Tennessee WWII veteran killed in Europe identified
WASHINGTON — A World War II veteran killed in Europe has been identified.
Pfc. Mark P. Wilson, 20, of Elizabethton in East Tennessee, was accounted for back in September following years of work by several groups.
Wilson, who was part of Company A, 1st Battalion, 112th Infantry Regiment, 28th Infantry Division, was declared killed in action following the end of the war in 1945.
His battalion had been holding the town of Kommerscheidt, Germany, in the Hürtgen Forest, when he was first reported missing in November of 1944.
With his body never recovered, never being reported as a prisoner of war, and the American Graves Registration Command never being able to recover or identify Wilson’s remains, he was declared non-recoverable in November of 1951.
In 2021, a historian found that remains buried in the Ardennes American Cemetery in Neuville-en-Condroz, Belgium, that were recovered in Kommerscheidt in April 1947, could be Wilson.
The remains, designated X-5433 Neuville, were disinterred and returned to America, where scientists used mitochondrial DNA, Y chromosome DNA, and autosomal DNA analysis to ID the remains as Wilson.
He will be buried in the Arlington National Cemetery at an undetermined date.
A rosette is also being placed next to his name in the Tablets of the Missing at Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery, an American Battle Monuments Commission site in Plombières, Belgium to account for him.
You can follow the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency and their work here.
You can read more about the fighting that took place in the Hürtgen Forest here.
You can read more about Wilson here.
