A Florida soldier disappeared in a WWII battle. His body is coming home 79 years later. Private Andrew Joseph Ladner (Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency/Released)
A Gulf Coast family has finally found answers after an eight-decade wait.
Since his disappearance during the World War II Battle of Buna-Gona, the fate of Private Andrew J. Ladner, a soldier from Harrison County, has been unknown. But this week, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced in a press release that Ladner’s remains had been identified in July 2021.
In November 1942, Ladner was posted in the southeastern mountain jungles of what was then the Australian territory of New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea), fighting Japanese troops for control of the port of Buna.
He was 30 years old and a native of Lizana, according to a newspaper clipping from the time of his death. Ladner graduated from Perkinston Junior College, which is now Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College.
His unit’s objective was to cut off Japanese supply and communications lines from the nearby village of Sanananda. On Nov. 30, the unit mounted a blockade — later known as the Huggins Roadblock — which held for 22 days until their rescue by Australian troops. Ladner, however, was killed in action.
After the Allied victory, the American Graves Registration Service spent years combing the battle site for the bodies of American soldiers, but declared Ladner non-recoverable in 1950.
It turned out, however, that Ladner’s remains had actually been found in April 1943 and buried at a temporary U.S. cemetery in the nearby village of Soputa. The body, still unidentified, was later moved to the Phillippines and buried at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in 1949.
Beginning in 1995, organizations dedicated to finding World War II POW/MIA soldiers launched a new effort to identify men from the Huggins Roadblock. They found three new bodies near the battle site, but none were identified as Ladner.
A DPAA review of unknown casualty records prompted the exhumation of Ladner’s body—listed only by the number X-1545—in November 2016.
DPAA scientists at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska took advantage of new technologies including dental analysis and mitochondrial DNA analysis, as well as anthropological and circumstantial evidence, to identify the body.
The identfication was confirmed by DPAA in July 2021.
Ladner’s family received a full briefing explaining the process of his identification. A funeral will be held in Gulfport at an undetermined date.
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