Body from World War II ID'd as NM sailor
The Associated Press
Posted: 01/30/2009 09:28:15 AM MST
SANTA FE, N.M. -- The body of a teenage sailor lost in a battle in the Pacific during World War II has been found and identified in a grave in the Philippines.
Eighteen-year-old Moyses Alfonso Martinez had been in the Navy for a year when the battleship he was on, the USS Colorado, was hit by 22 Japanese artillery shells on July 22, 1944, off the island of Tinian.
The seaman second class was among 42 sailors killed, and his mother was told he probably was buried at sea or at the locality.
Instead, the bodies of the sailors were buried on the nearby island of Saipan. Four years later, bodies were exhumed and examined by the Return of the World War II Dead program that identified half of the 15,000 to 20,000 graves of unknown U.S. servicemen around the world.
For some reason, three bodies, including Martinez's, remained unidentified and were reburied at Fort McKinley near Manila.
A private military investigation organization, WFI Research Group of Fall River, Mass., told the state Department of Veterans Affairs on Thursday that a document search had "100 percent identified" the body as that of Martinez.
Last summer, amateur investigator Raymond Emory, 86, of Honolulu identified Martinez's body using dental records. Emory turned over his research on the three graves to Heather Harris, a historian for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command based in Honolulu. Harris said last year that once the remains are positively identified, it's up to his next of kin to
determine where he is reburied. Emory, a Navy survivor of Pearl Harbor, recently located a niece of Martinez's in Santa Fe. The niece, born years after Martinez's death, said she thought her uncle, called Alfonso, was killed at Pearl Harbor.
Body from World War II ID'd as NM sailor - Farmington Daily Times
Body from World War II ID'd as NM sailor
