Army Cpl. Frank H. Smith was 23 when he was killed in 1951
A soldier from Liverpool is returning home 59 years after he was killed in the Korean War.
Army Cpl. Frank H. Smith was 23 when he was killed fighting communist forces on a hill near the 38th parallel on July 25, 1951. But his fellow soldiers were not able to recover his body because of intense fighting on the hill.
In June last year, a South Korean military team searching for the remains of South Korean soldiers killed in the war unearthed human remains from a shallow grave. Along with the skeletal remains were a U.S. Army boot and U.S. military identification tags containing Smith’s name and identification number.
The South Koreans turned the remains over to the American military, which sent them to its Joint Prisoners of War/Missing in Action accounting Command Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. There, specialists using dental records and DNA samples from the remains and from relatives of Smith who are still living, to confirm the remains belonged to him.
The soldier’s remains are scheduled to be flown to Syracuse on Tuesday and buried with full military honors next to his parents in North Syracuse Cemetery.
More than 54,000 Americans were killed in the Korean War, and 8,022 remain unaccounted for, according to the Defense Prisoner of War and Missing Personnel Office at the Department of Defense.