Before the embers of Pearl Harbor had cooled, the War Department made a decision no one had asked them to make. No American who died overseas would be brought home while the fighting continued. There were no surplus ships, no ports equipped for the task, and no intention of creating either. The dead would remain where they fell, or near it, in ground the Army did not own and, in some cases, did not yet control.
Instead, the Army kept a file on each of them so it could come back later. Sergeant Frank Ludwig Schultze, of Company A, 1st Battalion, 29th Marine Regiment, came ashore on Saipan in the first waves on June 15, 1944. He was a man from Louisiana. He was killed 11 days later, and he did not come home for 81 years.
The second half of that sentence is a promise, not a coincidence. When the war ended, the U. S. government wrote to the relatives of every soldier buried overseas, asked them to choose what should happen to him, and then carried out what each of them requested.
About 171,000 families asked to bring their men home. More than 110,000 families asked to leave him where he was. The work continued until December 31, 1951, at a cost of about $164 million out of the $190 million Congress had appropriated. Across the entire effort, between 1945 and 1951, the Army recovered and identified more than 280,000 Americans, which its own personnel at the time described as the largest undertaking of its kind any nation had ever attempted.
Let’s begin with what the machinery looked like while the shooting was still going on. Recovering the dead was the job of the men standing next to them. Infantrymen and medics carried casualties through battalion and regimental areas to a division collection point, where graves registration personnel were waiting. There, a medical officer determined and confirmed the cause of death, a phrase more brutal than it sounds, which existed because the second half of it mattered.
That was followed by identification, then examination and inventory of personal effects. Anything found on an enemy body went to the intelligence officer before it went anywhere else. The doctors attached to these units were not there to treat the wounded, and they had been informed of that in writing. They were chosen because they knew anatomy and medical terminology, and their entire job was to determine how a man died and then to figure out who he was from what remained of him.
At recovery sites, each set of remains was given a two-digit number before anything else happened to it. At the worst of those sites, the Signal Corps sent combat photographers to document the location and condition of every individual. The graves registration section sat within the division quartermaster’s office. It recommended burial ground locations, and higher commands approved those sites.
It kept sketched illustrations of fixed landmarks, so that anyone who had never visited the place could find it again. It was instructed to keep the number of isolated single graves to a minimum. Where a man had to be buried alone, the location was marked with a makeshift cross 15 feet tall, so it could be found later from a distance. The units doing this work were small, and their tasks were administrative and supervisory.
The digging was done by quartermaster service companies, hired civilians, or prisoners of war. There were separate instructions for men who died at sea. Where it was not practical to bring them back to land, they were buried at sea inside weighted bedding covers, with longitude and latitude coordinates recorded and forwarded to command. Even at the bottom of the ocean, without a grave or a marker, someone in some office was expected to know where he was.
On Saipan, the result was three cemeteries. The 2nd Marine Division had one, the 4th Marine Division had one, and the Army’s 27th Division had a third. The island was declared secured on July 9, 1944, 24 days after the landings, at a cost of 16,612 American casualties, killed, wounded, and missing. The Japanese garrison, numbering about 30,000 troops, was almost entirely destroyed.
There is a photo in the National Archives taken on the island that month. It shows the grave of a Marine no one had been able to identify, with a bouquet of weeds placed on the grave marker by someone who passed by. Schultze never got that far. From the beaches, his battalion could see Japanese artillery firing accurately from Mount Tapochau, the height in the middle of the island, and it took them three days to reach its base.
On June 25, the 1st Battalion was ordered to take the mountain. They climbed under sniper and mortar fire. Around 10 a. m.
, they hit the main Japanese defensive line, and Schultze was hit by shell fragments. He was carried back to the beach and from there to the command ship Rocky Mount, anchored offshore, where he was treated. He died there the next day, June 26. Under the standing instructions of the service, he was now a man who died at sea.
His papers say his remains were reported returned to Saipan for burial. That sentence carries a great deal of meaning, and the word to pay attention to in it is “reported. ”
Now for the part almost none of the affected families knew was happening at all. In 1946, Congress funded a program to settle the question the War Department had postponed in 1941.
