Missing in action
When missing combatants are recovered and cannot be identified after a thorough forensic examination (including such methods as DNA testing and comparison of dental records) the remains are interred with a tombstone which indicates their unknown status.
The development of genetic fingerprinting in the late 20th century means that if cell samples from a cheek swab are collected from service personnel prior to deployment to a combat zone, identity can be established using even a small fragment of human remains.
In addition to the obvious military advantages, conclusively identifying the remains of missing service personnel is highly beneficial to the surviving relatives.
The usual problems of identification caused by rapid decomposition were exacerbated by the fact that it was common practice to loot the remains of the dead for any valuables e.g. personal items and clothing.
The Geneva Convention was in part inspired by the experiences of Henri Dunant after the Battle of Solferino in 1859 where 40,000 wounded soldiers had lingered in agony for lack of care, facilities and logistics to ameliorate their condition.
Dunant also founded the Red Cross (in 1863), an organization dedicated to reduce the suffering of wounded in war and to ensure humane treatment of POWs.
Where previously there were hardly any alternatives to bury the dead close to where they fell before their bodies decomposed, now they could – if logistics allowed – be transported elsewhere for identification and proper burial.
Those killed in action at sea had previously simply been thrown overboard or their bodies pickled in distilled alcohol for preservation (as happened with Horatio Nelson).
The phenomenon of MIAs became particularly notable during World War I, where the mechanized nature of modern warfare meant that a single battle could cause astounding numbers of casualties.
[27][28][29][30] Another example is the excavation which took place at Carspach (Alsace region of France) in early 2012, which uncovered the remains of 21 German soldiers, lost in an underground shelter since 1918, after being buried by a large-calibre British artillery shell.
[33][34][35][36][37][38] In the United States Armed Forces, 78,750 personnel missing in action had been reported by the end of the war, representing over 19 percent of the total of 405,399 killed during the conflict.
[45][46][47] But in eastern Europe and Russia, World War II casualties include approximately two million missing Germans, and many mass graves remain to be found.
[48] Similarly, there are approximately 4 million missing Russian service personnel scattered across the former Eastern Front, from Leningrad down to Stalingrad, though around 300 volunteer groups make periodic searches of old battlefields to recover human remains for identification and reburial.
[50] The group World War II Families for the Return of the Missing was founded in 2005 to work with the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and other governmental entities towards locating and repatriating the remains of Americans lost in the conflict.
[citation needed] Significantly, DPAA continues to list as "unaccounted for" the five Sullivan brothers—arguably the single most accounted-for group of WWII casualties ever recorded.
[61][62] In August 1953, General James Van Fleet, who had led US and UN forces in Korea, estimated that "a large percentage" of those service members listed as missing in action were alive.
[77] The 1991–1993 United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs investigated some outstanding issues and reports related to the fate of U.S. service personnel still missing from the Korean War.
[82] In 2011, the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) adopted Resolution # 423 calling for renewed discussions with North Korea to recover Americans missing in action.
[84] In January 2012, it was announced that members of JPAC would go to North Korea in the spring to search for an estimated 5,000 MIAs in the Unsan & the Chosin Reservoir areas.
[88] In October 2014, North Korea announced it was going to move the remains of about 5,000 U.S. combatants en masse in an apparent attempt to force the U.S. to restart MIA recovery.
[102] As of September 9, 2024 the US Department of Defense has accounted for 700th Missing in Action soldier from the Korean war-Cpl Billie Charles Driver of the 8th US Cavalry Regiment.
[39] About 80 percent of those missing were airmen who were shot down over North Vietnam or Laos, usually over remote mountains, tropical rain forest, or water; the rest typically disappeared in confused fighting in dense jungles.
To skeptics, "live prisoners" is a conspiracy theory unsupported by motivation or evidence, and the foundation for a cottage industry of charlatans who have preyed upon the hopes of the families of the missing.
By 1992, there were thousands of zealots—who believed with cultlike fervor that hundreds of American POWs had been deliberately and callously abandoned in Indochina after the war, that there was a vast conspiracy within the armed forces and the executive branch—spanning five administrations—to cover up all evidence of this betrayal, and that the governments of Communist Vietnam and Laos continued to hold an unspecified number of living American POWs, despite their adamant denials of this charge.
"[114] Believers reject such notions; as Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Sydney Schanberg wrote in 1994, "It is not conspiracy theory, not paranoid myth, not Rambo fantasy.
[123] The 1991–1993 United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs investigated some outstanding issues and reports related to the fate of U.S. service personnel still missing from the Cold War.
[78] In 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin told the committee that the Soviet Union had held survivors of spy planes shot down in the early 1950s in prisons or psychiatric facilities.
[125][126] Russian Colonel General Dmitri Volkogonov, co-leader of the U.S.–Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs, said that to his knowledge no Americans were currently being held against their will within the borders of the former Soviet Union.
They are listed as missing by the Indian Government along with 52 others including a Maj Ashok Suri who wrote a letter to his father in 1975 from Karachi stating that he was alive and well.
[128] Websites have been started to attempt to track the fates of members of the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force shot down and captured over Iraq.
