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Post by JohnEakin on Sept 20, 2010 4:37:53 GMT 8
New guy here - guess I'd better introduce myself. About a year ago I started researching the life of a cousin who the family thought died on the Bataan Death March. Got lucky right off the bat when the Army Casualty Office provided stuff I didn't even know I wanted. Since then, I've enjoyed learning what I can about the Death March and the aftermath and was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled across this forum. I hope to keep learning and perhaps share some of what I have picked up. FWIW, I learned that Pvt Kelder had been assigned to the 2nd General Hospital, was one of only a few from that unit to pass through O'Donnell and he ultimately died on 19 Nov 42 in Cabanatuan. I also found the letters from the Army telling his parents that his remains were "non-recoverable." It turns out though, that while the Cabanatuan burials were well documented, the Army required two items of evidence for an identification. Those with only one item of - or no - identification were buried as unknowns. Of course, DNA has now changed the game and the military is now looking for the families of these unknowns. So it turns out that in addition to an interesting new hobby, I hope to ultimately see my cousin's remains returned to his family plot. I hope I'm not getting off on the wrong foot by advertising another website, but I didn't see any prohibitions so I'll take a chance. The Army provided me with a copy of the unit roster and history for the 2nd General Hospital and I've posted it on my site, bataanmissing.com I found it a fascinating account of one little portion of the battle. I never much thought of hospital staff as heroes - (in 'Nam there was an acronym for the rear echelon <G>) - but considering what they accomplished and the conditions they did it under, it got me hooked on learning more. (My apologies for some of the bad copies, but they came from some of the original 1940's typewritten pages. Please email me if anyone needs anything looked up from the originals.) John
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Post by chadhill on Sept 20, 2010 14:25:11 GMT 8
Hello John,
The website was very impressive. By chance have you come across information on the fate of a childhood acquaintance of my mother, WT2C John Porter Derrington? He was a crew member of the USS Canopus who later was inducted into the 4th Battalion (Provisional), 4th Marine Regiment. Derrington may have fought on Longoskwayan Point and on Corregidor. NARA listed him as a POW on 07 May 42, and I have learned he died at Cabanatuan on 22 September 42.
Chad Hill
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Post by JohnEakin on Sept 20, 2010 21:20:11 GMT 8
I haven't come across Derrington, but there were certainly all services represented at Cabanatuan. Of the 14 men buried in the communal grave for 19 Nov 42 when my cousin died, there was a Navy civilian, a Marine and a number of AAC as well as the regular Army. Have you checked the tablets of the missing available on the ABMC site? www.abmc.gov/search/wwii.phpI would also submit a FOIA to the military for his Individual Deceased Personnel file (IDPF). I *think* the Army Human Resources Command controls all the IDPF's but you may have to go through the Navy Casualty Office. Addresses are located at: www.dtic.mil/dpmo/dod_links/There's a small charge and it takes months. I'd suggest submitting a request to both the Army and Navy at the same time. The IDPF will likely contain information on the Cabanatuan grave he was buried in and efforts to identify him. If he was not identified there will be references to the "X" files of the unidentified remains from that Cabanatuan grave. The Army controls the X files and it will take another FOIA request to get them. IF he is an unknown, it is important to have someone from the family contact the military casualty office to provide a DNA family reference sample. Keep in mind that even if the family believes he should continue to rest where he is (as many do), the identifications are made by exclusion so the DNA sample may help some other family find their loved one. (Hope that makes sense.) John
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Post by chadhill on Sept 21, 2010 9:35:53 GMT 8
John, I had checked the ABMC and found they had nothing. Thanks for the tip about requesting the IDPF, and the addresses at DPMO. Greatly appreciated.
Let me repeat that your Bataan Missing website is very good.
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Post by JohnEakin on Sept 21, 2010 10:51:15 GMT 8
John, I had checked the ABMC and found they had nothing. Thanks for the tip about requesting the IDPF, and the addresses at DPMO. Greatly appreciated. Let me repeat that your Bataan Missing website is very good. If he died in Cabanatuan and is not listed on the ABMC site there's a very good chance his remains were returned to his family. I've been told that the Cabanatuan burial records were poor for about the first two months, after which they were excellent. So if he died in Sep 42 they should have had a record of which communal grave he was in. The deciding factor in which remains were identified was generally if they had dental records. The new guys - the pvt's and PFC's - generally only had their induction dental exams and they were not good enough for an ID. The guys who had been in longer were more likely to have had military dental work and consequently more likely to be identified. I've found little evidence that Graves Registration even looked for civilian dental records to use for ID. My cousin's older brother was a dentist so the family had the records, but no one asked. And in those pre-CSI days the average civilian had no idea they would be useful. The Army just told the family that his remains were non-recoverable and they thought that meant there were no remains. As it turns out, we were lucky enough to find the next best thing to his dental records, an oral history recording by the older brother which mentioned that he had put gold inlays in his younger brother's teeth. And of the 14 men in that grave, only one set of remains had gold inlays. Thanks for the kind words about the site. These men deserve a much better site than I could build for them, but there were so many people involved in the search for the other families that I kind of threw it together to keep everyone updated. I've asked DoD for the files on all the Manila unknowns, but they have not been real helpful - which makes me think this kind of SNAFU was typical. John
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Post by chadhill on Sept 21, 2010 11:15:50 GMT 8
Your words have given me quite an insight, John. I may be speaking to one of Derrington's surviving family members soon, and I greatly appreciate your efforts. Everett Perry has written a fabulous new book about the search for his lost uncle, who was also a Canopus crewmember and went thru Cabanatuan, but perished at Osaka in February '43. It is first rate and titled "Ghosts of Canopus".
