Aitkin County Minnesota

Gresens, Rosslyn Edward
Army Corporal

Rosslyn Edward Gresens, age 32, from Aitkin County Hill City, Minnesota .

Parents: Edward Gresens

Service era: Korea
Military history: Silver Star

Date of death: Friday, August 11, 1950
Death details: The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency identified the remains of U.S. Army Sgt. Rosslyn Edward Gresens, missing from the Korean War on Feb. 28, 2025. Gresens entered the Army from Minnesota and served in B Company, 3rd Engineer Combat Battalion, 24th Infantry Division. On Aug. 11, 1950, twenty members of B Company conducted a reconnaissance patrol across the Naktong River to investigate North Korean activity near Chang-dong. After crossing to the west bank and completing their reconnaissance, the patrol came under heavy enemy fire and withdrew toward the river, sustaining severe losses. Only five men ultimately returned to friendly lines. Gresens was last seen in a rice paddy providing covering fire during the withdrawal. With no evidence of his continued survival, and no reports of imprisonment from repatriated prisoners of war, the U.S. Army issued a presumptive finding of death on Dec. 31, 1950. In December 1951, a team from the 565th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company recovered several sets of remains on the west side of the Naktong River, near the villages of Yon-dong and P’odu-ri. One set believed to be American was transferred to the United Nations Military Cemetery at Tanggok before being sent to the Central Identification Unit in Kokura, Japan, for analysis. The remains could not be identified and, in February 1956, were interred as an Unknown at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. On July 7, 2021, as part of DPAA’s Korean War Disinterment Project, these remains were disinterred from the cemetery and accessioned into a DPAA Laboratory for analysis. There, scientists used modern forensic techniques to identify Gresens. 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, Minneapolis Star (1950)

Fields, Sam
Private

Sam Fields from Minnesota, Aitkin county.

Service era: World War II

Date of death: Tuesday, June 30, 1942
Death details: Following the Allied surrender on the Bataan Peninsula on April 9, 1942, the Japanese began the forcible transfer of American and Filipino prisoners of war to various prison camps in central Luzon, at the northern end of the Philippines. The largest of these camps was the notorious Cabanatuan Prison Camp. At its peak, Cabanatuan held approximately 8,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war that were captured during and after the Fall of Bataan. Camp overcrowding worsened with the arrival of Allied prisoners who had surrendered from Corregidor on May 6, 1942. Conditions at the camp were poor and food and water supplied extremely limited, leading to widespread malnutrition and outbreaks of malaria and dysentery. By the time the camp was liberated in early 1945, approximately 2,800 Americans had died at Cabanatuan. Prisoners were forced to bury the dead in makeshift communal graves often completed without records or markers. As a result, identifying and recovering remains interred at Cabanatuan was difficult in the years after the war. Private Sam Fields joined the U.S. Army in Oklahoma and served with the 192nd Tank Battalion in the Philippines during World War II. He was captured in Bataan following the American surrender and died of malaria on July 30, 1942, at the Cabanatuan Prison Camp in Nueva Ecija Province. He was buried in a communal grave in the camp cemetery along with other deceased American POWs; however, his remains could not be associated with any remains recovered from Cabanatuan after the war. Today, Private Fields is memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency

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