Matson, Kenneth E.
Army Private

Kenneth E. Matson, age 26, from Logan County West Virginia.

Parents: Hobart Matson

Service era: World War II

Date of death: Wednesday, June 28, 1944
Death details: On June 22, 2025, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency identified the remains ofU.S. Army Pvt. Kenneth E. Matson, missing from World War II. Matson entered the U.S. Army from West Virginia and served with the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), a volunteer-only Special Operations Light Infantry Unit known as Merrill’s Marauders. The Marauders arrived in Burma in February 1944, and on May 17, with the help of two Chinese infantry regiments, seized a strategic airfield near the village of Myitkyina, beginning a major battle in which combined American, Chinese, British, and Kachin, a group of native ethnicities of northern Burma, air and ground forces fought to drive out Japanese forces from the area, often in grueling jungle conditions. Matson was killed in action on June 28, 1944, during the Battle of Myitkyina, but due to battlefield conditions his body could not be immediately recovered. Post-war efforts by U.S. military personnel during the 1940s to recover and identify Matson’s remains were unsuccessful. In 2018, DPAA began the first of a series of exhumations of unidentified remains believed to be associated with the Battle of Myitkyina which had been buried as World War II Unknowns in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, in Honolulu. In November 2021 and January 2022, as a part of this effort, DPAA personnel exhumed two unknowns from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific for comparison to unresolved casualties from the battle. Based on the laboratory analysis, in which the unknowns were examined as one larger set, and the total circumstantial evidence, elements of the remains were identified as those of Matson.

Source: Nation Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Wilmington News Journal (1944)