LANSING, Mich. (WLNS) — A soldier from Webberville, U.S. Military Air Forces Sgt. James W. Swartz, 21, who was captured and died as a prisoner of warfare in World Warfare II, was recognized and accounted for by the Protection POW/MIA Accounting Company on Aug. 2, the group introduced Thursday.
U.S. Military Air Forces Sgt. James W. Swartz
In 1942, Swartz was a member of the seventeenth Pursuit Squadron, twenty fourth Pursuit Group, when the Japanese navy invaded the Philippines in December, with intense combating taking on the area till the give up of the Bataan peninsula and Corregidor Island within the spring of that 12 months.
Throughout this time, hundreds of American and Filipino service members had been captured and imprisoned at POW camps, with Swartz being reported amongst these captured when U.S. forces in Bataan surrendered to the Japanese troops. They had been then subjected to the Bataan Loss of life March, the 65-mile forcible switch of 60,000–80,000 American and Filipino prisoners of warfare from the Bataan peninsula to varied internment camps.
Swartz was held on the Cabanatuan POW Camp #1, the place greater than 2,500 prisoners of warfare died throughout the warfare.
Jail camp and historic information report that Swartz died on Sept. 23, 1942, and was buried with different prisoners within the native Cabanatuan Camp Cemetery in Frequent Grave 434. After the warfare, the American Graves Registration Service (AGRS) exhumed and relocated these buried to a short lived U.S. navy mausoleum close to Manila.
In 1947, the AGRS examined the stays to determine them, figuring out 4 units of stays from Frequent Grave 434 and declaring seven units unidentifiable—burying these seven on the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial as Unknowns.
In April 2019, as a part of a challenge to determine those that died at Cabanatuan Camp #1, stays related to Frequent Grave 434 had been exhumed once more and despatched in for laboratory evaluation.
Swartz was recognized by way of mitochondrial DNA evaluation, dental evaluation, anthropological evaluation, and circumstantial proof. Swartz’s title, memorialized on the Partitions of the Lacking on the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, can have a rosette positioned subsequent to it to point he was accounted for.
Swartz’s stays can be transported to and buried in Williamstown Township in April 2025.
