It is a number that I had never really considered before -- there are some 88,000 missing American servicemen from the wars of the twentieth century, 79,000 of them from WWII.

Of those, the remains of some 35,000 are classified as "recoverable" by the military, generally meaning that they were not lost at sea.

More than six decades after the end of World War II, the families of men like Joe Huba are making a new push to find and bring home the remains of their missing and dead. After years when survivors accepted the solace of mass memorials and unknown-soldier graves, a younger generation is seeking something much more personal.

The relatives are spurred by strides in DNA matching, satellite mapping and Internet archives, and by a new advocacy group impatient with the pace of the military unit that tracks down remains.

“We owe these men for giving their lives — we can’t just leave them in jungles, on mountainsides,” said Lisa Phillips, 45, president of the group, World War II Families for the Return of the Missing, which was formed in 2006 to compete with organizations pressing for recoveries from the conflicts in Vietnam and Korea. “There’s that saying, ‘No one left behind,’ and we’ve left a generation behind.”

The search has its pitfalls, Ms. Phillips admits. Discoveries about how a loved one died can prove more disturbing than ignorance. International swindles and treasure hunters complicate the sheer challenge of identifying remains after so many years.

And some relatives have come up empty-handed after expensive private searches, like a Minnesota man who has spent thousands of dollars on underwater dives off Yap Island in the South Pacific without finding his uncleÂ’s sunken B-24.

The sad reality is that many of these heroes will never make it home. But the desire to keep looking -- to find that loved one for the surviving family members -- is strong. And even if remains are truly unrecoverable, we do have an obligation to try to honor them as fully as they honored our nation by giving their lives for us.

Posted by: Greg at 04:19 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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