All next of kin were surveyed. The form was “Quartermaster Form 35,” and it arrived with a booklet titled “Burial Arrangements for Deceased Personnel of the Armed Forces in World War II,” which the form asked the reader to read before filling anything out. A second booklet was produced because the Office of the Quartermaster General was receiving the same request from people who wanted to know the fate of their loved ones. It was titled “Tell Me About My Boy.
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Four options were offered. Return to the United States for burial in a private cemetery. Return to a foreign country, if that was where the man or his family came from, for burial in a private plot there. Burial in a national cemetery in the United States, or in a permanent American military cemetery overseas, beside his comrades in arms.
And the fourth option: leave him where he was. The form asked a question no government had ever asked its citizens before, and it asked it of people who were not in a state to answer it. One mother wrote offering to sell her house to cover the cost of bringing her son home. She had not been told, or had not absorbed, that the government would be the one paying.
Then the government was slow. The workforce had to be built from scratch, shipping arrangements had to be made, caskets had to be manufactured in numbers no one had ever ordered before, and steel and coal strikes disrupted production. The survey was completed long before the machinery was ready to act on it. Nearly two years passed between the end of the war and the first arrivals.
For the families at the end of that wait, nothing had changed since 1942. They had a telegram and, if earned, a set of medals, and no grave thousands of miles from where they lived. The government had spent its resources during the war on achieving victory rather than on managing the costs of that victory. The first of them arrived in Oakland, California, on October 10, 1947, aboard the military transport Honda Knot, carrying 3,027 caskets from the Pacific.
A military band played as it docked. Sixteen days later, the Joseph V. Connolly, a converted Liberty ship, came through the Narrows past the Statue of Liberty and docked at a pier on the west side of Manhattan with 6,248 dead from Europe on board. Many of those men were killed in the Ardennes.
More than 400,000 people came out for it. Every casket on the Connolly was there because a relative had signed Form 340 and asked for it. One casket was lowered from the ship and carried to Central Park, where a symbolic memorial service was held for the rest. A Navy chaplain concluded the ceremony by describing the man in front of him as a chosen son of the American people.
Chosen in his death. It is a strange thing to say over a man whose name was written on the casket, and it was the only way to say it over the six thousand others. The other side of that number is the hardest for a country that talks about bringing them home to accept. More than 100,000 families went through the same four options and chose the fourth one.
They left their sons and husbands in Belgium, France, Italy, and the Philippines, in ground still cared for by the American Battle Monuments Commission across 26 cemeteries worldwide. Many wrote that the man belonged with the men he died beside, and the government took them at their word and built 14 new military cemeteries to hold them. Those who took the other path were repatriated from 86 countries across six continents, and they formed about 60 percent of all Americans killed in combat during the war. For the Pacific dead, there had to be a place on American soil for those who would come home but would not go to a plot in their hometown.
Congress had authorized a national cemetery in Honolulu years earlier, on two conditions. The War Department had to find the site suitable, and someone had to donate the land rather than sell it. In 1943, the governor of Hawaii offered an extinct volcanic crater above the city called Punchbowl, which met both conditions. The $50,000 appropriated for the work turned out to be nowhere near enough, and the idea was shelved until the war ended.
By 1947, thousands of Americans were in temporary graves on Guam and across the Pacific with no permanent place, and pressure on the Army mounted from Congress and veterans’ organizations alike. Funding was approved in February 1948, and work began. The first burials at Punchbowl took place on January 4, 1949. Among the men buried that day, 776 had been killed at Pearl Harbor seven years earlier, meaning the crater received the first casualties of America’s war before it received almost anyone else.
The cemetery opened to the public on July 19 of that year. The first person buried there after its gates opened was a civilian, war correspondent Ernie Pyle, killed on Ie Shima in April 1945. The site covers 112 acres inside the volcanic crater. A small chapel and two map galleries stand at the top of a stone staircase crowned by a 30-foot statue of Columbia.
