Whipple, Milo O.
Army Private 1st class

Milo O. Whipple, age 25, from Montgomery County Union City, Ohio .

Service era: World War II

Date of death: Tuesday, December 4, 1945
Death details: On Sept. 19, 2025, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency identified the remains of U.S. Army Pfc. Milo O. Whipple, missing from World War II. Whipple entered the Army from Ohio and served with Company A, 22nd Regiment, 4th Infantry Division during the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. The Battle of the Hürtgen Forest, one of the bloodiest conflicts of World War II, was fought between Allied and German forces from Sept. 1944 to Feb. 1945. As U.S. forces advanced eastward into Germany, the defending Germans manned “Siegfried Line” positions opposite the Belgian border. The battle grew to involve approximately 200,000 troops, with tens of thousands of casualties on both sides, Whipple among them. He was reported missing in action on Dec. 3, 1944, during intense combat which took place in the eastern edge of the forest, between Grosshau and Gey, Germany. Beginning in 1946, search teams from the American Graves Registration Command (AGRC), the organization tasked with recovering missing American personnel in the European Theater, conducted several investigations and recoveries around Grosshau, but none of the remains found during those efforts could be identified as Whipple. In May 1946, an AGRC investigation team had recovered two sets of remains south of Gey, Germany, and transferred them to the United States Military Cemetery Neuville, now the Ardennes American Cemetery, in Belgium for processing. At the time, the remains could not be successfully identified and were interred at Ardennes American Cemetery as Unknowns. In July 2022, the Department of Defense and American Battle Monuments Commission exhumed these two Unknowns and transferred them to the DPAA Laboratory for analysis. There, it was discovered that the two sets contained commingled remains from one individual, which the laboratory analysis and total circumstantial evidence identified as Whipple.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Dayton Daily News (1945), Daily Advocate (2016)