Why Is It Taking So Long to Identify America's Unknown Fallen Heroes?

Buried beneath the curved, sweeping rows of white marble crosses and Stars of David at the Manila American Cemetery lies a special kind of American hero.

Their headstones carry no names. No ranks or branches of the military. No dates of death.

Each grave marker bears the same inscription: "Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God."

About 2,900 American service members are still buried as "unknowns" in the Manila cemetery-soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen whose remains were recovered after World War II but could not be identified with the science of their time.

Jim Knudsen believes his Uncle Julius is one of the unknowns.

For 17 years, the Minnesota resident has carried his family's torch in the search for the remains of Army Technician 5th Class Julius St. John Knudsen, a 25-year-old tanker who vanished in the Philippines in 1942 during the infamous Bataan Death March.

Jim Knudsen, 75, has tracked down military records and contacted distant relatives to submit DNA samples. He's studied dog-eared wartime maps and interviewed the last surviving soldier from his uncle's tank battalion-fulfilling a promise made to his dad in 2009.

"Rest easy," he told his father when he went into hospice care. "I'll keep looking for Julius."

Earlier this year, Knudsen believed the mystery of Julius' final days might finally be solved-thanks to the marvels of forensic DNA science.

It took several years for Knudsen and a military researcher to convince the Pentagon's MIA agency to exhume the remains of nine American soldiers recovered after World War II along the route of the death march. There is more than a glimmer of hope that Julius is one of the nine.

In an interview with The War Horse, Kelly McKeague, a retired Air Force major general who has been the director of the DPAA since 2017, ruled out a dramatic surge in disinterments.

McKeague defended the current system for identifying the unknowns. He said the painstaking, respectful process effectively blends science, military history, and the solemn responsibility of disturbing military graves only when investigators believe there's a strong chance of finding answers.

He said a massive disinterment campaign would destroy the sanctity of America's military cemeteries. In addition, McKeague said, the DPAA lacks the laboratory capacity for such an effort.

McKeague pointed to one of the agency's signature projects as evidence that DPAA's approach is working: the disinterment of the remains of sailors and Marines killed on the battleship USS Oklahoma during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The 394 servicemen had been buried as unknowns in 61 caskets in the Punchbowl after the war.

Most of the caskets contained commingled remains. "One casket alone had 95 different individuals," McKeague said.

The DPAA exhumed the remains of all the sailors and spent six years using forensic anthropology, dental analysis, and advanced DNA testing to separate and identify them. Of the 394 servicemen, 362 have been identified and their remains returned to their families for reburial with military honors in the cemeteries of their choice.

McKeague said the DPAA has adopted a similar strategy for the 862 Korean War unknowns who were buried at the Punchbowl.

The average length of time between the arrival of remains at the DPAA lab and formal identification is three to four years, McKeague said, "with some cases being closed in as little as a few weeks and others requiring many years to solve."

Asked what he would say to MIA families hoping for quicker answers, McKeague said the "generational grieving" is often on full display when the DPAA updates families at regular meetings around the country.

"We understand, we empathize, and we're doing everything possible" to alleviate that suffering, he said.

From Brainerd to Bataan

The decades-long quest to find Julius Knudsen illustrates the conviction required to navigate through the triumphs and pitfalls of the DPAA's process.

For most of Jim Knudsen's life, Uncle Julius existed only in family stories. He was the fun-loving prankster from Brainerd, Minnesota, who walked on stilts in parades, entered beard-growing contests, and rode an Indian motorcycle to California during the Great Depression before joining the California Army National Guard in 1941.

Like those of many World War II-era service members, however, his military record survived only in fragments: a few handwritten documents and a condolence proclamation bearing President Harry Truman's signature.

"Dad never talked about it," Knudsen said.

In the 1980s, Knudsen's father, Wilbur, began searching for answers by writing letters to Congress and the Pentagon, only to encounter dead ends. Officials repeatedly told him that most of his older brother's records had likely been destroyed in the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. Burned out and frustrated, Wilbur Knudsen eventually stopped searching.

