Underground Radar Helped Find a Lost World War II Cemetery

Cutting-edge archaeological tools are helping find the remains of missing service men.

Underground Radar Helped Find a Lost World War II Cemetery
Marine Barracks, Washington. (Gunnery Sgt Kent Flora)

The U.S. government’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) believes that the remains of more than 80,000 U.S. service members are still undiscovered. That number is far greater when fallen troops from other nations are including. But now, using a combination of traditional excavation methods and newer ones like ground-penetrating radar, organizations around the world have found hundreds of service members once deemed unrecoverable. Government programs sometimes fall short, but privately-funded recovery efforts and public-private ventures have started to play a central role in efforts to return missing service members to their home countries. History Flight is one of those organizations. Started by Mark Noah, a commercial pilot with a consuming interest in lost U.S. service members from World War II, Noah made multiple trips to the South Pacific to unearth the bodies of lost Marines.

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