GULFPORT, Mississippi – A southern Mississippi family has finally found answers to a mystery spanning eight decades.
The fate of Private Andrew Ladner, a Harrison County soldier, has remained unknown since he disappeared during the Battle of Buna-Gona in World War II.
This month, the US government announced that Ladner’s remains had been identified. The notification came from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, The Sun Messenger reported.
In November 1942, Ladner was stationed in the southeastern jungle mountains of what was then Australian territory New Guinea and fought Japanese forces for control of the port of Buna, The Sun Herald reported. His unit’s mission was to cut off the Japanese supply and communications lines from the nearby village of Sanananda.
Ladner was killed in action.
Ladner, a native of Lizana, Mississippi, was 30 years old at the time of his death, according to newspaper articles from the period. He graduated from Perkinston Junior College, now Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College.
The American Graves Registration Service spent years searching the battlefield for the bodies of American soldiers, but declared Ladner non-salvageable in 1950. It turned out, however, that Ladner’s remains had actually been found in April 1943 and buried in a makeshift US cemetery in the nearby village of Soputa. The remains, as yet unidentified, were later taken to the Philippines and buried in a different cemetery in 1949.
About 45 years later, in 1995, organizations dedicated to finding World War II POW/MIA soldiers began a new effort to identify men from the battle in which Ladner went missing. A review of unknown victim records prompted the exhumation of Ladner’s body – listed only as number X-1545 – in November 2016.
Then new technology, including DNA analysis, allowed researchers at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska to identify the body.
A funeral will be held in Gulfport at an undetermined date, The Sun Herald reported.