When his son resumed the hunt years later, he had internet tools his father never possessed. And after cycling through two Army casualty officers, he was assigned Charles Johnson, who became his steady guide through the bureaucracy.

Knudsen tracked down distant relatives and asked them to submit DNA samples to the Pentagon's Delaware DNA lab as he pieced together Julius' wartime path. He learned Julius had transferred from the California Army National Guard to join 63 other Brainerd men in Company A of the Army's 194th Tank Battalion, one of the first mechanized units sent to defend the Philippines before Japan began attacking the island nation within hours of bombing Pearl Harbor.

After the fall of Bataan in April 1942, Julius joined 75,000 American and Filipino troops on the Bataan Death March. Army records initially suggested he died at the Cabanatuan POW camp, but secret camp records kept by American prisoners showed he never arrived there or at Camp O'Donnell, the end point of the 65-mile march.

In 2019, Knudsen sought the help of Colorado MIA researcher John Bear, who located the diaries of Julius' commander, Lt. Col. Ernest Miller. He had written that Julius was last seen near the city of Lubao. Knudsen then interviewed Walt Straka, the last surviving Brainerd tanker, a year before he died at 101 in 2021. Straka, who told Knudsen he believed Julius was among a group of POWs who ran into the woods somewhere south of Lubao, said some marchers reported hearing gunshots in the area where the men had fled.

Bear later found Army maps showing a cluster of wartime graves in a banana field near Lubao. Greg Kupsky, the DPAA's lead World War II historian for the Philippines, then connected the site to the remains of nine unidentified soldiers recovered after the war and eventually buried at the Manila American Cemetery.

Kupsky ultimately assembled a list of candidates that included Julius and 151 other soldiers. Before approving a disinterment, the DPAA requires DNA reference samples from relatives tied to at least 60% of those possible matches-a threshold that took Bear and Army genealogists until 2023 to reach.

In April 2024, top Pentagon officials gave their approval for workers to exhume the remains of the nine soldiers and nine others from the Manila cemetery. The DPAA and the American Battle Monuments Commission, which manages 26 military cemeteries overseas, then worked together to schedule the disinterments. The 18 caskets were exhumed in December 2025 and sent the next month to the DPAA's Honolulu lab.

Knudsen was elated-until he learned the identification process could still take years because of laboratory backlogs.

"They have thousands of remains to process and have their own internal hierarchy when it comes to priority cases," Johnson wrote to Knudsen in a Jan. 26 email. "So this is the part of the ID process where patience will be the most difficult."

Identifying Victims of Genocide

Huffine says there's no reason families like the Knudsens should be waiting so long to find the remains of the dead warriors.

During his time at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, the friendly Oklahoman helped pioneer mitochondrial DNA testing, which became the backbone of early military identifications because it could recover genetic clues from badly degraded remains.

But it was his work in Bosnia and Herzegovina that helped push DNA science into a new era.

In 1999, Huffine quit his AFDIL job to join the International Commission on Missing Persons in the aftermath of the Bosnian war. He was asked to help solve one of the most daunting forensic challenges in modern history: identifying thousands of victims found in mass graves.

Bosnian Serb forces had massacred tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim civilians and POWs and hastily buried them. To hide the evidence of their war crimes, the Serbs later dug up the mass graves and reburied the victims in other graves, using bulldozers to scatter and conceal the bodies.

"When I got there 27 years ago, they had 4,000 bodies and had identified only seven in three years," Huffine told The War Horse.

The mitochondrial DNA tests the Bosnians were using were producing results, but because mitochondrial DNA passes only from mothers to their children, large numbers of related victims often share the same genetic signature, Huffine said. That was a huge problem in Bosnia, where entire extended families were slaughtered and buried together.

So Huffine and his team inverted the system.

