Walter L. Sokolowski, age 21, from Luzerne County Nanticoke, Pennsylvania .
Service era: World War II
Date of death: Saturday, July 1, 1944
Death details: The siege of Myitkyina was an engagement during the Burma Campaign of World War II, which was a battle for the strategic airfield and village of Myitkyina, Burma, and occurred from May to August 1944. Allied troops, led by Merrill’s Marauders (later designated the 475th Infantry Regiment) and supported by elements of the Chinese Army, attacked a much larger Japanese force at Myitkyina. While the airfield was seized within days, it proved more difficult to force the Japanese out of the village of Myitkyina. For more than ten weeks, the Japanese Army played a defensive strategy before slowly abandoning the village, by river and at night.Tropical diseases such as scrub typhus, cerebral malaria, amoebic dysentery and skin fungus contributed significantly to nearly 300 U.S. casualties during the campaign. Soldiers who died at Myitkyina were buried in makeshift graves near the village. These graves rapidly reverted back into the jungle after the campaign, making it exceedingly difficult for American Graves Registration personnel to locate and recover them after the war.
Private First Class Walter L. Sokolowski, who joined the U.S. Army from Pennsylvania, served with the 475th Infantry Regiment in the China-India-Burma Theater. He died on July 1, 1944, in the midst of the Myitkyina campaign, but there are no specific circumstances recorded about his death. His remains could not be recovered after the war. Today, Private First Class Sokolowski is memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.
Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Times Tribune (1946)
