Roseville Michigan

Philip J. Geary, age 37, from Macomb County Roseville, Michigan .

Service era: World War II

Date of death: Saturday, July 1, 1944
Death details: On August 27, 2025, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency identified the remains of U.S. Army Pvt. Philip J. Geary, missing from World War II. Geary entered the U.S. Army from Michigan and served with the 475th Infantry Regiment in the China-India-Burma Theater. From May to Aug. 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 the strategic airfield of the village of Myitkyina, Burma, in a battle that came to be known as the siege of Myitkyina. While the airfield was seized within days, it proved more difficult to force the Japanese forces out of the village. For more than ten weeks, the Japanese Army played a defensive strategy before slowly abandoning the village, by river and at night. Geary was lost on July 1, 1941, in the midst of the battle for Myitkyina. Soldiers who died at Myitkyina were buried near the village in makeshift graves which 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. Eventually, all known burials were concentrated into the U.S. Military Cemetery at Myitkyina. In 1946 all of the remains at the U.S. Military Cemetery at Myitkyina were disinterred and transferred to the U.S. Military Cemetery at Kalaikunda, India, where those that could not be identified were sent to the Central Identification Laboratory on Oahu for further analysis. Despite the efforts of Central Identification Laboratory staff, a number of remains could still not be identified at the time and were subsequently buried as World War II Unknowns in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. In Nov. 2021, as part of the Battle of Myitkyina project, DPAA personnel disinterred one such Unknown and transferred the remains to the DPAA laboratory for further study. There, based on the laboratory analysis and total circumstantial evidence, one set of these previously unidentified remains was found to be those of Geary.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Ann Arbor News (1944)