Instead of treating DNA as the final step, they made it the first. They shifted to nuclear DNA-which comes from the nucleus at the center of human cells-and built a database of family reference samples. They then tested every viable bone to try to find a genetic match.

Within two years, the system was identifying about 500 individuals a month.

The implications were profound. Fragmented and commingled remains could be reassembled through genetic matches. Identification was no longer a slow, case-by-case exercise.

A quarter of a century later, however, the identifications of the commingled remains of the unknowns in America's military cemeteries still emerge through a fusion of forensic anthropology, dental analysis, isotope testing, and military history-with DNA serving as one powerful line of evidence within a larger scientific reconstruction rather than the engine driving the case.

Huffine said it's a system designed for a time when extracting DNA was expensive, limited, and uncertain.

"They need to do DNA testing first," he said. "Then have everything else confirm it."

Huffine said he believes the Bosnian model could identify the overwhelming majority of the 6,050 unknowns in U.S. military cemeteries in several years, particularly if Congress allocates more money for DNA testing and more of the testing is outsourced to private labs to eliminate the identification bottlenecks.

He argues that a large-scale identification campaign wouldn't require turning America's military cemeteries into excavation sites. Huffine envisions tightly controlled operations using temporary shielding, mobile DNA laboratories, and CT scanners positioned near cemetery grounds.

Remains could be exhumed, scanned, sampled for DNA, and reburied quickly. Forensic anthropologists and geneticists could analyze the data later.

"You could go through an entire cemetery relatively fast," Huffine said. "It would actually shorten the length of time that you have to be there opening graves."

Is a ‘Blended' System Better?

McKeague, the DPAA's director, said it is standard for the lab to start large projects-cases with commingled remains-with DNA analysis. The "blended" approach in those cases, he said, happens concurrently while samples are being processed.

"When we have sufficient information from our DNA-led approach to identify someone, we do so once the data are validated," McKeague said. "Best practice for identifying large groups of poorly preserved skeletonized remains is to use a diverse toolkit, with DNA being a key component."

He said forensic anthropologists routinely remove fingernail-sized slivers of bone from remains soon after they arrive at the DPAA lab. And the bone samples are sent to the Delaware lab for immediate analysis.

But Huffine said the issue is not whether the DPAA sometimes uses DNA at the beginning of the process, but how much weight the agency gives the science. The DPAA's current blended approach still leans too heavily on anthropology, history, and other forensic disciplines rather than allowing DNA to drive identifications, he said.

"Always use your strongest science first," he said.

David Americo, the Paris-based chief of cemetery operations for the American Battle Monuments Commission, said that under an agreement with the DPAA, the current limit is 100 disinterments a year at the Manila American Cemetery and 75 annually across Europe. But, Americo said, the staff would work in good faith with DPAA officials if they eventually decide to accelerate the pace of disinterments.

Americo said the disinterments are carefully managed to minimize disruption to the cemeteries and the families who visit them. But headstones must be temporarily removed, and sod is cut away. Freshly disturbed earth can remain visible for weeks as the grounds slowly heal.

Still, Americo said, he understands the need to balance the beauty of the cemeteries and the MIA families' pressing need for closure, and he hopes the issue can be resolved to the satisfaction of people on both sides of the debate.

Americo ended an interview with The War Horse by recounting the first disinterment he witnessed at the Florence American Cemetery in Italy after joining the commission in 2017.

He remembers watching in awe as a casket was opened and he saw the remains of a young American who had given his life for his country. "He was probably 18, 19, 20 years old," Americo recalled.

U.S. soldiers then carried the casket away from the grave with military honors before it was transported to the DPAA's forensic lab.

"That," he said, "is a moment that will remain with me for the rest of my life."

Reporting for this War Horse investigation was supported by the Pulitzer Center. The story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

The post Why Is It Taking So Long to Identify America’s Unknown Fallen Heroes? appeared first on The War Horse.

The War Horse

This story was originally published May 21, 2026 at 4:00 AM.