The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of a serviceman, missing in action from the Korean War, have been identified and returned to his family for burial with full military honors.
Army Cpl. John W. Lutz, 21, of Kearny, N.J., will be buried tomorrow at Arlington National Cemetery. From May 16-20, 1951, Task Force Zebra, a multinational force made up of Dutch, French, and U.S. forces, was attacked and isolated into smaller units. Lutz, of the 1st Ranger Infantry Company, part of Task Force Zebra, went missing while his unit was attempting to infiltrate enemy lines near Chaun-ni, South Korea, along the Hongcheon River Valley.
After the 1953 armistice, surviving POWs said Lutz had been captured by enemy forces on May 19, marched north to a POW camp in Suan County, North Korea, and died of malnutrition in July 1951.
Between 1991-94, North Korea gave the United States 208 boxes of remains believed to contain the remains of 200-400 servicemen. North Korean documents turned over with one of the boxes indicated the remains inside were exhumed near Suan County. This location correlates with the corporal’s last known location.
Analysts from DPMO developed case leads with information spanning more than 58 years. Through interviews with surviving POW eyewitnesses, experts validated circumstances surrounding the soldier’s captivity and death, confirming wartime documentation of his loss.
Among other forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence, scientists from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory also used dental comparisons and mitochondrial DNA – which matched that of his niece—in the identification of the remains.
Another servicemember is coming back from WWII.
The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of a serviceman, missing in action from World War II, have been identified and are being returned to his family for burial with full military honors.
Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Martin P. Murray, 21, of Lowell, Mass., will be buried on April 16 in Marshfield, Mass. Murray, along with 11 other crew members, took off on Oct. 27, 1943, in their B-24D Liberator from an airfield near Port Moresby, New Guinea. Allied plans were being formulated to mount an attack on the Japanese redoubt at Rabaul, New Britain. The crew’s assigned area of reconnaissance was the nearby shipping lanes in the Bismarck Sea. But during their mission, they were radioed to land at a friendly air strip nearby due to poor weather conditions. The last radio transmission from the crew did not indicate their location. Multiple search missions in the following weeks did not locate the aircraft.
Following World War II, the Army Graves Registration Service conducted searches for 43 missing airmen, including Murray, in the area but concluded in June 1949 that all were unrecoverable.
In August 2003, a team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) received information on a crash site from a citizen in Papua New Guinea while it was investigating another case. The citizen also turned over an identification card from one of the crew members and reported that there were possible human remains at the site of the crash. Twice in 2004 other JPAC teams attempted to visit the site but were unable to do so due to poor weather and hazardous conditions at the helicopter landing site. Another team was able to successfully excavate the site from January to March 2007 where they found several identification tags from the B-24D crew as well as human remains.
By: Brant
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