Remains of World War II tank commander identified after 79 years

For nearly 79 years, Anne Walker Collingwood knew little about her father, an American soldier who died fighting near Hücheln, Germany, during World War II about three months after her birth.

Her father, Second Lieutenant Gene F. Walker, was the commander of a tank that was hit by an anti-tank shell and caught fire in November 1944. The attack is believed to have killed 27-year-old Lieutenant Walker instantly, but there was heavy fighting. in the area prevented surviving crew members from recovering his body.

Subsequent efforts to recover Lieutenant Walker’s remains were unable to determine whether the remains found were his, or whether they belonged to other soldiers who had been killed or missing. Back home in Indiana, Mrs. Collingwood’s family told her little about her father.

Then in July, Mrs. Collingwood received an unexpected phone call: the military had identified her father’s remains.

“It was the biggest surprise I’ve ever had in my life, I still can’t believe it,” Mrs Collingwood said on Friday, the 79th anniversary of her father’s death.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA, a Department of Defense agency that works to recover the bodies of service members missing in war, announced on Wednesday that Lieutenant Walker had been taken into account. From May 2022there were still more than 72,100 Americans missing in World War II.

Lt. Walker began his military service in July 1942 after graduating from high school in Richmond, Indiana, in 1935 and working at an automobile company, according to news reports from the time. provided by the DPA.

The War Department issued a presumptive death sentence for Lieutenant Walker in April 1945. After the war, researchers who went to the area where he was killed were unable to find his remains.

Mrs Collingwood said her mother was so distraught over her father’s death that she did not talk about him. What little information Mrs Collingwood had about him came from a few photographs and conversations with her stepfather, who had been a close friend of her father.

“I still wasn’t happy because I still didn’t know enough,” Ms Collingwood said. “People were just, I think they were more tight-lipped back then anyway, but because of the trauma of the whole thing, no one ever really told me too much about him.”

That changed this month, when military representatives visited her and her family in Solana Beach, California. Ms. Collingwood said the representatives gave her several copies of books based on military records that “just told everything there was to know about my father.”

Ms Collingwood said the idea of ​​her father’s remains ever being identified was the “furthest thing” from her mind and that she was unaware the army had a program to identify missing soldiers.

She had an inkling something might happen about five years ago when the military contacted her and said they were trying to create a family tree for her father in case his remains were ever found.

She and two cousins ​​provided DNA samples, but she didn’t expect anything would come of it.

Historians pored over documents as part of a DPAA project focused on missing soldiers in ground battles on Germany’s western border, said Sgt. First Class Sean Everette, agency spokesman.

A historian found a series of unidentified remains recovered from a burned-out tank in the Hücheln area that could have belonged to Lt. Walker or another soldier, Sergeant Everette said.

The remains were buried at the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery and Memorial in Belgium and exhumed in August 2021. They were then transferred to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska for examination by forensic anthropologists, the sergeant said.

DNA samples were also sent to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and compared to family samples from Lt. Walker and the other soldier. The military scientists concluded that the remains belonged to Lieutenant Walker and contacted Mrs. Collingwood.

“I was very happy and wished my mother and my grandmother were still alive so they could know this,” she said.

She said she is preparing to fly Lt. Walker’s remains to California, where Ms. Collingwood and her family will meet the plane on the tarmac.

“I don’t know if I’m going to make it, it’s going to be so emotional for me,” she said.

Then, nearly 80 years after Lieutenant Walker was killed, he will be buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean. His family plans to hold a ceremony there early next year.