Lies from the government [Vietnam POWs]

Factual Questions
41

It’s a bit more gruesome than this, and while I don’t have statistics on hand, I doubt that the majority, much less the vast, vast majority of MIAs were aircrews. There are nearly 80,000 US MIA from WWII. Consider that remains today are identified by DNA. Missing in Action usually means dead, no identifiable body recovered. The horrible reality of warfare, particularly modern warfare, is that there may not be enough remains left to identify without using a DNA match in land warfare or were simply never properly recovered post battle.

For example, the Battle of Tarawa which took place over 76 hours, with the fighting almost exclusively on the atoll of Betio, which totaled only 291 acres, about 1/3 of the size of Central Park, NYC. One might assume the bodies of the dead from such a small area and such a short timeframe would be recoverable and identifiable. One would be mistaken. According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency:

Casualties and Unknowns

Of the 1,021 U.S. personnel killed during the Battle of Tarawa, approximately 350 remain unaccounted-for.

42

A few years ago when I was in IT one of my older co-workers had been a mortuary guy as a USMC enlisted man in Viet Nam at the height of the ground combat era. He dealt exclusively with the recovery and ID of KIA Marines from his division.

In his telling figuring out who was who involved more guesswork than the families would have been happy to have known about. When an artillery shell lands in a squad of men you’re recovering chunks, not bodies. Even determining how many mens’ chunks you have is hard. With no assurance you found all the chunks big enough to be found. Technically any chunks unidentified or unrecovered belonged to the other men now listed as “MIA, presumed KIA.”

He didn’t like to talk about it even w me, the other vet although 30 years his junior.

43

You also have to consider that many would have died in the water or surf zone, such that their bodies would have become submerged.

44

From what I’ve read, Tarawa was a clusterfuck all around, but the USMC got a lot better at things after that.

I was wrong about that, but it’s actually more interesting than I thought. Apparently the military counts crews of sunken ships as “unaccounted for” (i.e. MIA) even though it’s common knowledge that they’re dead and died in the sinking of the ship.

Similarly, if someone’s killed and their body isn’t identifed/identifiable, they’re classed as MIA as well. So right off the bat, about 10% of the MIA listing is known to be dead from WWII, because that’s the rough number of unknowns. An example is that they’re still identifying Pearl Harbor unknowns by DNA, and taking them off the list. We know they’re dead, we just don’t know who the chunks or bones belong to.

So if you look at WWII, the Navy leads the list with about 31k, followed by the US Army Air Forces with about 20k, then the US Army with about 16k, then the USMC with just shy of 3k.

Vietnam is similar in that the USAF missing outnumber the Army missing by about 300 (roughly 1000 to 700)

Here’s where I’m getting the totals from:

Search Our Missing (crmforce.mil)

45

True, but to continue from the citied sentence:

Many of the missing were Marines killed during the first day of the assault; there are often few details surrounding the deaths of these Marines, but it is likely that they were killed by artillery or machinegun fire while still in the transport boats or while wading to shore. The remains of some of these individuals were recovered, but survivors believed that many drifted out to sea. Marines killed on land, and a handful of those recovered from the lagoon, were buried in isolated graves or cemeteries around Betio. The Marines left Betio on November 24. Once they left, U.S. Navy construction battalions, known as Seabees, began work to improve the island’s airstrip and turn the island into a military base. This project required that the Seabees relocate of some of the burial sites. A second project called for the beautification of the remaining cemeteries and isolated burials. The Seabees realigned the cemeteries, evened out rows, erected monuments in the larger cemeteries, and replaced the original grave markers with white crosses. A handful of the larger cemeteries were also expanded as the Seabees erected crosses for men not originally buried there.

In March 1946, the U.S. Army’s 604th Graves Registration Company arrived on Betio to disinter the Americans buried on the island and consolidate the remains in a cemetery on the island’s western end known as “Lone Palm Cemetery.” Unfortunately, the Seabees’ decision to move or alter many of the burial sites significantly complicated recovery efforts, and many graves were found to contain no remains beneath their markers. Recovery efforts became even more complicated when officials discovered that few of the remains possessed any sort of identification media, such as identification tags, wallets, or rings. The few identification media that did survive were often illegible. Officials worked to identify these remains using other methods but were often unsuccessful.

In December 1946, the 604th GRC disinterred the remains buried in Lone Palm Cemetery. Those who had been identified were buried in locations designated by next of kin. The unidentified remains were sent to the Central Identification Laboratory (CIL) at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. Between 1948 and 1951, the CIL added additional identifications to the list. Ultimately, the efforts of the 604th GRC and the CIL resulted in the identification of more than 400 individuals from Betio. Remains that could not be identified were buried as Unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (NMCP).

The remainder of the article goes on to discuss the recovery of isolated remains uncovered as a result of storms or construction over the next 60 years, attempts to locate and excavate grave sites using ground penetrating radar, and approval to disinter 94 caskets of unidentified remains in 2016.

