In mid-October 1944, somewhere in eastern France, Private Leonard Hicks sat in a graves registration tent and faced a form he could not complete. The body in front of him had no identification. No dog tags. No paybook.
Nothing in the pockets that would tell him who the man had been. Every required line stayed blank. Hicks, a twenty-two-year-old clerk from Indianapolis, wrote what he could: unknown, American, male, age approximately twenty to twenty-five. He buried the man without a name.
By the end of that week, he had done the same for ten more soldiers. It was not that the system was supposed to work this way. Under normal conditions, every soldier wore two identification tags. One remained with the body; the other traveled with the paperwork.
Graves registration units were then responsible for transporting each body to a temporary cemetery, documenting the name, unit, date, and location, and filing the record. But the fall of 1944 was anything but normal. Patton’s Third Army was sweeping through France at a pace of sometimes fifty miles a day. Units pushed forward, took casualties, and kept moving.
The dead were left behind, and graves registration followed as quickly as it could. When the teams arrived at the sites, they found what the fighting had left: lost tags, scattered records, and bodies so damaged by artillery that identification was often impossible. Days could pass before a body was recovered, sometimes by French civilians, with nothing left to tell who the soldier had been. The paperwork said unknown, and that was that.
Hicks had been doing this work for three months when those eleven men came through his tent in a single week. He submitted his forms and kept working. Somewhere in America, eleven families would eventually receive the same telegram: missing in action, no further information at this time. The message offered some families hope.
For others, it meant a grief with no place to go, no grave to visit, no certainty to hold on to. The matter might have ended there, hidden in the administrative records of a wartime army, had a chaplain’s letter not reached the wrong desk on the right day. Father Raymond Doyle, forty-eight years old and originally from Pittsburgh, was conducting memorial services at a temporary cemetery near Metz. He knew every grave in that cemetery.
He also knew the section at the far edge, where forty-three white stakes stood in neat rows, each one marked only with the words “Unknown American Soldier. ” He had watched that section grow over the weeks and had asked about it. The answer never changed: no identification available, standard procedure. So he wrote a letter to Third Army headquarters.
The letter moved through several hands. Most officers noted it and passed it along. One of them, Colonel Arthur Wainwright, fifty-one, from Cleveland, decided the letter deserved the attention of the army’s commander. He was not certain Patton would care.
The dead were gone, and there was a war to win. Still, he sent it. Patton read the chaplain’s letter on a Thursday evening, after dinner, in his command trailer. He read it once and set it aside.
Then he picked it up again and read the description of those forty-three unnamed graves. He called for Wainwright. Wainwright explained what he knew: the identification failures, the mounting number of unknowns in temporary cemeteries across the sector. It was a systemic breakdown, he said, not a local problem.
Equipment had been lost, records were incomplete, and the speed of the advance made proper documentation impossible. When Patton asked for a total, Wainwright estimated that roughly two hundred men had been buried without names across the Third Army operational area in the past four months. Two hundred families waiting for answers that would never come. Patton asked what it would take to identify them.
Wainwright had expected a reprimand or dismissal, not this question. He told the general it would require a systematic effort: going back to the units, cross-referencing casualty reports with burial records, locating witnesses, and physically re-examining remains where possible. It would require dedicated personnel, time, and cooperation from every unit in the sector. Weeks, possibly a month.
“Do it. ”
Wainwright blinked. “Sir, that would require pulling personnel from—”
“Colonel, I have two hundred men buried with no names. Their families don’t know where they are or what happened to them.
I need that fixed. ”
The work that followed over the next six weeks was not a military operation in the conventional sense. There were no objectives on a map, no artillery coordinates, no tactical assessments. There was only paperwork, witness interviews, and careful examination of partial records.
Wainwright assembled a small team: a graves registration captain, two clerks, and a sergeant who had been a mortician in civilian life. They started at Metz, working backward from those forty-three white stakes. What units had operated in the area? What did the casualty reports show?
Who was listed as missing in action? Then they contacted those units and interviewed platoon leaders, squad leaders, and the men who had been present for the fighting. Many interviews came to nothing. Witnesses had been transferred, rotated home, or killed themselves, and memory proved unreliable.
But some led somewhere. A staff sergeant remembered a soldier killed near a crossroads, remembered his face and his first name. Cross-referencing that memory against the casualty records produced a match: Private First Class William Dorn, twenty years old, from Akron, Ohio. One unknown grave became William Dorn.
A corporal remembered two men from his platoon killed in the same artillery strike. He remembered their names. Two more matches, both of whom had been listed as missing in action. The work went on like that: slow, one grave at a time.
After three weeks, twenty-six of the forty-three unknowns at Metz had been identified. Seventeen would not be resolved, because the evidence simply was not there. But twenty-six families who had been told only that their son was missing now received a name, a grave, a specific place. Not everyone cooperated.
Some unit commanders saw the interviews as a distraction from the fighting. Patton listened to Wainwright’s complaints and wrote out a brief note: every man in this army knows that if he is killed, his family will be told what happened to him, and that is not a distraction from the mission, that is the mission. The commanders cooperated. At the end of six weeks, the team had identified thirty-seven of the two hundred unknowns.
The rest remained nameless, some of them permanently, because time and the records had run out. When Wainwright delivered the final summary, Patton read it, set it down, and issued two instructions: the markers on the unidentified graves were to be maintained, and Father Doyle was to be told what had been done. Two weeks later, the chaplain received a brief letter from Third Army headquarters, signed by a colonel, describing the identification effort and the thirty-seven names recovered. It did not mention Patton.
Private Leonard Hicks, the clerk who had buried eleven men without names in that first week of October, was eventually told that nine of them had been identified. He learned their names and copied them onto a piece of paper, which he carried for the rest of the war. When asked why, he said: “Because I buried them. I was the last person who touched them before the ground covered them.
Seemed right to know who they were. ”
Most of the thirty-seven families responded the same way, with a brief letter acknowledging the notification. Some asked to visit the graves. A few were angry, and their anger was fair.
The system had failed, and only a fraction of its failures could be undone. Thirty-seven was not two hundred. It was simply what had been possible given what remained of the records, the witnesses, and the evidence. The rest stayed anonymous.
Patton never wrote about the identification effort. It appears in no diary, no memoir, no after-action report. Wainwright’s documents went into administrative files, and for years the effort was invisible. Its significance was never the scale of what was accomplished.
It was the fact that it happened at all: a chaplain wrote a letter, the letter reached the right desk, and the commander of an army in the middle of a brutal campaign decided that two hundred unnamed graves were a problem worth solving. Most generals would have read that letter and moved on. Patton called a colonel in and asked what it would take.
Then he made sure it was done.