A U.S. soldier who went missing during World War II is missing eight years after his disappearance, federal officials said Wednesday.
Former U.S. Army Captain Willibald Bianchi of New Ulm, Minnesota, received the Medal of Honor for his wartime actions, according to the Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for locating and identifying missing U.S. military personnel.
In 1942, while serving as a battalion commander on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines, Bianchi volunteered to help clear Japanese armed forces of machine gun nests and continued to lead the effort after being wounded, the DPAA said. For these actions, he received the Medal of Honor, the highest honor an American soldier can receive for “combat valor,” according to the Army.
Willibald Bianchi/Photo source: DPAA
Just months later, Bianchi was captured by the Japanese military and held as a prisoner of war in the Philippines until 1944, when Japan used the transport ship Oryoku Maru to transfer the prisoners, the DPAA said. After the ship was sunk by American pilots, Bianchi was transferred to another Japanese ship bound for modern-day Taiwan. The ship was also attacked and sunk by U.S. forces, and Japanese officials later reported that Bianchi was among those killed on board.
Bianchi was 29 when he died, according to the DPAA. His remains were originally discovered in a mass grave on a Taiwanese beach in 1946, although the U.S. Graves Registration Command, which is responsible for locating missing U.S. military personnel, was unable to identify them at the time. The remains were declared “unidentifiable” and buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii, known as “Punchbowl.”
The DPAA unearthed unknown remains associated with the sunken Japanese transport ship from Punchbowl between October 2022 and July 2023, according to the organization.
“To identify Bianchi’s remains, DPAA scientists used anthropological analysis and circumstantial evidence,” the DPAA said, adding that other scientists from the Armed Forces Forensic System also conducted various DNA tests to confirm Bianchi’s identity.
The DPAA said Bianchi’s name remains on the Missing Persons Wall at the American Cemetery and Memorial in Manila, Philippines, along with the names of other missing soldiers from World War II. He will be buried in his Minnesota hometown in May, according to the organization.
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