Someone had proposed turning the crater into a cemetery in the 1890s for the ordinary dead of growing Honolulu, but the city rejected the idea. Part of the objection at the time was that the living did not want the idea of a city of the dead above them on the hill. 48 banyan trees were planted on the ground below, one for each state that was in the Union during the war, and they were a gift from China. The graves were originally marked with white wooden crosses, and in 1954, the crosses were removed and replaced with flat stones in the grass because the wood turned out to be full of termites.
The cemeteries of Saipan were emptied. The men in them returned to towns in Ohio, Kentucky, and Kansas, or crossed over to Hawaii and into the crater. Sergeant Grant Timmerman of the 2nd Marine Division died on Saipan on July 8, 1944. He was first buried in the 2nd Marine Division plot and then at Punchbowl.
A colonel brought his Medal of Honor to his parents in their living room on July 8, 1945, the first anniversary of the day he was killed, because his mother asked that it be done at home and without crowds rather than on a military parade ground. Private First Class Harold Eberson, another Medal of Honor recipient, was also killed on Saipan and initially buried in the same division plot. From there he was moved to the cemetery in Winchester, Kentucky. Two men killed on the same island, initially buried in the same ground.
Their families gave the government two different answers. And the government carried out both of them. Frank Schultze was on neither list, because the American Graves Registration office could not find him. Search missions worked on Saipan in 1947.
Teams arriving in an area were instructed to search for every scrap of burial paperwork before putting a shovel in the ground, on the principle that a bad list remained better than a guess. They opened the temporary graves. They examined what they exhumed and compared it to the files. Nothing matched Schultze.
In 1949, the Graves Registration Board reviewed his case and decided, without objection, that he was non-recoverable. That is a specific administrative conclusion, not mere indifference. It means a board reviewed everything available and concluded that further effort would not find him. His name was carved into the Courts of the Missing at Punchbowl, on the stone tablets that surround that staircase, beneath an inscription taken from Lincoln about that costly sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
It is worth noting exactly how inaccurate the paperwork is at this stage, because this is the kind of thing the files cannot resolve by themselves. The published totals for the names on those tablets do not match each other. One report says 28,788, another says 28,078, while the American Battle Monuments Commission’s figure for World War II missing commemorated there is 18,094, which counts something different and is quoted as if it were the same thing. The total bill for the entire program appears as $163 million in one place and $164 million in another.
Neither source explains what that difference consists of. And no remaining paperwork identifies which grave on Saipan held Frank Schultze, or whether he was buried in a grave at all. The file says his remains were reported returned to the island. But it does not say by whom, or in which plot.
“Non-recoverable” is a descriptive outcome. But it is not the end of the story. On April 15, 1958, Punchbowl was reopened. By that morning, the site held about 16,000 Americans from World War II and the Korean War.
For the first time since the initial burials in January 1949, graves were being opened rather than filled. The purpose was to select an Unknown Soldier to be transferred to Arlington. Two graves were opened, officials’ cars lined up beside them, and the men doing the work came from the same profession as those who had buried these two soldiers in the first place. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency lists cases like his under a category called “active pursuit,” meaning the file contains enough to justify returning to the field.
Schultze was classified under this category. In the end, it was not a search team that found him, but a laboratory working to match DNA from remains exhumed long ago and never given a name. On Monday, October 13, 2025, Sergeant Frank Ludwig Schultze was buried with full military honors at Garden of Memories Cemetery in Metairie, Louisiana. Nearly 81 years and four months after he died off the coast of Saipan, aboard a ship his family never saw.
The program that was supposed to end this work stopped on December 31, 1951. But the accounting did not stop with it. At Punchbowl, when a name on those tablets is finally matched to a person, the American Battle Monuments Commission places a small bronze rosette in the stone beside it. No ceremony is held for this rosette, and most visitors pass by without knowing what it means.
It is the marker the government uses to show that one of the long-pending files has been closed. More than 18,000 names on those walls still do not carry this mark.