Members of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency and the Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group carry remains of an unknown service member at Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines, March 6, 2026. (George Tobias/DPAA)
U.S. military officials recently carried out the first-ever repatriation ceremony at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial for the remains of “unknown” American service members disinterred as part of an ongoing effort to identify dead from World War II.
Friday’s ceremony marked the removal of the 100th set of remains exhumed from graves marked “unknown” at the cemetery since Oct. 1, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said in a news release Wednesday.
Although a single set of remains represented the milestone during the ceremony, the agency said it has disinterred 100 unknown graves at the site this fiscal year. The remains will be taken to the agency’s forensic laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, for identification.
DPAA, which works to recover and identify U.S. service members missing from past conflicts, began exhuming unknown graves at the Manila cemetery around 2016, according to the release.
Since then, scientists have identified more than 220 service members among roughly 750 remains disinterred from the site.
The Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, operated by the American Battle Monuments Commission, is the world’s largest U.S. World War II cemetery, with more than 17,200 U.S. service members and Filipino Scouts buried there.
Many of those died in the Philippines and New Guinea during the war that lasted from December 1941 to September 1945.
Capt. Meghan Bodnar, the accounting agency’s deputy director for operations, said the identities of many of those recently disinterred remain unknown but their history is tied to some of the war’s most brutal campaigns.
“While there is much we do not know yet about these unknown heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, there is much we do,” she said at the ceremony, according to DPAA’s release.
“We know they were killed during the Battle of Saipan or on [Tagaytay Ridge] during the Battle of Luzon or died enduring the Bataan Death March or the Cabanatuan POW Camp and were subsequently buried as unknowns here at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial,” she said.
The Philippines holds the largest number of still-unaccounted-for U.S. service members from World War II, according to DPAA. Of roughly 82,000 Americans still missing from World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars, more than 10,000 were lost in the Philippines.
Forensic anthropologists at the Hawaii lab often encounter another challenge: Remains from unknown graves that were mixed together during burial.
In one recent case, remains linked to U.S. Army aviators who died in the Tokyo Prison fire of May 1945 were exhumed from Manila in 2022. What were believed to be 39 separate sets of remains had been buried as unknowns.
The remains are so badly commingled and lacking in identifying features that they can only be identified through DNA testing, said Alexander Christensen, the DPAA forensic anthropologist leading the Tokyo Prison project.
“There isn’t a single accession of that 39 that only has one person in it,” he told Stars and Stripes last year.
DNA sampling has proven to be hit-or-miss on those remains, with some yielding few usable DNA sequences.
Christensen said varying soil conditions and water levels in the Manila cemetery’s rolling hills may have affected the remains’ preservation.
