Missing in Action - World War II

World War II

There are many missing service personnel from World War II. In the United States armed forces, 78,750 missing in action were reported by the conclusion of the war, representing over 19 percent of the total 405,399 killed in the conflict.

The 1991–1993 United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs investigated a few outstanding issues and reports related to the fate of U.S. service personnel still missing from World War II.

As with MIAs from the First World War, it is a routine occurrence for the remains of missing service personnel killed during the Second World War to be periodically discovered. Usually they are found purely by chance (e.g. during construction or demolition work) though on some occasions they are recovered following deliberate, targeted searches. As with the First World War, in western Europe MIAs are generally found as individuals, or in twos or threes. However, sometimes the numbers in a group are considerably larger e.g. the mass grave at Villeneuve-Loubet, which contained the remains of 14 German soldiers killed in August 1944. Others are located at remote aircraft crash sites in various countries. But in eastern Europe and Russia, World War II casualties include approximately two million missing Germans, and many mass graves remain to be found. Almost a half million German MIAs have been buried in new graves since the end of the Cold War. Most of them will stay unknown. The German War Graves Commission is spearheading the effort.

During the 2000s, there was renewed attention within and without the U.S. military to finding remains of the missing, especially in the European Theatre and especially since aging witnesses and local historians were dying off. The group World War II Families for the Return of the Missing was founded in 2005 to work with the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and other governmental entities towards locating and repatriating the remains of Americans lost in the conflict. The president of the group said in reference to the far more publicised efforts to find remains of U.S. dead from the Vietnam War, “Vietnam had advocates. This was an older generation, and they didn’t know who to turn to.”

In 2008, investigators began to conduct searches on Tarawa atoll in the Pacific Ocean, trying to locate the remains of 139 American Marines, missing since the Battle of Tarawa in 1943.

According to the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, there were still 73,692 U.S. servicemen still unaccounted for from World War II.