| From DPAA Mil
On June 30, 2023, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) identified the remains of Sergeant George F. Bishop, missing from World War II.
Sergeant Bishop entered the U.S. Army from Washington and served with Battery K of the 59th Coastal Artillery Regiment in the Philippines. He was captured on Corregidor Island following the Allied surrender of the Bataan Peninsula on April 9, 1942, and was eventually transferred to the notorious Cabanatuan Prison Camp in Nueva Ecija Province, where he died of diphtheria and dysentery on July 28, 1942. At its peak, Cabanatuan held approximately 8,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war captured during and after the Fall of Bataan. Conditions at the camp were poor, with food and water extremely limited, leading to widespread malnutrition and outbreaks of malaria and dysentery. By the time the camp was liberated in early 1945, approximately 2,800 Americans had died at Cabanatuan. SGT Bishop was buried in Common Grave 215 in the camp cemetery along with other deceased American POWs. Following the war, American Graves Registration Service (AGRS) personnel exhumed those buried at the Cabanatuan cemetery and relocated the remains to a temporary U.S. military mausoleum near Manila. In 1947, the AGRS examined the remains in an attempt to identify them. Remains that could not be identified were buried at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial as Unknowns. In 2018, the unidentified remains associated with Common Grave 215 were disinterred and sent to a DPAA laboratory for analysis. The laboratory analysis and the totality of the circumstantial evidence available established an association between one set of these Unknown remains and SGT Bishop.
Sergeant Bishop is memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.
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