Eighty Years After His Plane Was Shot Down During World War II, This American Soldier’s Remains Were Found
Nearly 80 years after his death, the remains of an American soldier who was killed during World War II have finally been identified.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced that it had identified Glenn H. Hodak, a 23-year-old corporal in the United States Army Air Forces from Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania.
Hodak was a gunner with the 93rd Bombardment Squadron’s 19th Bombardment Group during World War II. In March 1945, he was on a bombing mission to Tokyo when his B-29 Superfortress plane was shot down.
At first, he was reported missing in action, but investigators later realized that he had been captured as a prisoner of war. He was taken to Tokyo Military Prison, where he was killed by U.S. firebombing on May 26, 1945.
On the evening of May 23, 1945, more than 500 American B-29 Superfortress bombers traveled from the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean to Tokyo.
They then firebombed the Japanese capital with highly flammable explosives in an attempt to force the Japanese to surrender.
The bombing in May 1945 came just two months after another U.S. firebombing campaign called Operation Meetinghouse, which had killed an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people in Tokyo. Many of them were civilians.
After the war, the American Graves Registration Service searched throughout the Pacific region for the remains of American soldiers.
In 1946, they visited the Tokyo Military Prison. The Japanese government told them they would find the remains of 62 U.S. service members.
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They ended up recovering 65 sets of remains and managed to identify 25 of them. The service could not identify the other 39 bodies, so they were buried in the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines.
In March and April 2022, the remains were disinterred and sent to the lab at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii.
The agency launched the Tokyo Prison Fire Project in 2024, which aimed to identify American service members who had died in the 1945 fire.
The conditions of the remains were poor, with burns and considerable damage. At least four sets of DNA were found within one casket.
Eventually, experts were able to use dental and anthropological techniques, along with circumstantial evidence, to identify Hodak’s remains. They also drew on a DNA sample provided by Hodak’s great-nephew, Benjamin Hodak.
So far, the agency has accounted for two service members during the duration of the project. Hodak was accounted for on September 25, 2024. This May, he will be laid to rest in Spring Creek, Pennsylvania, next to his mother and two of his brothers.
“I was happy that a match was able to be made,” Benjamin said. “It’s amazing that they were able to find his remains, that we matched, and now they are bringing him home. I just want him back home; the whole family wants him home.”
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