Army Private Is Identified Almost 80 Years After Death in World War II

Jeremiah P. Mahoney had been missing in action since 1945. His remains will be interred in Arlington National Cemetery in 2025.

Seven months after the pivotal D-Day invasion of the French coast, a baby-faced Army private from Chicago and his anti-tank company were resupplying and reinforcing Allied forces for weeks along a 40-mile-wide front on the France-Germany border in early January 1945.

During a fierce German counterattack with heavy artillery and mortar fire near Reipertswiller, France, the 19-year-old private, Jeremiah P. Mahoney, was digging a foxhole.

“Shells were falling,” a soldier in the company later wrote to Private Mahoney’s mother in Chicago. “One came close and this fellow jumped into the foxhole on top of Mahoney. Then, at once, another one came in bursting in a tree, spraying shrapnel downward into this open half-finished hole.”

Private Mahoney was killed during the pitched battle. His company was forced to retreat from the area, and his body could not be immediately recovered. The War Department issued a presumptive finding of death in January 1946 because the Army had no record of German forces capturing Private Mahoney, and no remains.

But last month the Defense P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Agency, or D.P.A.A., a Defense Department agency that tries to find and identify the bodies of service members who go missing during wars, announced that Private Mahoney had been accounted for.

“For the first time in my life, I had a familiarity with this long-lost uncle,” said Jerry Mannell, 72, when he learned of the identification of Private Mahoney, whom he had never met. “There was a sense of closure and relief. But there was a larger sense of remorse for his immediate family not having this information before they passed.”