, a baby-faced Army private from Chicago and his anti-tank company were resupplying and reinforcing Allied forces for weeks along a 40-mile-wide front on the France-Germany border in early January 1945.
During a fierce German counterattack with heavy artillery and mortar fire near Reipertswiller, France, the 19-year-old private, Jeremiah P. Mahoney, was digging a foxhole.
“Shells were falling,” a soldier in the company later wrote to Mahoney’s mother in Chicago. “One came close and this fellow jumped into the foxhole on top of Mahoney. Then, at once, another one came in bursting in a tree, spraying shrapnel downward into this open half-finished hole.”
Mahoney was killed during the pitched battle. His company was forced to retreat from the area, and his body could not be immediately recovered. The War Department issued a presumptive finding of death in January 1946 because the Army had no record of German forces capturing Mahoney, and no remains.
But last month the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA, a Defense Department agency that tries to find and identify the bodies of service members who go missing during wars, announced that Mahoney had been accounted for.
“For the first time in my life, I had a familiarity with this long-lost uncle,” said Jerry Mannell, 72, when he learned of the identification of Mahoney, whom he had never met. “There was a sense of closure and relief. But there was a larger sense of remorse for his immediate family not having this information before they passed.”
By 1947, French civilians and de-mining units found many human remains in the forest near Reipertswiller. They told U.S. military personnel, who recovered 37 unidentified sets of remains. Those of Mahoney were collected, but they could not be identified with the scientific methods available at the time.
He was not alone. About 8,500 sets of remains of soldiers killed in World War II also could not be identified. These were buried in American military cemeteries under marble markers with the word “Unknown.” Mahoney was interred as an “unknown” person in the Ardennes American Cemetery in Neupré, Belgium, in 1949.
There are more than 72,000 U.S. soldiers still unaccounted for from World War II.
Mahoney will be buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery in the spring of 2025, a century after he was born.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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