That’s to say nothing of the attempts to identify Japanese remains. Over 4,200 Japanese died in the battle.

From that article:

The ministry’s project to collect war remains began in 1952 and it has since retrieved the remains of some 1.28 million people – about half of the 2.4 million people who died outside of Japan. Based on the law to promote the collection of war remains enacted in 2016, the Japanese government has pushed forward with retrieval of war remains as a national responsibility.

46

How many MIAs in whatever wars could be guys who survived an event like a plane crash and then deserted? I can imagine going through a horrific event and not being in a frame of mind to make the best decisions. In my addled state, I could think “F all this” and wander off into the countryside to make a new life. Does this happen?

47

If that had happened at all, then an extremely minuscule percentage.

Of aircrew who survived crashes, ones who crashed in enemy held land would be captured, not allowed to wander around looking for ways to support themselves.

48

Ref @Drum_God’s contention two posts up, as wisely replied to by @TokyoBayer just above.

I flew fighters for USAF in the 1980s. In survival school we addressed a lot of self first-aid situations. Because damn near nobody survives an ejection uninjured. Broken limbs, eye damage, big lacerations, etc. Depending on how your aircraft was hit, shrapnel wounds and major league burns are also not uncommon.

We also addressed sneaking around in the countryside living off the land for weeks / months until rescued or somehow making it back to friendly territory. But that part had a distinct air of fantasy attached to it. The half-life of your life was reckoned to be about 2 days. Assuming you didn’t land on an ice floe, the middle of an ocean, or way out in a shadeless, waterless, foodless desert. In which case your half-life was about 6 hours. Unless seriously injured. Etc.

Back in e.g. WWII they didn’t have high speed ejection injuries, but they did have the difficulty of manually bailing out of a burning flailing bomber or fighter. Getting to the exit, opening it, and jumping out under conditions with lots of fire and centrifugal force is a non-trivial problem. Also while not colliding with the e.g tail of your aircraft before you achieve separation. Ejection seats were invented in the 1950s to solve these other severe problems, but brought plenty of their own. As does 500 or 1000 knots of windblast as aircraft speed increased with the transition from props to jets.

So now you’re on the ground and a 1%er who’s happily uninjured. You’re dressed like an enemy aviator, your ethnicity is that of the enemy, you probably don’t speak the local language at all, or if you do you sound like a foreign tourist from the pre-war era.

Good luck surviving your first encounter with a local. Since guys like you killed their brother or parents, your remaining time on Earth is quite likely to be (in the immortal words of Hobbes) nasty, brutish, and short. Avoiding all contact with local civilians was drummed into us as essential to survival. Just as much as avoiding encountering an enemy platoon of soldiers, and maybe more. Soldiers might abide by Geneva Convention standards on prisoner treatment. Civilians are under no such obligations. If they even knew they existed.

While I was in USAF, most of my / our senior officers / aviators were Viet Nam veterans. To a man they were quite convinced that many fliers had survived to the ground, been killed by the locals, and that the North Vietnamese government was telling the truth that they had no record of anybody parachuting down near Village X on date Y. The villagers made sure nobody knew what they’d done. The rest merely succumbed to their injuries alone in the uninhabited jungle, be that an hour later or two weeks later.

49

I vaguely recall it being big news when I was a kid, around 1990 or so, that a photo had emerged that was believed to be three specific American soldiers who’d gone MIA in Vietnam 20 years before, which suggested that they were still alive and being held somewhere in the jungle.

It eventually turned out the photo had been doctored and the men had almost certainly been dead the whole time, but I believe it was pretty big news for awhile. Does anyone else remember this?

50

Thank you for this wonderful and detailed reply. Please also understand that I have no intention of criticizing or denigrating the service of our servicemen and -women. Being shot from the sky must surely be a violent and terrifying event. That anyone survives such an event is a testament to our technology and ingenuity. I failed to consider the logistical problems with disappearing into the countryside, such as the locals not being delighted to see you.

51

I’m reminded of a quote from some USAF handbook: “It is generally inadvisable to eject over the area you just bombed.”

Also recall reading some historical thing about how American pilots in WW2 were indeed advised that while it was best to avoid both, if one must, it would be better to be detained by Japanese imperial soldiers than Japanese civilians, and that the latter could mean a much nastier fate.

I also read that apparently, in SERE, it is taught that despite Scott O’Grady having indeed survived for weeks and lived out the “fantasy,” he is usually held up as an example of what NOT to do in SERE.

52

The other problem with the Vietnam war was that the army was renowned for its laughable enemy kill tallies, which IIRC were so outlandish they became to punchline to many jokes. that plus the assurances that things were going great and they were one battlefield victory away from achieving and end to Northern incursions. Plus denying going-ons in Cambodia. The government built up a reputation that made the denial of surviving MIA’s less believeable. (Hence, Rambo).

53

let’s not forget Hollywood …

(and yes, many people are so uneducated that they let fiction creep into their “fact-minds”).