A U.S. soldier who went missing during World War II has finally been accounted for more than 80 years after his death, federal officials confirmed Wednesday.
Willibald Bianchi, a former U.S. Army captain from New Ulm, Minnesota, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery during combat, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), part of the Department of Defense responsible for recovering and identifying missing American service members.
In 1942, while commanding a battalion on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines, Bianchi volunteered to clear Japanese machine gun nests and continued leading the effort even after being wounded. His actions earned him the Medal of Honor, the highest U.S. military decoration for valor in combat.
Later that year, Bianchi was captured by Japanese forces and held as a prisoner of war until 1944. He was transferred aboard the Japanese transport ship Oryoku Maru, which was unknowingly attacked and sunk by U.S. forces. Bianchi was then moved to another ship bound for modern-day Taiwan, which was also sunk, resulting in his death at age 29.
His remains were initially recovered in 1946 from a mass grave on a Taiwanese beach but could not be identified at the time. They were buried as “unidentifiable” in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Between October 2022 and July 2023, DPAA disinterred remains linked to the sunken transport ship from the cemetery. Using anthropological analysis, circumstantial evidence, and DNA testing conducted by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner system, officials confirmed the remains as Bianchi’s.
Bianchi’s name remains on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines, alongside other WWII soldiers still unaccounted for. He is scheduled to be buried in his Minnesota hometown in May.