Memorial

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Sgt Larry S. Wassil attended high school for one year and worked as a machine operator.

He enlisted at Fort Dix, New Jersey on 3 March 1942.

Sgt Wassil was declared officially dead one day and one year after he was reported missing in action.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced Sgt Larry Wassil was accounted for on 27 July 2021.

His unit was part of the Hürtgen Forest offensive, near Hürtgen, Germany, when he was reported missing in action on 28 December 1944. He was leading a three-man reconnaissance team scouting enemy positions near Bergstein when they started taking enemy machine gun fire, forcing them to scatter. When the gunfire stopped, the other two men found each other, but were unable to find Wassil. German forces never listed him as a prisoner of war.

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 Wassil’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-9118 Griesheim Mausoleum, originally discovered by German wood cutters near Bergstein and recovered by the AGRC in 1952, possibly belonged to Wassil. 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.

To identify Wassil’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.

Wassil’s name is recorded on the Walls of the Missing at Netherlands American Cemetery, an American Battle Monuments Commission site in Margraten, Netherlands, along with the others still missing from World War II. A rosette will be placed next to his name to indicate he has been accounted for.

Sgt Wassil was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia on 14 May 2022.