page_title: Missing in action
section_title: World War II
hierarchical_section_title: Missing in action / World War II
caption_attribution_description: British War Cemetery - Bayeux. Tokina AT-X Pro SD 12-24mm F4 (IF) DX
context_page_description: Missing in action is a casualty classification assigned to combatants, military chaplains, combat medics, and prisoners of war who are reported missing during wartime or ceasefire. They may have been killed, wounded, captured, or deserted. If deceased, neither their remains nor grave has been positively identified. Becoming MIA has been an occupational risk for as long as there has been warfare.
context_section_description: There are many missing combatants and other persons in service from World War II.
  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.
  As with MIAs from the First World War, it is a routine occurrence for the remains of missing personnel killed during the Second World War to be periodically discovered. Usually they are found purely by chance (e.g. during construction or demolition work) though on some occasions they are recovered following deliberate, targeted searches. As with the First World War, in western Europe MIAs are generally found as individuals, or in twos or threes. However, sometimes the numbers in a group are considerably larger e.g. the mass grave at Villeneuve-Loubet, which contained the remains of 14 German soldiers killed in August 1944. Others are located at remote aircraft crash sites in various countries.
  But in eastern Europe and Russia, World War II casualties include approximately two million missing Germans, and many mass graves remain to be found. Almost a half million German MIAs have been buried in new graves since the end of the Cold War. Most of them will stay unknown. The German War Graves Commission is spearheading the effort. 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.
  During the 2000s, there was renewed attention within and without the U.S. military to finding remains of the missing, especially in the European Theatre and especially since aging witnesses and local historians were dying off. 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. The president of the group said in reference to the far more publicised efforts to find remains of U.S. dead from the Vietnam War, “Vietnam had advocates. This was an older generation, and they didn’t know who to turn to.”
  In 2008, investigators began to conduct searches on Tarawa atoll in the Pacific Ocean, trying to locate the remains of 139 American Marines, missing since the Battle of Tarawa in 1943. Between 2013 and 2016 the remains of 37 US Marines were recovered from Tarawa. Among those recovered was Medal of Honor recipient Alexander Bonnyman.
  As of August 28, 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, there were still 72,579 U.S. servicemen and civilians still unaccounted for from World War II.
  According to official US Department of Army and Department of Navy casualty records, submitted to Congress in 1946 and updated in 1953, the combined possible total of missing service personnel worldwide is closer to approximately 6600 and probably considerably fewer. Significantly, DPAA continues to list as "unaccounted for" the five Sullivan Brothers—arguably the single most accounted-for group of WWII casualties ever recorded.  Since DPAA alone designates such WWII personnel as the entire crew of the USS Arizona and most of the crew of the USS Oklahoma as both "missing" and "unaccounted for" it is likely that DPAA records keeping is irregular and prone to opinion rather than fact.
caption: Grave of an unknown British Lance Corporal of the 50th Division, killed on D-day. Buried in Bayeux War Cemetery
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