Remains of World War II Tank Commander Identified After 79 Years

For nearly 79 years, Anne Walker Collingwood knew little about her father, an American soldier who died about three months after she was born while fighting near Hücheln, Germany, during World War II.

Her father, Second Lt. Gene F. Walker, was the commander of a tank that was hit by an anti-tank round and caught fire in November 1944. The attack is believed to have killed Lieutenant Walker, 27, instantly, but heavy fighting in the area prevented the surviving crew members from recovering his body.

Later efforts to recover Lieutenant Walker’s remains could not determine if those found in the area were his, or if they belonged to other soldiers who had died or were missing. At home in Indiana, Ms. Collingwood’s family told her little about her father.

Then in July, Ms. Collingwood received an unexpected call: the military had identified her father’s remains.

“It was the biggest surprise I’ve ever had in my life, I still can’t grasp it,” Ms. Collingwood said on Friday, the 79th anniversary of her father’s death.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or D.P.A.A., a Defense Department agency that tries to recover the bodies of service members who go missing during wars, announced on Wednesday that Lieutenant Walker had been accounted for. As of May 2022, there were more than 72,100 Americans still missing from World War II.

Lieutenant Walker began his military service in July 1942 after graduating from high school in Richmond, Ind., in 1935 and working at a car company, according to news reports from the time provided by the D.P.A.A.

The War Department issued a presumptive finding of death for Lieutenant Walker in April 1945. After the war, investigators sent to the area where he was killed failed to find his remains.

Ms. Collingwood said that her mother was so distraught by her father’s death that she did not talk about him. The little information Ms. Collingwood had about him came from a few photos and conversations with her stepfather, who had been a close friend of her father’s.

“I still wasn’t happy because I still didn’t know enough,” Ms. Collingwood said. “People were just, I think they were more tight-lipped back then anyway, but also, with the trauma of the whole thing, nobody ever really told me too much about him.”

That changed this month, when military representatives visited her and her family in Solana Beach, Calif. Ms. Collingwood said that the representatives gave her several copies of books based on military records that “just told everything there was to know about my father.”

Ms. Collingwood said that the idea that her father’s remains would ever be identified was the “furthest thing” from her mind and that she did not know the military had a program to identify missing soldiers.

She had an inkling that something might happen about five years ago, when the military contacted her and said that they were trying to create a family tree for her father in case his remains were ever found.

She and two cousins provided DNA samples, but she did not expect anything to come of it.

Historians pored over records as part of a D.P.A.A. project focused on soldiers missing from ground combat on the western border of Germany, said Sgt. First Class Sean Everette, an agency spokesman.

One historian found a set of unidentified remains recovered from a burned-out tank in the Hücheln area that could have belonged to Lieutenant Walker or another soldier, Sergeant Everette said.

The remains were buried in Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery and Memorial in Belgium and disinterred in August 2021. They then were transferred to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska to be studied by forensic anthropologists, the sergeant said.

DNA samples were also sent to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and compared to family samples from Lieutenant Walker and the other soldier. The military scientists concluded that the remains belonged to Lieutenant Walker and contacted Ms. Collingwood.

“I was extremely happy and wishing that my mother and my grandmother could be alive so that they could know this,” she said.

She said she is preparing for Lieutenant Walker’s remains to be flown to California, where Ms. Collingwood and her family will meet the plane on the tarmac.

“I don’t know if I’ll make it through that, that’s going to be so emotional for me,” she said.

Then, nearly 80 years after Lieutenant Walker was killed, he will be interred at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean. His family plans to hold a ceremony there early next year.