‘An American Soldier:' The improbable homecoming of WWII Army Pvt. James Loyd to Chicago area

Chicago Tribune

25-05-2025

A little before 9 on a warm Thursday morning in mid-May, Doug Morgan climbed into the seat of an excavator and positioned the teeth of the bucket just above the centerline of an empty grave. He is 55, with a white beard and a face worn by working in the sun, and he long ago came to view digging graves at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery as 'taking care of my fellow veterans.'
Morgan joined the Marines as a teenager and served in Desert Storm. He has worked at Abraham Lincoln for 21 years, helping to fill the gentle green hills in rural Will County with the symmetrical gray-white headstones of American military veterans and their closest family. Some served in peacetime. Some died long after coming home from war. On a busy day, Morgan and his team might dig 15 graves, many of them now for those who served in Vietnam.
It was rare that Morgan and his men knew much about those whose graves they prepared. This was an exception. As Morgan made the first cut into the grass, he knew exactly who it was for. For days, it had been the talk of the cemetery: That a soldier who'd been missing since 1944 had been found. That a World War II veteran, confirmed to have been killed in action, was coming to rest.
Morgan heard about it on the news after the soldier's remains landed at Midway Airport in a flag-draped casket, and then he filled in some of the gaps himself. He knew that Army Pvt. James C. Loyd, a native of Brilliant, Alabama, disappeared during a nighttime firefight days after the Allied Forces landed near Anzio, Italy, in 1944.
And Morgan knew that the first of the graves he'd dig on this particular Thursday was for Pvt. Loyd — that he was to arrive at Lincoln National Cemetery, about 50 miles southwest of Chicago, just before noon. And so Morgan positioned the excavator and pushed its teeth into the ground, which parted easily for the soldier who'd soon lie beneath.
Born in the Deep South, Pvt. Loyd left home for the first time to go to war. He was a rifleman. Brown hair, blue eyes. Almost 5-foot-8 and 124 pounds. He entered service in Fort McClellan, Alabama, on May 15, 1943. In addition to his physical details, his intake paperwork described his complexion as 'ruddy.' When he went missing he was 19 years old, and for 80 years his fate remained a mystery until military scientists identified his remains in 2024.
It was only then that his journey to his final resting place could begin. At the cemetery, Morgan and two caretakers prepared for Pvt. Loyd's arrival. Morgan moved the earth while the caretakers sharpened the edges of a rectangle that measured 8 feet by 3 feet. They only had to dig 2 feet down to reach the lid of a premade crypt that went another 6 feet deep.
It was quiet, solemn work, and Andrew Pecchenino, one of the caretakers, felt the weight of it. Pecchenino served in the Army for six years and two grandparents fought in wars — one in World War II — and he said, 'this job for me is very personal, you know?' He'd never prepared a grave for a soldier who'd come home to rest after 80 years.
Pecchenino considered the work to be a calling and described it as 'an honor.' And now, after Morgan had removed 48 cubic feet of grass and dirt, Pecchenino helped lift the lid of the vault. They'd moved the dirt into the back of a truck, saving it for later, and then Morgan and the workers guided the lowering device for the casket over the grave.
It took more than eight decades to bring Pvt. Loyd home and about 30 minutes to prepare his final resting place. It was at the left corner of a front row, Site 1 in Section 27 of the cemetery. Most of the section had long been filled but the sites in front, at the corners, are unofficially reserved for special cases, for soldiers who died in service or whose valor the military recognized.
Pvt. Loyd fit both distinctions. Morgan made the connection before digging the grave.
'What this is,' he said, pointing to perfect rows of the headstones, 'is their last formation. And so he's the squad leader of this row. A 19-year-old is the squad leader of all these fellow' veterans, and there was a hint of awe in Morgan's voice. Morgan was 19, too, when he'd joined the Marines. Now he took control of the excavator and lowered the bucket toward the ground.
Pvt. Loyd was scheduled to arrive in a little more than three hours.
Six days earlier, Janice Dale arrived to a scene of somber pageantry at Midway Airport. A parking lot near the runways was full of police vehicles. More than a dozen motorcycles sat idle, most belonging to those in Rolling Thunder, an advocacy group for soldiers who went to war without ever coming home.
Dale made the trip with one of her daughters, Beth Kromray, and two granddaughters, Faith, 16, and Nora, 13. They all live in Valparaiso, Indiana, a long way from one side of their family's Alabama roots. Dale, Kromray and the two girls had all dressed up to come to the airport for what's known in military parlance as a dignified transfer. They'd come to receive a long-lost relative whose disappearance at war had long been a great family mystery.
Dale is 72, with kind eyes and a Midwestern warmth. Growing up, she'd heard whispers about the uncle everyone in her family knew as 'J.C.' — the one who'd left small-town Alabama to fight the Germans in Italy and disappeared without a trace. But she didn't know many stories because her family didn't share much, at least not in front of the children.
