Mystery of missing Mississippi WWII soldier solved after eight decades

Private Andrew Ladner was killed during the Battle of Buna-Gona during the New Guinea campaign

The mystery of the missing remains of a Mississippi World War II soldier has been solved after eight decades.

Private Andrew Ladner disappeared during the Battle of Buna-Gona, which was part of the New Guinea campaign in the Pacific from November 1942 until January 1943.

The US government, via the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, announced this month that his remains had been identified, according to the Sun Herald.

Mr Ladner was located in the southeastern mountain jungles of New Guinea, now known as Papua New Guinea, which was Australian territory at the time. He was battling Japanese forces for control of the port of Buna, the paper reported.

He was working alongside fellow soldiers to cut off Japanese lines of communications and supplies from Sanananda, a village in the area.

On 30 November 1942, his unit created a blockade, which would become known as the Huggins Roadblock, that lasted for 22 days until Australian troops came to their aid.

Mr Ladner, from Lizana, Mississippi, was killed in action. He was 30 years old at the time, newspaper reports from the time state.

A graduate of Perkinston Junior College, now known as the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, the American Graves Registration Service searched the area for soldiers’ remains for years, but Mr Ladner was classified as non-recoverable in 1950.

But his body had in fact been discovered in April 1943 and buried at a temporary US cemetery in Soputa, another village in the area.

The remains were still unidentified when they were moved a reburied at a cemetery in the Philippines in 1949.

Organizations working to identify prisoners of war and those missing in action started new attempts in 1995 to identify soldiers lost in the battle where Mr Ladner died, almost 45 years later. Three bodies were found but none were identified as Mr Ladner.

Unknown casualty records were then evaluated leading to the exhumation of Mr Ladner’s body in November 2016. His body was only identified by the number X-1545.

New technologies, such as dental analysis and mitochondrial DNA analysis, helped researchers at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska identify the soldier’s remains in July last year, according to a press release from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Anthropological and circumstantial evidence also helped researchers determine that it was Mr Ladner’s remains.

A funeral will be held in Gulfport, Mississippi on a date that hasn’t yet been decided.