Baker, Jack Benton
Army Sergeant

Jack Benton Baker, age 19, from Illinois, De Kalb county.

Service era: Korea

Date of death: Tuesday, September 5, 1950
Death details: On July 28, 2025, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency identified the remains of U.S. Army Sgt. First Class Jack Benton Baker, missing from the Korean War.

Baker entered the Army from Illinois and served with E Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division. On Sept. 3, 1950, Baker’s 8th Cavalry Regiment, along with other units of the 1st Cavalry Division, were holding a defensive line between the villages of Tabu-dong and Taegu at the upper end of the Naktong Perimeter. The regiment was attacked by elements of North Korea’s 13th Infantry Division and finding itself cut off from its supply train, was forced to withdraw from the area to keep from being surrounded by the enemy. Upon reaching Tabu-dong, members of the D and E Companies became involved in hut-to-hut fighting before they could retreat. Baker was reported missing in action on Sept. 5, 1950, following the battle at Tabu-dong, and was not seen again. His body was not found when U.S. forces retook Tabu-dong several weeks later, and evidence indicates he was not a prisoner of war. Lacking evidence of his continued survival, the U.S. Army issued Baker a presumptive finding of death as of Dec. 31, 1953. During and after the Korean War members of the American Graves Registration Service Group were responsible for searching, recovering, and identifying missing Americans from the conflict. Many remains that they could not positively identify at the time were eventually interred as Korean War Unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu. In July 2018, DPAA proposed a plan to disinter 652 Korean War Unknowns from the Punchbowl. In Oct. 2022 DPAA personnel disinterred an unknown set of remains that had been recovered near Nam Wang Dong, South Korea, as part of Phase Four of this plan, sending those remains to a DPAA laboratory for analysis. There, based on the laboratory analysis and total circumstantial evidence the remains were identified as those of Baker.

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