More than 80 years after a historic battle in the Pacific Theater of World War II ended, unexpected discoveries of that bloody campaign continue to surface.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced Friday a soldier from Santa Fe involved in the battle finally was accounted for last year.
“U.S. Army Pvt. 1st Class Manuel Trujillo, 22, of Santa Fe, New Mexico, who was captured and died as a prisoner of war during World War II, was accounted for July 13, 2023,” the department said in a news release.
The release said the department held off on announcing the news until more details could be provided to Trujillo’s family.
Trujillo served in Battery C of the 200th Coast Artillery Regiment when Japanese forces invaded the Philippine Islands on the heels of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.
Some 1,800 New Mexico soldiers, most of them members of the 200th Coast Artillery Regiment, were in the Philippines as Japanese military forces pushed through the Pacific in the early days of the war after that attack.
Many were killed in the fighting before the United States surrendered the battle April 9, 1942. Others died during the 65-mile Death March to prisoner of war camps. Still others were lost or died in prison camps or on ships and remained unaccounted for.
The news release said Trujillo was “among those reported captured when U.S. forces in Bataan surrendered to the Japanese.”
He, like other prisoners of war, was put in the Cabanatuan POW camp in the Philippines. “More than 2,500 POWs perished in this camp during the war,” the news release said.
Trujillo was one of them, dying July 26, 1942, and buried “along with other deceased prisoners” in Common Grave 225, according to the release.
Following the war, the news release says, American Graves Registration Service personnel “exhumed those buried at the Cabanatuan cemetery and relocated the remains to a temporary U.S. military mausoleum near Manila. In 1947, the AGRS examined the remains in an attempt to identify them. Three sets of remains from Common Grave 225 were identified, but the rest were declared unidentifiable.”
The unidentified remains were buried at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial as Unknowns, according to the release. In 2018 the remains were sent to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency for analysis.
To identify the remains, scientists used dental and anthropological analyses, as well as mitochondrial DNA analysis.
The news release said Trujillo’s remains will be buried in Santa Fe on July 26, but it did not say where.
The U.S. Army Casualty Office did not respond to a call Friday seeking more details.
