Eight decades after a German officer handed over his identification tags, officials have finally located the remains of a United States Army soldier from Alabama who was killed during World War II.
U.S. Army Pfc. Noah C. Reeves was reported killed in action on Dec. 6, 1944, following a firefight between his battalion and heavily-armed German forces near Vossenack, Germany, as reported by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). Reeves, a 26-year-old from Moulton, Alabama, lost his life in the battle.
Following the Vossenack conflict, both U.S. and German troops agreed to a temporary truce to retrieve fallen or injured soldiers. A German officer surrendered Reeves' identification tags, indicating that he was among the deceased and that his body had been recovered by German forces. Unfortunately, U.S. troops were unable to recover Reeves' remains before combat resumed.
After the war, the American Graves Registration Command conducted investigations in the Hürtgen Forest area, where Vossenack is located, in an effort to locate missing U.S. personnel from Europe. Despite their efforts, Reeves' remains could not be found or identified during these searches, leading to his classification as non-recoverable in 1951.
Unidentified remains that had actually been found three years earlier, in 1948, in the Hürtgen Forest turned out to belong to Reeves. The graves registration command recovered the remains during their searches in that area after the war, but they could not scientifically identify them, so the remains were interred in the Ardennes American Cemetery, a military cemetery in Belgium, in 1949. They were given the label X-5770.
A DPAA historian renewed the search for Reeves' remains in 2021, when officials determined that X-5770 could potentially belong to him. Scientists used a combination of anthropological analysis, circumstantial evidence and multiple types of DNA analyses to test the remains and ultimately identify them as Reeves. His remains were officially accounted for on Sept. 12, 2022.
A date and location for Reeves' burial had not yet been determined when DPAA announced that he was identified. People interested in family and funeral information can contact the Army Casualty Office by calling 800-892-2490, officials said.
