Galesburg Illinois

Paul Eugene Hoots, age 27, from Knox County Galesburg, Illinois .

Parents: John and Eunice W. Hoots

Service era: Korea

Date of death: Friday, July 7, 1950
Death details: On November 15, 2024, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) identified the remains of Corporal Paul Eugene Hoots, missing from the Korean War. Corporal Hoots entered the U.S. Army from Illinois and served with K Company, 3rd Battalion, 34th Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division. Members of the U.S. 34th Infantry Regiment were among the first U.S. ground troops to arrive in South Korea following the North Korean Peoples Army (NKPA) invasion on June 25, 1950. The 34th, which had been on garrison duty in Japan, was undermanned and under-equipped and had little field experience. Its mission was to delay the NKPA’s surge to the south as long as possible so that reinforcements could arrive. On July 6 the NKPA attacked the 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 34th Infantry north of the town of Chonan, South Korea. The U.S. troops withdrew slowly back to Chonan and established defensive lines there. Cpl Hoots was reported missing in action near Chonan, South Korea, during the early evening hours on July 7, 1950. The circumstances surrounding his loss were not immediately recorded at the time, although he was not reported as a prisoner of war. In 1952, a search and recovery team from the American Graves Registration Service Group (AGRSG), the unit tasked with finding and identifying those missing during the war, recovered one set of remains near Suwon. Remains recovered from this area were initially buried at United Nations Memorial Cemetery, Taejon, then sent to the CIU-Kokura for identification. On August 25, 1954, an AGRSG Board of Officers found this set of recovered remains to be unidentifiable. In 1956, remains that had been declared unidentifiable were sent to Hawaii where they were buried as Unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu. In July 2018, the DPAA proposed a plan to disinter 652 Korean War Unknowns from the Punchbowl. On June 10, 2019, as part of Phase Two of the Korean War Disinterment Project, this previously unidentified set of Unknown remains was sent to the DPAA laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, for analysis. The laboratory analysis and the totality of the circumstantial evidence available established the remains as those of Cpl Hoots.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Galesburg Register Mail (1954), Herald and Review (1950)