BY LARRY SOBCZAK
EDITOR
Bruce Township resident Linda Monicatti received good news just in time for Memorial Day.
She was informed last month that the remains of her fraternal uncle, Edward Joesph Kramer, 23, of Detroit, have been positively identified after nearly 83 years and will be returned to Michigan where he will receive a military burial in the Great Lakes National Cemetery in Holly.
“The whole thing is such a miracle. I’m still reeling from it,” Monicatti said.
Kramer was inducted into the U.S. Army on April 21, 1941 in Detroit and served as a private first class.
He was deployed to the Southwest Pacific Theater as a messenger in Company “H”, Second Battalion, 126th Infantry Regiment, 32nd Infantry Division according to U.S. Army records.
He shipped out for overseas duty in April 1942.
Kramer was part of a U.S. and Australian campaign in the late summer of 1942 to neutralize the Japanese threat to Port Moresby in the Australian-controlled territory of Papua on the island of New Guinea.
Port Moresby is located on the Coral Sea which separates New Guinea from Australia and it was a vital shipping route for supplies coming from both the United State and India.
In July 1942, the Japanese had taken control of the northern coast of Papua in New Guinea and were threatening Port Moresby which was located on the southern coast of the island.
By November 1942, the Allied Forces had trapped the Japanese to a well-defended position along the coast.
To reach the Japanese, according to U.S. Army records, troops had to cross the treacherous Owen Stanley Mountains as well as traverse jungles and swamps that remained undeveloped without roads to the present-day.
“I was told the terrain was so swampy and hilly that it was difficult for the men,” Monicatti said.
The Japanese had expertly created a system of defensive positions with a network of firing lines. The Japanese had also made use of jungles, swamps and manmade obstacles to drive attacking forces into snipers and machine gun nests.
“The Japanese were well fortified when they dropped my uncle in there,” Monicatti said.
Kramer lost his life during the Battle of Buna-Gona on Dec. 27, 1942.
For his actions, Kramer was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.
The precise cause and circumstances of Kramer’s death were not recorded and a journal for the Second Battalion did not contain any information about individual casualties.
Kramer’s company began the battle with a strength of 108 men on Dec. 2, 1942 but its numbers had dwindled to just 17 men in one month’s time according to records.
According to U.S. Army records, the first graves registration officer did not arrive until Jan. 5, 1943 and a handful of soldiers attempted to identify and recover the bodies of soldiers while under enemy fire themselves. The battle concluded on Jan. 22, 1943.
The commander of the U.S. Eighth Army, Gen. Robert Lawrence Eichelberger, expressed his dissatisfaction with the recovery efforts after the battle.
“A graves registration unit large enough to perform its duties properly should be assigned from the start of the campaign,” he said.
Army officials had issued a report of death for Kramer on Feb. 9, 1943 and informed his family.
According to U.S. Army records, graves registration personnel worked well into 1943 combing the battlefield and burying the dead into one of three cemeteries established on the Buna Front including one at Buna Village.
The American Graves Registration Service (AGRS) consolidated and reburied all of the remains exhumed from battlefield cemeteries and isolated burials into one of five cemeteries established at Finschhafen, New Guinea.
In 1947, AGRS personnel disinterred all of the remains and they were processed for further identification at the Central Identification Point, Maila Mausoleum, Philippines.
None of the AGRS efforts resulted in positive identification of Kramer, however, U.S. Army officials classified as many as 49 sets of remains believed to be U.S. personnel from the Buna-Sanananda-Gona battlefields.
AGRS personnel interred all of the unknown remains at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial.
In October 1949, a board of AGRS officers classified Kramer, along with dozens of other unrecovered casualties lost during the Papua Campaign, as non-recoverable.
“The family did not know what happened to him for seven years,” Monicatti said. “My uncle’s name is on a wall in the Philippines.”
She said her involvement with identifying her uncle’s remains began nearly 70 years after the family’s last official letter on the matter.
“They called me in 2017. At first, I thought it was a hoax,” Monicatti said.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), the successor agency to the AGRS, in cooperation with Army Casualty and the American Battle Monuments Commission had disinterred the 49 graves associated with the Papua Campaign, including the grave which would later prove to be Kramer’s.
Over the course of the next eight years, DPAA used modern forensic techniques on the remains before positively identifying Kramer with the assistance of DNA from two of Moncatti’s cousins.
She said that she is meeting with DPAA officials this month to make arrangements for a burial complete with a military honor guard at Great Lakes National Cemetery.
Monicatti is grateful to all the people that were involved in bringing closure to an old mystery in her family’s history.
“They are so, so dedicated. There are still 72,000 missing people. They cannot be forgotten,” she said.
