A WWII ‘Unknown’ Soldier May Finally Be Identified in Alaska

The remains of a World War II soldier known only as “X-3” were exhumed in late June from Sitka National Cemetery in Alaska and flown to a Defense Department forensics laboratory in Nebraska, where specialists hope to give a name to a headstone that has read “Unknown” since 1948. The case is part of a broader mission that still lists more than 81,000 U.S. service members as missing from past wars, NPR reported.

A crash in the Aleutian Islands

The effort centers on the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), the Department of Defense office responsible for recovering and identifying missing personnel from World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Cold War. Most of the missing are from World War II, and Alaska is one of the few places on U.S. soil where wartime remains are still recovered; the Pentagon says there are about 120 unidentified soldiers in Alaska and more than 1,900 in Hawaii.

The X-3 case reaches back to the Aleutian Islands Campaign, sometimes called the “Forgotten War.” On June 3, 1942, Japan bombed Dutch Harbor in Unalaska, prompting a U.S. military buildup in the remote islands. During that buildup, a twin-motor C-53B transport plane carrying 16 service members crashed near Cold Bay on the north side of the Alaska Peninsula on July 5, 1942; all aboard died. As The Reader recounts, a fur trapper later found six bodies that had washed ashore and buried them temporarily. The Army recovered the remains, and five of the six men were identified and returned to their communities. The sixth, designated “X-3 Fort Randall,” was reburied at Sitka National Cemetery in 1948. The missing men were declared unrecoverable the following year.

A family’s campaign

One of the missing soldiers is believed by his family to be X-3: 2nd Lt. Eugene Christensen, a 21-year-old co-pilot from Fremont, Nebraska, who enlisted in the Army Air Forces three months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. His grandnephew, Chris Pfeiffer, an Air Force and Nebraska National Guard veteran, spent years collecting hundreds of pages of records and pressing DPAA to act.

“Could it be my uncle? Yes. Could it not be? Yes. We have to manage our expectations on this,” Pfeiffer said. “They told me, ‘Chris, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.’ I never let up on them.”

DPAA officials acknowledge the family’s persistence mattered. The agency had been examining the case since 2017, but progress stalled until Pfeiffer became involved.

The disinterment

In late June, a DPAA recovery team including an archeologist, an odontologist, a medic and senior planner Aaron Cummings hand-dug X-3’s grave. The grave sat on a narrow terrace of Sitka’s main cemetery hill, where heavy equipment could not be used, making it the first disinterment at Sitka during DPAA’s tenure. The team found the remains in good condition in a metal-lined casket.

“It was a very successful, respectful, and honorable extraction,” Cummings said.

On July 1, more than a hundred Sitkans lined the streets as police and fire vehicles escorted a hearse carrying the remains to the city airport. The casket departed on an Alaska Airlines jet and arrived the next day at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield, where an Air Force honor guard transferred it to the DPAA laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base, KCAW reported.

What happens next

Forensic anthropologists will combine dental records, historical documents and DNA testing to identify the remains, working with the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Delaware. Reference samples have been obtained from relatives of 10 of the 11 missing soldiers from the C-53B crash. The process could take up to four years, KCAW reported.

If X-3 is identified as Christensen, Pfeiffer hopes to bury him in a Lutheran cemetery in Nebraska where the rest of his family lies. If not, he said he will remain involved as the unknown soldier is identified and laid to rest.

“Whoever this is, I’m gonna see it through,” Pfeiffer said. “I’m really thankful, as a veteran myself, to just help whoever this is.”

The case illustrates a broader commitment: in 2015, the Defense Department reversed a decades-old policy and began allowing DPAA to reopen graves of “unknown” soldiers from past wars. Cummings said the work is about keeping the nation’s promise.

“It’s important for the closure of the families to know that we will always try to bring our folks home and honor our nation’s fallen,” he said.