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Post by JohnEakin on Oct 12, 2010 3:25:38 GMT 8
Several people have contacted me about finding friends or relatives who participated in the Bataan and Corregidor festivities of '42 and I know EXO has done a lot of research on individual participants. It is difficult to tell who survived, who didn't and who returned to the states (one way or another). Even DoD doesn't have a single really *good* database of these guys. I'm sure most of the regulars here know more sources than I do, but here, in one place, are the basic sources I use. Probably the best known is the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) database which lists all those buried in their overseas cemeteries and those listed on their tablets of the missing. It is a little misleading because it doesn't list those who were returned to the states for burial in either a private or national cemetery. One nice feature is that it is searchable by military unit (as long as they are buried there or missing). I don't think there is a similar database for the Punchbowl or stateside national cemeteries. goo.gl/p33UThe National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has a database titled World War II Prisoners of War Data File, 12/7/1941 - 11/19/1946. This is a very useful database as it includes information gathered by the BBB, but it is still full of errors and omissions. It is possible to search by unit, but many fields are obviously incomplete. I obtained the raw data for these databases a while back and put it in to .dbf format I can slice and dice, but it really didn't give me much capability that wasn't available from the online version. PM me if someone would like copies and I'll try to find them, again. goo.gl/pDISThe Defense Prisoner/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) has a database which is probably the best single source I've found, but it is still far from perfect in that (as far as I know) it can't be searched by unit, battle, etc. goo.gl/90OSHere's two more sites if anyone knows any MIA family members or is interested in obtaining more information on them. These sites have links to about anything one could want to find online about the WWII POW/MIA issue. Defense Prisoner/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) goo.gl/mFsMJoint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) goo.gl/RyLBJust as a point of information, the DPMO database shows the following numbers of MIA's by service: U.S. Army 17,029 U.S. Army Air Forces 20,465 U.S. Marine Corps 3,113 U.S. Navy 32,606 Other* 851 Total 74,064 To put these numbers in context as far as recoverability of remains, I'm told that most of the Navy MIA's are "deepwater" losses and there is not much chance of recovery. The USAAF losses are generally aircraft crashes which are pretty tough to find and remains are usually fragmented (if any). The Army and USMC losses total just over 20,000 and a very large percent are considered recoverable. According to the ABMC website, there are 3,744 unknowns buried in Manila and just over 4,000 WWII losses in Europe and the Punchbowl. So somewhere around 20% and 25% of recoverable MIA's are probably buried as unknowns. I'd appreciate any similar data sources concerning WWII Bataan/Corregidor loses - especially POW's - if anyone knows of any.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 18, 2010 23:36:20 GMT 8
to Johneakin.. I am so sincerely impressed with all of the work you are doing in your personal quest, and how it may help others who sadly feel that tremendous void of not knowing what happened. God bless you and help you succeed. Karol Ames
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Post by JohnEakin on Oct 22, 2010 3:53:16 GMT 8
to Johneakin.. I am so sincerely impressed with all of the work you are doing in your personal quest, and how it may help others who sadly feel that tremendous void of not knowing what happened. God bless you and help you succeed. Karol Ames Thank you very much for the kind words, Karol, but I'm sure anyone here would do the same if they had stumbled upon the records I found. These are our brothers. Best, John
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Post by JohnEakin on Dec 21, 2012 2:49:55 GMT 8
I guess I’m a little slow in that it has taken me more than three years to figure out that the U.S. Government is not going to return the remains of my Cousin who died at Cabanatuan. I’ve tried asking nicely and it doesn’t get any action. The people in the casualty offices all say the right things and I see lots of press releases about DoD spending $100 million each year for accounting for MIA. But, other than the 70 or so they decide to return each year (yes, that is about $1,428,571 each), we don’t seem to be getting much for our tax dollar. Three years ago I had to file a FOIA suit to get the documents needed to identify these men. In that litigation, the government lawyers filed sworn testimony that they didn’t have digital copies of the documents and it wasn’t even possible to scan them all. Two weeks after the final judgment was entered, the digitized documents miraculously appeared. What a coincidence. Overall, the only thing the feds have given me has been lies, half-truths and obstructionism. One might ask why they are being so difficult. And I’d have to say we’ll never know, but we can make some guesses. The