A veteran from New Jersey who died at the age of 19 while imprisoned during the Korean War has been accounted for 71 years after his death, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) said.
The remains of Harry J. Hartmann, Jr., of Mays Landing, a Private First Class in the U.S. Army, were identified on July 13, 2022, the agency said.
The soldier was reported missing on Nov. 2, 1950, during a battle near Unsan, North Korea, officials said. POWs reported he had been captured and held as a prisoner of war at Camp #5 in Pyoktang, North Korea, where he died on or around March 31, 1951, the DPAA said.
During Operation GLORY in the fall of 1954, the remains of 495 soldiers from burial grounds near Camp #5 were returned to the United Nations Command, but 38 were never identified, officials said. Those 38 sets of remains were buried as unknowns at the National Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii, according to the DPAA.
The unidentified remains were exhumed in 2019 and transferred to a DPAA laboratory in 2019 as part of an initiative to identify fallen Korean War veterans, officials said.
Medical examiners and scientists were able to identify Hartmann’s remains using dental records as well as mitochondrial DNA and anthropological analysis, according to the DPAA.
A rosette will be placed next to his name on the Court of the Missing at the Punchbowl monument, which lists all of the Korean War veterans who were reported unaccounted for.
The DPAA plans to bury Hartmann’s remains in Mays Landing.
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