Floyd Elmer Cohick, age 19, from Lycoming County Pennsylvania.
Service era: Korea
Date of death: Saturday, February 10, 1951
Death details: By mid-November 1950, U.S. and Allied forces had advanced to within approximately sixty miles of the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and China. On November 25, approximately 300,000 Chinese Communist Forces (CCF) “volunteers” suddenly and fiercely counterattacked after crossing the Yalu. The 2nd Infantry Division, located the farthest north of units at the Chongchon River, could not halt the CCF advance and was ordered to withdraw to defensive positions at Sunchon in the South Pyongan province of North Korea. As the division pulled back from Kunu-ri toward Sunchon, it conducted an intense rearguard action while fighting to break through well-defended roadblocks set up by CCF infiltrators. The withdrawal was not complete until December 1, and the 2nd Infantry Division suffered extremely heavy casualties in the process. Corporal Floyd Elmer Cohick, who joined the U.S. Army from Pennsylvania, served with Battery D, 82nd Anti-Aircraft Artillery Automatic Weapons Battalion, 2nd Infantry Division. He was captured on December 1, 1950, as his unit provided cover to withdrawing 2nd Infantry Division troops near Kunu-ri. He was marched to an old mining camp in the Pukchin Tarigol Valley, North Korea, where he died of exhaustion and malnutrition on February 10, 1951. Although he was buried near the camp, his remains were not identified among those returned to U.S. custody after the war. Corporal Cohick 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, DC, which was updated in 2022 to include the names of the fallen.
Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency
