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The United States military announced Wednesday that it has identified the remains of a soldier who belonged to the iconic “Merrill’s Marauders” unit during World War II, more than 80 years after his disappearance.
Joseph Gala, of Lynn, Massachusetts, was declared killed in action on July 14, 1944, two months after he went missing during a mission in what was then Burma, now Myanmar, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
Gala was 21 when he died. Although the circumstances of his death were never recorded, he was last seen advancing with his battalion toward a heavily-fortified Japanese area near the village of Mankrin, the military said.
Gala had fought alongside a volunteer infantry unit that came to be known as “Merrill’s Marauders,” named after its commander. The battalion was solicited by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to fulfill a “secret and dangerous mission” in the China-Burma-India Theater — the war’s so-called “forgotten theater,” as the Army described it in a 2016 article. About 3,000 young men volunteered for the mission, and just 200 returned home.
“Those that volunteered had no idea what the mission was going to be,” Robert Passanisi, one of troops who did survive, told CBS New York in 2013.
Recalling his unit’s 1,000-mile march through the Burmese jungle to disrupt Japanese supply lines, Passanisi added: “It’s pretty well-known that nobody else ever did anything as strenuous, as enduring and as difficult in such miserable terrain.”
The mission where Gala was last seen alive marked his unit’s “final objective” overseas, the Army said in a 2016 article spotlighting surviving “Merrill’s Marauders” troops. On May 17, 1944, the unit captured Burma’s Myitkyina airstrip after defeating the elite, and much larger, Japanese army in five major battles and 30 minor ones.
“We were expendable,” Sam Wilson, a former Marauder, told the Army in 2016. “A plan existed on paper to get us into Burma, but no plan existed to get us out.”
Each soldier who was part of “Merrill’s Marauders” was later awarded the bronze star by the U.S. military, and the Pentagon ordered that none would ever be placed in combat again. A dramatized version of their plight through the Burmese jungle came to life on the big screen in a 1962 war film named after the unit.
Gala’s remains were buried at various U.S. military cemeteries in Burma and India. They were later transferred, alongside other unidentified remains of soldiers, to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
DPAA said officials began to exhume unidenfied remains from the Punchbowl in efforts to identify more soldiers killed at Myitkyina in 2018. Scientists were eventually able to identify those belonging to Gala through dental and forensic tests, as well as “anthropological and circumstantial evidence,” DPAA said.
Gala will be buried Thursday in his hometown, according to DPAA.