'Back in the '60s, when his brothers and sisters were probably talking about him during visits, we were kids,' she said. 'We were outside. Kids weren't allowed to hover around listening.'
The people who best knew Pvt. Loyd are all gone and most have been gone a long time. His mother, Pearlie, died in 1952 at age 46. It was passed down that she died believing what many mothers of her generation believed about their own sons — that one day Pvt. Loyd would walk through their front door off of Route 1 in Brilliant, and that he'd be home safe from war.
His father, John, a coal miner and farmer, died at 70 in 1975, and is buried next to the wife he lost 23 years earlier. He was a practical jokester not above teasing the grandchildren or delivering one-liners for laughs. 'A character,' according to his granddaughter.
'We missed him a lot when he passed,' Dale said.
Whatever pain her grandfather felt over his missing son, he kept inside. John and Pearlie had 11 children and grew or raised everything they ate. The Loyd children 'went barefoot all summer,' Dale said, and lived modestly. Pvt. Loyd was the oldest. Two siblings came along after he'd left home. His last living sibling, a brother named Euil, died in 2019.
That left Dale and her brother, in declining health in The Netherlands, as Pvt. Loyd's closest living relatives. Dale in recent years has become a steward, the link between Pvt. Loyd's family and the military's efforts to bring him home.
Her first decision upon Pvt. Loyd's identification was that of the cemetery. Many of his kin are buried in Alabama, but the family plots filled long ago. And so Pvt. Loyd would've been alone there, Dale said. Her daughter initially pushed for Arlington National Cemetery.
Dale, though, felt something when she visited Abraham Lincoln. It is close to Pvt. Loyd's relatives in northwest Indiana but far enough removed from Chicago that it blends into the farmland and country roads. The surroundings are similar in some ways to what Pvt. Loyd might have known in Alabama, with its wide open spaces.
And, 'to me,' Dale said, reflecting upon the cemetery, 'it's kind of like a band of brothers.'
On May 9, it came time for her uncle's arrival at the airport. Dale, her daughter and two granddaughters arrived at Midway accompanied by Sgt. 1st Class Corbin Colon, an Army casualty officer assigned to Pvt. Loyd's family. They boarded a van and met the plane, a Southwest Airlines 737 from Omaha, Nebraska, on the tarmac. Firetrucks on either side doused the jet with the spray of their hoses, a water salute offered as a sign of profound respect.
A line formed on either side of a cargo port and Pvt. Loyd's casket, wrapped tightly in a bright American flag, rolled slowly down a conveyor. Dale and her daughter looked up to see passengers on the plane and in the windows of the nearby gates with their phones out, recording. The pallbearers, all in various uniforms, stood saluting until they carried the casket to a silver hearse with small American flags on either side of the hood.
Colon presented Dale with replicas of Pvt. Loyd's dog tags — the originals lost with him in Italy. She held them tightly in her hands. She held them as the procession from Midway began, with the Illinois State Police leading a long line of vehicles and roaring motorcycles out of the city and down I-55. She held them while the outskirts of Chicago turned into the countryside and while the procession made its way to the old Route 66 town of Wilmington, Illinois, where people pulled over to salute the hearse bringing Pvt. Loyd home.
People lined sidewalks all the way to Baskerville Funeral Home in Wilmington, where Matthew Baskerville, wearing a sharp pressed suit, steered the hearse into the lot and parked in front of two heavy wooden doors. The Rolling Thunder riders dismounted their motorcycles and lined up in formation to carry Pvt. Loyd's casket inside.
There, Dale and her family spent time alone with it in the parlor. Pvt. Loyd's military escort, who'd accompanied him from Nebraska, was there, too. She opened his casket, following orders to ensure the transfer had been completed and she asked if the family wanted to look. At first they weren't sure, but then Dale felt a need to see inside.
'And I'm so glad I did,' Dale said. 'Because they did such a good job honoring him.'
For almost six years she'd been involved in the effort to bring her uncle home. It began with an unexpected phone call in 2019 from a military genealogist, asking if she'd be willing to provide a sample of her DNA, and continued until after she came to have answers she never knew existed.
At home in Valparaiso, Dale keeps a collection of records, reports and lost details only recently rediscovered. One stack of papers is Pvt. James C. Loyd's Army personnel file. The other is the official account of how the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, known as DPAA, identified him.
Together, the documents tell a story that took 80 years to come together, one that began with Pvt. Loyd's enlistment in 1943, and his assignment to Company F in the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Infantry Regiment in the 3rd Infantry Division. On Jan. 22, 1944, the Allied Forces made an amphibious landing in and around Anzio, along the central-west coast of Italy.
