US’ ‘unknown’ POWs were buried in a Japan mass grave 80 years ago. Can an American forensics team finally identify them?

Nearly 80 years after 62 US airmen held as prisoners of war were buried in a mass grave after perishing in a fire that consumed the Tokyo Military Prison, a new effort is under way to identify their remains and bring closure to their families.

That complicated and time-consuming task falls to the historians, forensic anthropologists, archivists and recovery teams of the US Department of Defence’s POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA).

“We know where the ‘unknowns’ are, but our work now is to determine who they are,” she told This Week in Asia.

Wetherby said her work is less field-based and more focused on combing through records to build up an unidentified individual’s “X-file”, listing physical details, dental records and any other key data that can then be linked to scientific data, such as DNA, to provide an identification.

The task has been made significantly more difficult for the Tokyo Prison Fire “unknowns”, Wetherby said, as the remains were all dumped in a mass grave, meaning there was extensive co-mingling of the bones, which have also been badly degraded by the fire.

Yet there has been progress, she said, and she remains hopeful that names will finally be put to many of the remains.

On the night of May 25 and 26, 1945, more than 500 B-29s carried out one of the largest air raids against Tokyo of the entire war, dropping around 4,000 tonnes of bombs that ignited a firestorm, burning down nearly 57 sq km of the city.

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The blaze consumed residential, industrial and government districts and was spread by strong winds into Shibuya Ward in western Tokyo, where the Tokyo Military Prison was.

A war crimes trial after Japan’s surrender looked into