A Story For Vets day: Soldier's Remains (19 YO)Found in 1945 is Finally Identified
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| U.S. Army Pvt. Jeremiah P. Mahoney, 19, of Chicago, was accounted for on May 6, 2024, after his death during World War II.Credit...The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency | Adeel Hassan |
Seven months after the pivotal D-Day invasion of the French coast, a baby-faced Army private from Chicago and his anti-tank company were resupplying and reinforcing Allied forces for weeks along a 40-mile-wide front on the France-Germany border in early January 1945.
During a fierce German counterattack with heavy artillery and mortar fire near Reipertswiller, France, the 19-year-old private, Jeremiah P. Mahoney, was digging a foxhole.
“Shells were falling,” a soldier in the company later wrote to Private Mahoney’s mother in Chicago. “One came close and this fellow jumped into the foxhole on top of Mahoney. Then, at once, another one came in bursting in a tree, spraying shrapnel downward into this open half-finished hole.”
Private Mahoney was killed during the pitched battle. His company was forced to retreat from the area, and his body could not be immediately recovered. The War Department issued a presumptive finding of death in January 1946 because the Army had no record of German forces capturing Private Mahoney, and no remains.
But last month the Defense P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Agency, or D.P.A.A., a Defense Department agency that tries to find and identify the bodies of service members who go missing during wars, announced that Private Mahoney had been accounted for.
“For the first time in my life, I had a familiarity with this long-lost uncle,” said Jerry Mannell, 72, when he learned of the identification of Private Mahoney, whom he had never met. “There was a sense of closure and relief. But there was a larger sense of remorse for his immediate family not having this information before they passed.”
By 1947, French civilians and de-mining units found many human remains in the forest near Reipertswiller. They told American military personnel, who recovered 37 unidentified sets of remains. Those of Private Mahoney were collected, but they could not be identified with the scientific methods available at the time.
He was not alone. About 8,500 sets of remains of soldiers killed in World War II also could not be identified. These were buried in American military cemeteries under marble markers with the word “Unknown.” Private Mahoney was interred as an “unknown” person in the Ardennes American Cemetery in NeuprĂ©, Belgium, in 1949.
Private Mahoney was one of an estimated 400,000 American service members who died in the war. Most of them were sent home to their families, or buried overseas in marked graves.
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| The grave of an unknown U.S. soldier at Cypress Hills National Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.Credit...Peter Foley/EPA, via Shutterstock |
The remains are sent to the D.P.A.A. lab, so that forensic anthropologists can analyze and catalog them. If there are teeth intact, forensic odontologists can examine them to help with identification. The lab can also match bone X-rays and use advanced software for data analysis.
Private Mahoney’s remains were exhumed by investigators in 2022 for fresh analysis, and they were identified using DNA samples from his family.
“Kudos to the Army for sticking with this for 75 years,” Mr. Mannell said. “So they truly leave no soldier behind.”
Private Mahoney grew up on the South Side of Chicago, the oldest of four children, and graduated from St. Ignatius College Prep in 1943. He entered the Army after high school, and he arrived in the European Theater of Operations around February 1944, military records show.
He served in Italy and France and was part of Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France. He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and Purple Heart.
“He and I shared the same foxhole many times, same blankets, food, clothes, etc.,” wrote the soldier in the letter to Private Mahoney’s mother. “Of all the men in there that I’ve seen in action, none was of stouter heart than your son. Everybody liked Mahoney.
“He was the sort of fellow who could be depended on every time. By that I mean he never hesitated to perform his duties come what might. Mahoney never, in spite of how rough things got, lost his nerve nor sense of humor.”
There are more than 72,000 American soldiers still unaccounted for from World War II. From the Korean War, there are more than 7,400 still missing. And from Vietnam, there are about 1,500 missing.
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| Flag-draped cases with the remains of American soldiers repatriated from North Korea on display during a ceremony in Honolulu on Aug. 1.Credit...Ronen Zilberman/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images How the Defense Department Identifies the Remains of Our War Dead |
But Private Mahoney will be buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery in the spring of 2025, a century after he was born.
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