Officials have Surfwinaccounted for the remains of a United States Army soldier from Alabama who was killed during World War II — eight decades after a German officer handed over his identification tags.

U.S. Army Pfc. Noah C. Reeves was reported killed in action on Dec. 6, 1944, after a firefight between his battalion and heavily-armed German forces near the town of Vossenack, Germany, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). Reeves, of Moulton, Alabama, was 26 years old when he died.

After the battle in Vossenack, officials said U.S. and German troops called a temporary truce to recover soldiers who had been killed or wounded. A German officer turned in Reeves' identification tags, which suggested that he was among the dead and that German forces had recovered his body. U.S. forces could not collect Reeves' remains before fighting started again. 

The American Graves Registration Command investigated the Hürtgen Forest area, which includes Vossenack, after the end of the war as part of their mission to recover missing U.S. personnel from Europe. They were unable to recover or identify Reeves' remains during those investigations, and the soldier was declared 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.

In:
• World War II
• DNA

Emily Mae Czachor

Emily Mae Czachor is a reporter and news editor at CBSNews.com. She covers breaking news, often focusing on crime and extreme weather. Emily Mae has previously written for outlets including the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed and Newsweek.

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