The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced that a World War II veteran, missing from World War II, was identified and will be returned to his family where he will buried with full military honors, according to a news release.
Army Pfc. Lloyd Lobdell, 23, was a member of Company A, 192nd Tank Battalion, in the Far East when Japan invaded the Philippines.
Lobdell was captured after the surrender of Corregidor and moved to the Cabanatuan POW camp, where more than 2,500 POWs died during the remaining years of the war.
Lobdell died Nov. 19, 1942, and was buried along with fellow prisoners in the local Cabanatuan camp cemetery after suffering from an illness at the Cabanatuan Prison Camp Hospital.
After the war, the American Graves Registration Service exhumed those buried at the Cabanatuan cemetery and relocated the remains to a temporary U.S. military cemetery near Manila, according to the release.
“Due to the circumstances of the POW deaths and burials, the extensive commingling, and the limited identification technologies of the time, all of the remains could not be individually identified,” according to the release. “The unidentified remains were reburied as unknowns in the American Battle Monuments Commission cemetery at Fort McKinley in Manila, Philippines.”
Ten graves of unidentified soldiers associated with the Cabanatuan Common Grave 717 were exhumed after being given permission from the Secretary of the Army.
Scientists from DPAA and the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System used DNA analysis and other forms of evidence and analysis to identify Lobdell.
A rosette will be placed next to his name at the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery site to indicate that he has been identified and accounted for.
