One Of The Greatest Generation Comes Home To Rest

[mekender]

http://www.timesargus.com/article/20100 ... 003/NEWS02

Sgt. Edward T. Jones died in 1944 as the U.S. Army tried to fight its way into Germany.

For more than half a century, the West Pawlet native was listed as missing in action. Saturday, he finally came home and was laid to rest in a military funeral at the family plot in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Middle Granville, N.Y.

“My mother always wanted to know what happened to her brother,” said Charles Pecue of Hudson Falls, N.Y., who is Jones’ nephew and closest living relative. “Now she’s passed on. I know they’re united in the afterlife, but, still, it means a lot.”

Pecue was born after Jones died. He said his mother was Jones’ only sibling and that Jones had no children. No one who attended the service had known Jones.

Military officials continue to find the remains of soldiers missing in action. So far in 2010, remains of four World War II servicemen have been identified, along with four from the war in Vietnam, one from the Korean War and one from World War I.

“It’s really difficult to determine the number from World War II, but there’s more than 72,000” still missing, said Maj. Carie Parker of the U.S. Air Force, a spokeswoman for the Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office. “The technology was different. Even keeping track of people was more difficult.”

Jones served in the 112th Infantry Regiment, a unit of the Pennsylvania National Guard attached to the 28th Infantry Division. According to Sgt. Damian Smith, the official historian of the Pennsylvania National Guard, the 112th landed in Normandy on July 22, 1944, and fought its way to Paris, where the 28th had the honor of being the first American unit to enter the city. Its members formed up at Versailles and paraded past Gen. Omar Bradley and French Gen. Charles de Gaulle.

From the parade, the soldiers went directly back into combat, engaging the Germans in the Paris suburb of St. Denis, and they continued to fight to the Oise River, the Compiegne Forest and Sedan.

In October, the 112th was at the center of what would become the single longest battle in U.S. Army history and one of the Army’s worst defeats in World War II: the Battle of Huertgen Forest.

Assigned to capture the German towns of Kommerscheidt and Schmidt, according to Smith, the 112th made early gains but then suffered the worst casualties of the battle. Of 3,000 men, the regiment had 232 captured, 431 missing, 719 wounded, 167 killed and 544 listed as “non-battle casualties.”

Jones, 27 at the time, was killed Nov. 6 near Kommerscheidt.

“He was with five other men,” Parker said. “When they were killed, they were all together. A German tank fired point-blank into their position.”

Witnesses saw the attack and were able to describe at the time roughly where it happened, Parker said, and military officials tried to find the bodies soon after.

“They were hampered by a large amount of unexploded ordnance and adverse terrain conditions,” she said.

In 1951, Jones’ remains and those of the other five men were declared unrecoverable.

In 2008, a German ordnance disposal team surveyed the area in preparation for a construction project. Unexploded bombs are still frequently discovered in Germany; earlier this year an Allied bomb exploded in Goettingen, killing three people who were trying to defuse it.

The team outside Kommerscheidt found human remains, which were turned over to the German and then the U.S. governments.

Parker said the United States uses two facilities to identify remains — the Armed Forces DNA Laboratory in Maryland and the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii.

“They look at artifacts, dental records and everything else,” she said. “They kind of bridge the gap.”

Pecue, 63, said he grew up hearing about his uncle who died in the war, though he said he could not remember many details of his mother’s stories.

“All I can remember was that he went to war and was missing in action,” he said. “All my grandfather and grandmother ever got was a letter stating that and a Purple Heart. They never heard anything after that.”

In fact, Pecue said, it wasn’t the military that told him his uncle had been found. He said he was contacted in the spring by a relative of one of the men killed with Jones.

Pecue himself served in the military, with the 45th Engineers out of Rutland, for 30 years before retiring in 1996.

The funeral Saturday was short and simple. About a dozen people attended, not counting those from the military and the media. An honor guard from the 10th Mountain Division brought in a small wooden box holding Jones’ ashes, fired a 21-gun salute and stood at attention as a bugler played taps.