About MIA Lists

One of my classmates and friend in Flathead High School was Jerry Baldwin. He came from a historic local family which had more than its share of personal tragedy, which I’ll not detail in this column. His father was a well-known attorney who was shot by a client and one of his two older brothers, Jimmy, was killed during World War II European combat. All the Baldwins were talented musically. His sister became a professional piano player and singer.

I remember Jerry entertaining with songs and a ukelele. He also had the largest hat collection of anyone I knew. The last time I saw Jerry was just after I got out of the army in 1949. Seems to me he was working the summer at Glacier Park but am not sure.

Jerry is one of the over 83,000 American service people currently “MISSING IN ACTION.” He went down over the China Sea in a fighter jet with a fellow flying officer in the early 1950s. My youngest brother Alva went missing about the same time, February 7, 1952. He was cut off from his platoon while taking a Chinese machine gun bunker below “The Chongjin Reservoir” in North Korea.

A local paper, The Flathead Beacon, recently ran a story about a Columbia Falls native, Rick Huston, who completed his service career working years with the Army’s MIW Accounting Command in the Southwest Pacific, searching for MIAs. He said there are 83,000 Americans still listed as missing, 73,000 from World War II, 7,800 from Korean War, 1,600 from Vietnam, and about 130 from the Cold War and Iraq.

Those figures for World War II were shocking to me. I worked in communications with the European Theater of Operations after World War II, headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany. We had direct lines to Saint Germain, a suburb of Paris, where we Americans had established “The Graves Registration Corps.” The thinking at that time was a guess, “maybe” 50 or 60,000 missing in African-European theater and in that figure was also a wild guess at possibly 20,000 who were still alive but AWOL or deserters. I’ve written about that before. Final figures will never be verified.

It is a part of military training to talk about a policy of never leaving combat casualties on foreign soil and the military spends millions to try and fulfill that concept. It is part of the morale building efforts within all our defense services. Our combat troops do know that every reasonable effort, including dangerous risk of others’ lives could be used to bring every casualty home but we all know that is not always possible nor rational.

In my personal family tragedy, my brother Alva’s body was recovered four years after his disappearance and brought home. Most of those others, including Jerry Baldwin … will not.

The terrible cost of war is a two-way street. The last figures I obtained from German sources said that nation’s World War II Missing in Action list is still around a quarter of a million.

G. George Ostrom is a national award-winning columnist for Hungry Horse News. He lives in Kalispell.