Brown, Roy Jr.
Army Private

Roy Jr. Brown, age 22, from Des Moines, Iowa, Polk county.

Service era: World War II

Date of death: Wednesday, December 2, 1942
Death details: On May 13, 2019, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) identified the remains of Pvt. Roy Brown Jr., missing from World War II. Brown joined the U.S. Army from Iowa and was a member of Company I, 126th Infantry Regiment, 32nd Infantry Division. He was reported missing in action and presumed dead on December 2, 1942, during an engagement against Japanese forces along the Soputa-Sanananda Track near Buna, New Guinea. on February 2, 1943, Graves Registration personnel recovered a set of unidentified from near Sanananda Road and buried them at the U.S. Temporary Cemetery Soputa #1. The remains could not be individually identified at the time, and were eventually classified as “unidentifiable” and interred at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines. DPAA historians concluded that this set of remains was likely associated with the Buna and Sanananda campaign, prompting its transfer to the DPAA Laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base in May 2017. Analysts were eventually able to identify these remains as those of Brown. On Dec. 2, 1942, Brown was a member of Company I, 126th Infantry Regiment, 32nd Infantry Division, when his unit was forced into intense engagement with Japanese forces in the vicinity of Soputa-Sanananda Track in the Australian Territory of Papua (present-day Papua New Guinea). Brown was reported missing and presumed dead when he could not be accounted for by his unit. On Feb. 2, 1943, the remains of an unidentified American Soldier were interred at the U.S. Temporary Cemetery Sanananda #2. On April 6, 1943, the remains, designated Unknown X-72 were reinterred at Temporary Cemetery #1 at Soputa, then moved them to U.S. Armed Forces Finschhafen #2, where they were redesignated X-1086. In 1947, the American Graves Registration service exhumed approximately 11,000 graves, including X-1086, and sent the remains to the Central Identification Point at the Manila Mausoleum in the Philippines. X-1086 could not be identified and were interred at Fort McKinley (now the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial). In May 2017, Unknown X-1086 was disinterred, and the remains were sent to the DPAA laboratory in Offutt, Nebraska, for analysis. To identify Brown’s remains, scientists from DPAA used dental and anthropological analysis, as well as circumstantial evidence. Additionally, scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System used mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis.

Source: Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency