By Michael Swanger
Welcome home.
One can only imagine what it would have meant to the parents and five siblings of U.S. Army Pvt. Laurel W. Ebert to have spoken those words to their beloved Blairstown soldier. Sadly, they went to their graves without having had the opportunity to do so.
On Sept. 20, thanks to advanced science and the perseverance of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) and American Battle Monuments Commission, Ebert’s surviving sister-in-law, nieces and nephews finally welcomed home the World War II soldier when they laid him to rest next to his parents at Pleasant Hill Cemetery in Blairstown with full military honors. Across the Pacific Ocean, a rosette was placed next to his name at the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial to indicate that he had been accounted for after missing in action for nearly 77 years.
According to a report by the DPAA, on Nov. 26, 1942, two days after his 28th birthday, Ebert was part of a nine-person patrol tasked to locate and silence an enemy machine gun position west of the Sanananda Track in the Cape Killerton area of the Australian Territory of Papua, known today as Papua New Guinea. Ebert, a member of Company I, 126th Infantry Regiment, 32nd Infantry Division, was in the midst of the Battle of Buna-Gona, a brief campaign in New Guinea from November 1942 to January 1943 where nearly 700 U.S. soldiers were killed. On that fateful November night, Ebert was one of six members of the patrol who failed to return from the mission and was listed as missing in action.
The DPAA’s report said that the remains of an unidentified U.S. soldier were interred on Jan. 15, 1943, at the U.S. Temporary Cemetery Sanananda No. 3. In March 1945, they were moved to the U.S. Armed Forces Cemetery Finschhafen No. 2 where they were designated “Unknown X-44.” And in 1947, the American Graves Registration service exhumed 11,000 sets of remains, including X-44, which was re-designated as X-3127 and sent to the Central Identification Point at the Manila Mausoleum in the Philippines where they could not be identified and were interred at Fort McKinley, known today as the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial.
Ebert, who was born in Marengo and lived in Blairstown where he graduated from high school in 1933, remained listed as missing in action for decades following World War II. His parents and siblings over the years received his numerous awards and honors, including the Bronze Star Medal and Purple Heart, but never experienced the closure of securing his remains during their lives.
A new investigation and improved technology provided a watershed moment in Ebert’s case when in May 2017 the remains of X-3127 were disinterred and sent to the DPAA’s laboratory for analysis. They would prove to be Ebert’s remains as DPAA scientists used dental and anthropological analysis to identify them with help from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, using mitochondrial DNA analysis. They were officially accounted for earlier this year on July 1.
Advancements in forensic DNA analysis might lead to the repatriation of more soldiers and sailors lost during World War II and other wars. Currently, there are more than 72,000 U.S. service members still missing in action from World War II. The DPAA reports that approximately 30,000 have been assessed as “possibly recoverable.”
In May, military experts identified the remains of Seaman 1st Class Wesley Jordan from Deep River. The 23-year-old Iowan was one of 429 sailors who died aboard the USS Oklahoma on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese fighter pilots attacked Pearl Harbor. For nearly 80 years, officials said his body was “undiscoverable.”
We owe a debt of gratitude to those who served and sacrificed, as well as to those who search for lost soldiers and sailors. Let us never forget.
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