Emil Joseph Kapaun, 35 from Pilsen Kansas, Marion county.
Parents: Enos Kapaun
Service era: Korea
Date of death: May 23, 1951
Death details: The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced that Kapaun, of Pilsen, Kansas, who died as a prisoner of war during the Korean War, was accounted for March 2, 2021.
After serving in World War II, Kapaun returned to active duty in the U.S. Army and served in the Korean War with the 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division. On November 2, 1950, his unit was near Unsan when they came under heavy fire from Chinese forces and received orders to withdraw. Approximately a quarter of the unit’s soldiers made their way back to friendly lines. The others, including many wounded soldiers, became trapped. Kapaun volunteered to stay with the wounded, and was soon captured and taken to a Chinese-run prison camp on the Yalu River’s south bank known as Camp 5.
Even after he became gravely ill, Kapaun continued to serve as a spiritual leader for his fellow prisoners, encouraging them to faithfully await their release and regularly defying his captors to bolster the collective morale of the POWs. Due to prolonged malnutrition, he died on May 23, 1951, after which the other POWs buried him in one of the camp’s cemeteries.
As part of the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement, Kapaun’s remains were among the 1,868 who were returned to U.S. custody, but they were not able to be identified. At a White House ceremony on April 11, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Kapaun the Medal of Honor for extraordinary heroism and selflessness.
In 1993, Pope John Paul II declared Kapaun a Servant of God, the first stage toward possible canonization, which is the culmination of the Roman Catholic Church’s recognition of a deceased person as a saint.
Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Wichita Eagle (1955)