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Abstract
During the Korean War, the American Graves Registration Service, U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, developed an innovative system to recover, identify, and repatriate deceased U.S. servicemen. In doing so, the U.S. armed forces returned their dead to the United States during major combat operations for the first time in military history. This article describes and analyzes the handling of the Korean War dead. It concludes that the wartime program exemplified the country's adaptation to limited war during a time of prosperous insecurity.
IN March 1951, dockworkers in Yokohama, Japan, loaded fifty caskets aboard the USNS General George M. Randall. The flag-draped metal coffins contained the remains of U.S. servicemen killed or mortally wounded in Korea. Months before, the American Graves Registration Service (AGRS), U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, evacuated the bodies from the peninsula. Then, at a state-of-the-art laboratory in Japan, identification specialists, including physical anthropologists, carefully examined the remains, observing and recording important biological data. Military officers used the scientific findings, circumstantial information, and material evidence to identify deceased servicemen. With the first shipment of remains ready for repatriation, Americans gathered in Yokohama to honor the dead. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines placed wreaths around a shipside memorial. A U.S. Army band played a selection of dignified music, and military chaplains delivered emotional invocations. During his public remarks, Major General Doyle O. Hickey, Chief of Staff, Far East Command, tried to explain the loss of life. American military dead, he said, "represented all the people of the earth who prefer death to bondage."1 A nearby U.S. Navy frigate fired a twenty-one-gun salute as the USNS General Randall, bound for San Francisco, California, pulled away from the pier. Covering the event, American journalists published tributes to the sacrifice and heroism of U.S. servicemen in Korea. They stressed, throughout, the novelty of the wartime repatriation program. "This was the first time America has returned her dead from an active theater of war," the New York Times and other newspapers reported.2
During the Korean War (1950-53), the U.S. armed forces developed an innovative system to recover, identify, and repatriate the dead. In doing so, they returned deceased servicemen to their families without undue delay, an achievement repeated in all conflicts since Korea. The credibility of the wartime...