Farrell, William Thomas
Army Private

William Thomas Farrell, age 18, from Cambria County Nicktown, Pennsylvania .

Parents: William T. Farrell

Service era: Korea

Date of death: Friday, August 31, 1951
Death details: On Sept. 2, 2025, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency identified the remains of U.S. Army Pfc. William Thomas Farrell, missing from the Korean War. Farrell entered the Army from Pennsylvania and served in Battery C, 38th Field Artillery Battalion, 2nd Infantry Division. By mid-November 1950, U.S. and Allied forces had advanced to within approximately sixty miles of the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and China. On Nov. 25, 1950, approximately 300,000 Chinese Communist Forces “volunteers” suddenly and fiercely counterattacked after crossing the Yalu. The 2nd Infantry Division could not halt the Chinese Communist Forces’ advance and was ordered to withdraw to defensive positions at Sunchon in the South Pyongan province of North Korea. As the division pulled back from Kunu-ri toward Sunchon, it conducted an intense rearguard action while fighting to break through well-defended roadblocks set up by Chinese Communist Forces infiltrators. Farrell was captured during the withdrawal from Kunu-ri and marched to Prisoner of War Camp 5 at Pyoktong, North Korea. There, he died of disease on Aug. 31, 1951. In 1954, the opposing nations reached an agreement to exchange war dead known as Operation Glory. Those remains that could not be identified with the tools available at the time were interred as unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. On March 27, 2014, DPAA disinterred one of these Unknowns as part of the Korean War Disinterment Project and transferred the remains to a DPAA laboratory for analysis. There, scientists used modern forensic techniques to identify Farrell. He 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, D.C., which was updated in 2022 to include the names of the fallen.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Pittsburgh Press (1950)