This story was co-published with The Daily Beast
U.S. Army Private
First Class Lawrence S. Gordon — killed in Normandy in 1944, then mistakenly
buried as a German soldier — will soon be going home to his family.
But don’t thank the
American military for this belated return. The Pentagon declined to act on his
case, despite exhaustive research by civilian investigators that pointed to the
location of his remains.
Instead, Gordon’s
family and advocates used the same evidence to persuade French and German
officials to exhume Gordon and identify him through DNA testing. That’s right:
the relatives of this U.S. soldier, who fought against the Germans, are relying on Germany to bring him back home.
Gordon’s case is
another example of breakdowns in the American system for finding and identifying
tens of thousands of missing service members from past conflicts. More than
9,400 troops are buried as “unknowns” in American cemeteries around the world. Yet,
as ProPublica and NPR recently reported, the Joint Prisoners of War/Missing in
Action Accounting Command (J-PAC) rarely disinters any of those men to try to use DNA to identify
them. On average, just 4 percent of such
cases move forward.
Several U.S. and international
news outlets have written about Gordon’s
case, but ProPublica obtained a previously undisclosed J-PAC
memo from April 2013 that, for the first
time, reveals the agency’s rationale for turning aside his family’s entreaties.
One J-PAC historian advised
“extreme caution” on the case, saying that making an identification would
require a “monumental” amount of research about thousands of Americans and
Germans killed in roughly the same area.
A Pentagon review ordered
by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel of how the military is managing its mission to
find and identify MIAs concludes next month.
Gordon’s family
benefited from a fluke of circumstance: Gordon was in a German cemetery in
France, not an American one, allowing his case to advance without the U.S.
military’s participation.
Jed Henry, a
filmmaker from Wisconsin whose grandfather served in Gordon’s unit, took up Gordon’s
case in 2011. Henry scoured records, witness statements and various archives
and pieced together evidence about Gordon’s
whereabouts.
Gordon’s family knew
only that he was killed in Normandy when a German shell hit his armored car in
August 1944. Gordon’s bloody wallet was sent home to his mother in Canada.
(Gordon had Canadian citizenship, but he was born to American parents and
decided to enlist in the U.S. Army.)
Henry found paperwork
revealing the Army had recovered the destroyed vehicle and two badly burned,
unidentifiable bodies. They were buried as American unknowns.
After the war ended,
the Army dug up both sets of remains, finding they wore German clothing. Using
fingerprints, one was identified as U.S. Army Pvt. James Bowman, who had been
in the turret of the car next to Gordon.
It was impossible to
use fingerprints to identify the other set of remains. The bones were given a
number, X-356, for lack of a name. Because of the German clothing, they were turned
over to the Germans, who interred them in a crypt in France.
That evidence was
enough to persuade the French and German governments to exhume the remains last
fall and test for DNA, but not the Pentagon.
“Why is that we had
enough evidence to convince the French and the Germans but not the Americans?”
Henry asked. “Why is the burden of proof in America so much higher? It’s
ludicrous.”
The April 2013 internal
J-PAC memo argued that
the evidence was too thin to eliminate the thousands of other men who died in
the area during that time, concluding “that the association between [Gordon]
and this set of remains was possible but improbable.” J-PAC historian Jeffery
Johnson questioned
whether it was even within the agency’s authority or responsibility to try to
identify Gordon because he was a Canadian citizen.
Another J-PAC official told Henry in an email that the case
didn’t meet the criteria for disinterment set by Pentagon policy. In practice,
J-PAC’s scientific director, Tom Holland, has broad leeway to interpret that
criteria and he has set an extraordinarily high standard that has led to the 96
percent rejection rate. J-PAC did only one World War II disinterment in
2013 and none in 2012.
So the critical tests
on the remains were performed by France’s National Forensic Science Institute,
which found that DNA from a molar matched that of Gordon’s nephews, according
to a letter from the French prosecutor overseeing the matter.
Dirk H. Backen, the Brigadier General of the German Defense Attaché,
sent a personal letter to Gordon’s namesake and nephew, Lawrence R. Gordon,
after learning of the test results, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
“Eventually,
justice has won. My congratulations for showing such honorable commitment,
patriotism, faith and courage to walk that long path for your uncle,” Backen wrote. “He will come home and that is what
counts. He fell in a battle against my countrymen, but he did this under a just
cause: To liberate Europe from fascism and to restore peace, freedom and
humanity. His sacrifice was not in vain.”
There will be a ceremony
on June 10 in France to turn Gordon’s remains over to his family. For the
flight across the Atlantic, representatives of the Canadian, German and French
military will escort Gordon, Henry said. It’s unclear if the American military
will be there, he added.
The remains will go
next to the University of Wisconsin for an anthropologist and odontologist to inspect. The lab there will also test the
DNA to confirm the French results. The family has invited J-PAC to observe the
process but has opted not to give the remains to the agency to examine
independently.
The family won’t wait
on the U.S. government to proceed with burying Gordon in Saskatchewan on Aug.
13, the 70th anniversary of his death, Henry said.
The Defense Prisoner
of War/Missing Personnel Office said in a statement that “we strongly believe
that Pfc. Gordon will receive full military benefits and honors suitable to the
honorable service and sacrifice that he made for all of our Countries during the
Second World War.”
Gordon’s family and
advocates are frustrated the U.S. military is just now stepping up to be
involved.
J-PAC’s “mission
statement says to achieve the fullest possible accounting of soldiers,” Henry
said. “They’re never going to get everybody, but they can certainly do a hell
of a lot better than what they’re doing.”
For more on this story, see
Megan McCloskey and NPR’s original investigation into the U.S.
military’s failure to identify the remains of its missing service men and women
or learn how
you can help find an MIA.