entire identification process after the war was an exercise in incompetence. A lot of people went to great lengths to recover the remains, but things fell apart in the identification phase. A command decision to use embalmers rather than anthropologists was one small part of the problem. A couple of dentists who, well, let’s say they had vision problems, because they certified identifications that didn’t come close to matching the dental records. Lots of wrong remains sent to the family in the states for burial meant that at some point at least one other set of remains had to be mis-identified as well. Must have been a real ah shucks moment when they ran out of names and still had thousands of left overs. Perhaps the level of competence, dedication and reverence for the dead is perhaps best illustrated by tracking the tooth charts of the dead over the four or five years they were being processed at Nichols Field. If an original tooth chart showed any precious metal dental work when it came in, it was somehow missing by the time these unknowns were buried at Ft McKinley Military Cemetery. Eventually, it was decided to close down the entire identification project. Within a few months, the remains still not identified were buried as unknowns and the records were classified. Knowing from experience that nothing focuses the mind like a lawsuit, I filed one in Federal Court a few weeks ago. Below is the factual history filed with the court in the most recent filings. Anyone who is interested in watching the gory details can find the docket online at bataanmissing.com/EakinVABMC/files.htm. I Factual History Plaintiff’s family member, Pvt Arthur H. Kelder, survived the infamous Bataan Death March of April 1942 only to perish a few months later while a prisoner in the Cabanatuan POW camp. He and thirteen other fallen American heroes who died the same day were interred in the camp cemetery in communal grave number 717. The death was certified and burial documented by the American officers authorized to do so. These records were retrieved after liberation of the camp and have been admitted in multiple judicial and administrative proceedings and found credible. After the war, the grave was opened and the remains of one man were immediately identified on the basis of information from the burial record and individually identified by an identification tag. The remains were all temporarily interred in Manila Cemetery #2 where the remains of three more men were identified on the basis of the burial record and military dental records. The remains of the remaining ten men were eventually transferred to above ground storage in an aircraft hangar at Nichols Field. Graves registration personnel attempted, unsuccessfully, to obtain civilian dental records of only one man in order to individually identify his remains. No further effort was ever made to obtain individually identifying information on Kelder or the remaining men. Facing a congressionally mandated deadline to complete the Fort McKinley Military Cemetery, the still unidentified remains were interred there without military or religious ceremony before exhausting all possible avenues for identification. Records of the burials were then classified and restricted from public access. Family members were informed only that the remains were “non-recoverable.” By 2009, the records of Pvt Arthur H. Kelder had been automatically declassified and obtained by Plaintiff. Immediately recognizing that Kelder’s remains were obviously one of no more than ten possibles, he contacted other family members who provided information of distinctive gold dental inlays which conclusively identified the unidentified remains designated as Manila #2 X-816 which were buried in grave A-12-195 in the cemetery now operated by Defendant ABMC. Granted power of attorney by the primary next-of-kin, Plaintiff petitioned the U.S. Army Human Resources Command to recognize unknown X-816 as the remains of Arthur H. Kelder. That petition was subsequently forwarded to Defendant DPMO. Simultaneously, the JPAC Intelligence Directorate completed an investigation concerning all ten of the unknowns recovered from Cabanatuan Grave 717 and recommended disinterment for identification. In addition to the evidence of the identity of unidentified remains X-816 submitted by Plaintiff, family reference samples (DNA) are available for all ten of the Grave 717 unknowns and would permit use of this modern identification technology if any party wishes to dispute the factual basis of the identification of X-816. Defendants have routinely employed DNA matching technology since at least 1998 when The Vietnam Unknown was disinterred from the Tomb of the Unknown in Arlington National Cemetery and identified as Lt. Michael J. Blassie. II Introduction This is an action for review of agency refusal to act to identify the remains of a member of Plaintiff’s family missing since his death and burial in a WWII POW camp. Plaintiff has submitted overwhelming factual and expert opinion evidence that unidentified remains designated Manila #2 number X-816 are those of Pvt Arthur H. Kelder. Plaintiff is further seeking injunctive action requiring that Defendants comply with their statutory obligations under 10 U.S.C. §§ 1501-1509 and that they be enjoined from future discrimination against the families of unknowns.
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