Bauer, Lester W.
Army Private 1st class

Lester W. Bauer, age 20, from Clinton County Indiana.

Parents: Besse E. Bauer

Service era: Korea

Date of death: Thursday, July 27, 1950
Death details: On March 4, 2025, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency identified the remains of Cpl. Lester William Bauer, missing from the Korean War. Bauer, who entered the U.S. Army from Indiana, was a member of I Company, 3rd Battalion, 29th Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division. On July 27, 1950, he was reported missing in action following the 3rd Battalion’s fighting withdrawal from positions near Hadong, Republic of Korea. U.S. forces retook the Hadong area in late September; however, none of the remains recovered there could be associated with Bauer. He was never reported as a prisoner of war. The U.S. Army issued him a presumptive finding of death on December 31, 1953, and declared him non-recoverable. In October 1950, the 565th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company had conducted recovery operations in the Chinju area. Those remains were transported to the United Nations Memorial Cemetery, in Masan, South Korea. In 1956, recovered remains that could not be identified were transferred to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu and interred there as Korean War Unknowns. In July 2018, the DPAA proposed a plan to disinter 652 Korean War Unknowns from the Punchbowl. In October 2018, DPAA personnel disinterred an Unknown as part of Phase One of the Korean War Disinterment Plan and sent the remains to the DPAA laboratory for analysis. The laboratory analysis and the totality of the circumstantial evidence available established an association between this set of remains and Bauer. Bauer is memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. His name is also inscribed on the Korean War Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, DC, which was updated in 2022 to include the names of the fallen.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Tipton Daily Tribune (195)