Memorial

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S/Sgt Grady H. Canup attended Central School and worked in a textile factory.

He enlisted at Fort Jackson, South Carolina on 26 June 1941 and received training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma and Texas City, Texas. He had been overseas for one year.

He was reported killed in action on 14 November 1944 when enemy artillery fire hit near his foxhole. Because of the fighting, his body was unable to be recovered.

Following the end of the war, the American Graves Registration Command (AGRC) was tasked with investigating and recovering missing American personnel in Europe. They conducted several investigations in the Hürtgen area between 1946 and 1950, but were unable to recover or identify Canup’s remains. He was declared non-recoverable in December 1951.

While studying unresolved American losses in the Hürtgen area, a DPAA historian determined that one set of unidentified remains, designated X-5450 Neuville, originally discovered by a German forester and recovered by the AGRC in 1947, possibly belonged to Canup. The remains, which had been buried in Ardennes American Cemetery, were disinterred in April 2019 and sent to the DPAA laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, for examination and identification.

Meanwhile, in 2019, Canup’s identification tag was found in the Hürtgen Forest in the general location of where DPAA historians believed he was lost and near where X-5450 was recovered. In May 1947, the remains, marked as X-5450, were found, above ground, in a wooded area some 400 metres from the center of Hürtgen, Germany by a German forester. It was assumed that he was a casualty of artillery fire.

To identify Canup’s remains, scientists from DPAA used dental and anthropological analysis, as well as circumstantial and material evidence. Additionally, scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System used mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), Y chromosome DNA (Y-STR), and autosomal DNA (auSTR) analysis.

S/Sgt Canup’s name is recorded on the Walls of the Missing at Netherlands American Cemetery. A rosette is placed next to his name to indicate he has been accounted for.

S/Sgt Canup was given his final resting place on 10 April 2022, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in Anderson, South Carolina.