Forensic techniques that have helped to solve decades-old murder cases could be used to identify thousands of American soldiers killed in the Second World War who were buried beneath anonymous headstones.
Investigations into the graves of unknown servicemen have been hampered by rules adopted by military researchers that prevent them from exhuming a body unless they are more than 50 per cent certain the bones can be identified.
In many cases from the Second World War the military was unable to trace family members to request a blood sample. However, a method using advances in DNA analysis and the growth of genealogical databases would allow scientists to recover DNA from graves and use it with genealogists to find relatives.
“The science is there,” said Jennifer Vallee, of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System. “It’s policy that has not allowed us to move forward.” She said the agency is considering how to alter its rules. “We want to be sure we are doing everything right,” she said.
The possible change of policy was first reported by The New York Times, which cited the case of Melton Futch, an African American within a segregated Army division which fought in North Africa and Italy. In December 1944, Futch was part of a night raiding party that was caught in the fire of German machine guns. He was missing when the party regrouped.
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After the war a body wrapped in a wool coat containing the private’s address book and a letter from his wife was found on a hillside, but Army coroners failed to match the dead man with the private’s dental records. Genealogists found that he was the only child of a couple who had migrated from Georgia to Florida; he had no children. The lack of a family DNA sample currently prevents the military from exhuming the grave in Italy where he is thought to be buried.
Ed Huffine, a forensic scientist who worked for the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory and then in Bosnia, identifying victims of genocide, said medical records from the Second World War were often incorrect while DNA analysis has improved since the 1990s. “Back then the system was based on mitochondrial DNA,” he said, which was easier to retrieve but less precise. “Hundreds of people could have the same mitochondrial DNA.”
Since then the use of nuclear DNA can identify an individual, or their identical twin, and a technique called SNP analysis can help researchers develop a profile of the person and identify even second or third cousins.
Megan Smolenyak, a genealogist who has worked with the military on more than a thousand cases, said it was right to take a cautious approach on the use of genealogical databases to which the public have contributed their DNA, unaware that it might be used in this way, though she thought “the vast majority of people would be perfectly comfortable with that”.
