WASHINGTON — The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced Dec. 10 that Medal of Honor recipient U.S. Army Capt. Willibald C. Bianchi, 29, of New Ulm, Minnesota, missing from World War II, has been identified and will return home for burial in May 2026. The agency said scientists used forensic analysis and family DNA samples to match him to remains once buried as an “unknown” at Hawaii’s Punchbowl cemetery, Dec. 10, 2025.
For New Ulm, it is a rare homecoming: a chance to lay Willibald Bianchi to rest with full military honors, decades after war and paperwork reduced him to a single word — missing.
Willibald Bianchi’s long journey home
In 1942, Willibald Bianchi led Company D, 1st Battalion, 45th Infantry Regiment, Philippine Scouts, during the desperate defense of the Bataan Peninsula. During an assault near Bagac on Feb. 3, 1942, he kept driving the attack even after being wounded multiple times — an act of valor later detailed in a Congressional Medal of Honor Society profile.
Heroism did not spare him captivity. Captured after the fall of Bataan in April 1942, Bianchi endured years as a prisoner of war. In late 1944, DPAA said, he was moved to Manila and loaded onto the Oryoku Maru, a POW transport ship attacked by U.S. aircraft in Subic Bay. Survivors were transferred to the Enoura Maru; Japanese records later reported Bianchi was killed Jan. 9, 1945, when U.S. forces struck the ship in Takao Harbor, Formosa, now Taiwan.
The horrific “hell ship” crossings that carried Allied prisoners through the Pacific have been chronicled for decades, including a detailed National Archives Prologue history that documents how unmarked transports and overcrowded holds turned rescues into disasters.
From “unknown” to identified
After the war, an American Graves Registration team exhumed a beachside mass grave in Takao in May 1946 and recovered 311 bodies, DPAA said. When those remains could not be matched to names, they were interred as unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu — a reality that left families waiting for decades.
Oct. 2022–July 2023: DPAA disinterred Punchbowl unknowns linked to the Enoura Maru for laboratory analysis.
Aug. 11, 2025: Scientists confirmed the remains as Willibald Bianchi using anthropological work and DNA testing.
May 2026: Willibald Bianchi is scheduled to be buried in New Ulm with full military honors.
“Never would we have ever guessed, after 80 years, they would identify his remains,” Bianchi’s nephew Steve Marti told KSTP.
Overseas, a small symbol now marks the shift from uncertainty to certainty. The American Battle Monuments Commission says a bronze rosette has been placed beside Bianchi’s name on the Walls of the Missing at Manila American Cemetery, signaling that the once-missing Medal of Honor recipient has been accounted for.
The result is both personal and historic: an 80-year wait ending not with a headline, but with a burial, a hometown gathering and the return of a name — Willibald Bianchi — to a place on the map.