Pvt. Loyd and the 7th Infantry landed just east of Anzio and Nettuno, along what American forces called 'X-Ray Beach.' The long-term goal of the invasion was to liberate Rome, about 30 miles north, from German control. Progress came slowly and with a significant toll.
On Jan. 30, 1944, Maj. Gen. John P. Lucas ordered an attack against Cisterna — a 'strategically important crossroads town,' according to the military's narrative — and Pvt. Loyd's regiment 'encountered stubborn enemy resistance.' In the early-morning hours of Jan. 31, 1944, he joined a reconnaissance mission between a small village and Cisterna.
Pvt. Loyd went into the night with his rifle and the other men in his patrol. The military's narrative about what happened next is as spare as the details it's based upon. It only says that the mission 'encountered enemy forces at an unspecified location.' When some of his fellow soldiers returned to American lines, Pvt. Loyd was not among them.
Between Jan. 22 and Jan. 31, 1944, the 7th Infantry reported 525 men killed or wounded and another 331 missing in action. The nature of the fighting precluded thorough searches for the missing or recovery of the dead.
An 'After Action Report' in Pvt. Loyd's personnel file details what American forces encountered around the time and place of his disappearance. The report contains an unnamed soldier's account of the fighting around Cisterna, testimony that brings to life the carnage in a harrowing narrative:Eight months later, in September of '44, the Army sent a package addressed to Pearlie Loyd on Route 1 in Brilliant, Alabama — no street number, just 'Route 1' — with what her son had left behind in camp:
A New Testament. A prayer book. A sewing kit. A nail file.
The War Department declared him dead in April 1945. A letter from a major general arrived at the Loyd house, offering hope 'that the ending of a long period of uncertainty may give at least some small measure of consolation.'
'An appraisal of the sacrifice made by your son in the service of his country compels in us feelings of humility and respect,' went the letter. 'May Providence grant a measure of relief from the anguish and anxiety you have experienced during these many months.'
Three years later, a military organization known as the 3044th Graves Registration Company discovered remains in crude graves between Anzio and Cisterna, where some of the casualties were most severe.
Many sets of remains were missing identification tags. One skeleton, without its hands, was among the nameless. A small and enduring piece of fabric still attached to what was left of the body indicated it belonged to an American soldier. Officials interred the remains in Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in 1948 and, without a name, assigned the soldier a letter and number:
X-834 Nettuno.
And there X-834 stayed in Sicily-Rome Cemetery for 73 years, his true identification a mystery.
Three days before Pvt. Loyd's funeral at Lincoln National Cemetery, Dale sat at her dining room table, her uncle's files in front of her. She remained in disbelief that a swab of the inside of her cheek could have led to all of this. The identification. The homecoming. The dignified transfer and burial with full military honors.
When Dale submitted her DNA, she never believed it would amount to anything. Her uncle had been gone by then for 75 years. Nobody in her family knew much about him. Whatever pictures or mementos anyone kept had gradually been lost. There was little hope of ever having answers.
In 2019, Pvt. Loyd's name remained on a list of the more than 72,000 missing Americans who served in World War II. The remains known as X-834, meanwhile, were still at Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in an anonymous grave.
Around then, DPAA historians began looking more closely at those soldiers who disappeared after the invasion around Anzio. It is slow work. Some of it happens in the field, visiting battle sites and digging for remains. A lot of it involves delving into a missing soldier's 'X file.'
When DPAA historians begin focusing on soldiers who went missing in one general area, that's when relatives of those soldiers often receive requests to provide DNA like the one Dale received in 2019. But the matching process is long and complicated.
Military researchers at first believed X-834 could be any one of about 100 soldiers. Then they narrowed it down to 21. They did not think X-834 could be Pvt. Loyd, because there were no records to indicate Pvt. Loyd was lost near the spot where X-834 was discovered in 1948.
In 2021, with its historians' belief that X-834 could be identifiable, the DPAA recommended he be exhumed for 'renewed forensic analysis and comparison with the remaining candidates.' In September 2021, it happened: The Department of Defense and the American Battle Monuments Commission disinterred X-834 and delivered him to a DPAA laboratory.
There are three such labs in the country. Two are in Hawaii, including one at Pearl Harbor. The other is at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha. The three DPAA labs combine to form what the military describes as 'the largest skeletal identification laboratory in the world.'
The remains of X-834 went to Offutt because that lab receives all unidentified exhumed World War II remains from Europe. When X-834 arrived, scientists arranged the remains on one of the dozens of rectangular white tables spread throughout a large, brightly lit space. X-834's skeleton was mostly intact but even when there are only pieces they are placed in a certain way.
Remains always face the same direction, said Carrie Brown, the lab manager, 'because all the way at the front of the lab, in the lobby, there's an American flag. And so they are laid out symbolically so that if they were to sit up,' they'd see that flag.
