Seifreid, Harold L.
Army Technician sergeant

Harold L. Seifreid, age 31, from Philadelphia County Philadelphia, Pennsylvania .

Service era: World War II

Date of death: Wednesday, December 1, 1943
Death details: On November 21, 2023, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) identified the remains of Technical Sergeant Harold Lynn Seifreid, missing from World War II. TSgt Seifreid entered the U.S. Army Air Forces from Pennsylvania and served in the 436th Bombardment Squadron, 7th Bombardment Group. On December 1, 1943, he was the radio operator aboard a B-24J Liberator (serial number 42-73196) which took off from Panagarh Airfield, India, with ten crew members on a bombing mission against the Insein rail yards north of Rangoon, Burma. After making its bombing run, this Liberator was hit in the left wing by anti-aircraft fire. The aircraft was last seen trailing smoke between Insein and Rangoon, diving into the clouds with several enemy fighters in pursuit. The bomber failed to return to its base, and it was not found following the incident. The remains of the crew were reported not recovered or identified after the war and were eventually declared Missing in Action. In 1947, the American Graves Registration Service (AGRS) recovered the remains of what they believed to be eight individuals involved in a potential B-24 Liberator crash that was supposed to have occurred in November 1943 near Yodayadet, Burma. According to local witnesses, there were no survivors from this aviation loss and Japanese forces had instructed local villagers to bury the remains in two large graves. At the time, the eight sets of remains could not be scientifically identified, and they were interred as Unknowns in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (NMCP) in Honolulu, Hawaii. In October 2020, DPAA personnel exhumed the remains from NMCP and moved them to the DPAA laboratory for further study. The laboratory analysis and the totality of the circumstantial evidence available established one set of these remains as those of TSgt Seifreid.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Punxsutawney Spirit (1943)