The lab also displays a large photograph of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It's a reminder of their work, Brown said. That the mission is to reunite soldiers with their names.
Brown keeps a mini gong in her office. She likes to sound it whenever the staff makes an identification. The work can feel overwhelming. According to the DPAA, more than 81,000 American military personnel remain unaccounted for, from World War II to Desert Storm.
Among those, the military considers a little less than half to be identifiable. An untold number have been lost at sea, in planes that went down or in ships that sank. And even if remains are found, they may not be in good enough condition to be exhumed. Every so often, though, Brown has reason to sound her gong, and those are happy, celebratory occasions.
Such a moment arrived on March 14, 2024. It happened after scientists and historians expanded the scope of possibilities for X-834, and after not only Dale had submitted her DNA — but after her brother and one of her uncles had, too. Euil Loyd died in November 2019 at 86, but not before submitting a DNA sample in hope that it might help find his older brother.
It did, becoming another piece of evidence that allowed X-834 to transform from an unidentified casualty of World War II to a person with a history and family, however distant. After more than two years in the lab at Offutt, and 80 years after the deadly recon mission, X-834 had a name.
It was James C. Loyd. 'J.C.' to friends and family.
'The historical circumstances of loss, along with anthropology, the biological profile, the dental profile and the DNA profile all lined up to match Pvt. Loyd to the exclusion of all other reasonable possibilities,' Brown said. Pvt. Loyd is among the first to be identified among the missing in and around Anzio.
The day of the identification, Dale received the news she never believed would come. A long meeting with a case manager followed. She was relieved to know that most of her uncle's remains had been found intact. She learned more about the circumstances of his death.
Given the trauma on one of his ribs, Dale said she was told that he'd been 'shot through the heart … so it would have been instantaneous.' She took comfort in that.
Soon, the planning of a homecoming began. It took more than a year for Pvt. Loyd to arrive in Chicago to a hero's welcome, with people saluting and waiting to receive the flag-draped casket. Dale thought of her uncle frozen in time at 19 — how 'this young kid from Alabama never in his life would've dreamed' of such a sight.
By the time mourners began arriving at Baskerville Funeral Home on the day of Pvt. Loyd's funeral, his final place of rest was ready. About 20 members of his extended family gathered before the procession to the cemetery. Among those there were Pvt. Loyd's nieces and nephews and great-nieces and great-great-nieces.
One of Dale's cousins, the daughter of Pvt. Loyd's brother Roger, came from Colorado. The procession from Baskerville to Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery was not unlike the one from Midway to the funeral home, except even more people came outside to see it.
The funeral procession passed the nearby schools, with a long line of teachers and students on sidewalks, holding little American flags, hands over hearts. Some held small cards, distributed by Matthew Baskerville of the funeral home, with Pvt. Loyd's photo.
Seeing schoolkids stand in solemn unity like that, Dale found it impossible not to cry.
The procession wound around downtown Wilmington, a place of small-town Americana, and passed the Route 66 Creamery, an ice cream shop where a man held a giant American flag. It was like that for 7 miles to the cemetery, where members of the Rolling Thunder served as pallbearers amid the sound of 'Amazing Grace' from bagpipes in the distance.
The funeral service happened under a covered area near the woods, away from the graves. The military chaplain who led it read from the kind of prayer book Pvt. Loyd carried with him into war, and three soldiers fired three shots into the air in unison, one last salute. Then John Cryder, the bugler, spent the next 48 seconds sounding taps, the notes of his horn steady and proud.
Cryder is 91 and he's the cemetery's bugler on Thursdays. Pvt. Loyd's funeral was his third of the day, and his first for a soldier who'd come home like Pvt. Loyd had. It was especially meaningful, Cryder said, because his brother served in World War II, 'in Italy, at the same time this fellow was.'
Toward the end of the service, members of the honor guard folded the flag atop Pvt. Loyd's casket and Colon presented it to Dale, who held it to her chest. The pallbearers loaded the casket back into the hearse and the family followed it to the grave, where after a few moments the casket slowly disappeared into the ground.
The lid of the vault replaced, Morgan climbed back into the excavator and filled the rectangular hole with the dirt he'd removed earlier. The crew worked to refill the grave, and worked quickly. Another member of the grounds crew aligned the headstone so that it was even with the others, and then he worked to secure it in the center of Site 1 in Section 27.
All around, the headstones of those who served included references to what kind of person they'd been, whether a proud father or loyal husband. Pvt. Loyd, though, died before he'd had the chance to become what those headstones celebrated. Then everyone who knew him died, too.
And so the epitaph on his headstone, beneath the designations for his Purple Heart and Bronze Star, spoke plainly to who he was and what was known, even during the 80 years when so many things were not. It said, simply:
An American Soldier.