25-05-2025
Killed in World War II, a Lincoln County POW is finally coming home
Pvt. Ben Leslie's life was snuffed out aboard a Japanese 'hell ship' in January 1945.
Moored at the port of Takao in present-day Taiwan, the ship Enoura Maru held the New Mexico soldier and other Allied prisoners of war who had been evacuated from the Philippines as it was about to be retaken by U.S. forces. But the vessel was bombed by American aircraft, unaware of the prisoners on board.
Leslie's remains were declared unrecoverable in 1949. Eighty years after his death, however, his remains were accounted for, the Department of Defense announced in February, thanks to dental and anthropological analysis. A rosette will now be placed by Leslie's name on the United States' Wall of the Missing, the uncertainty ended.
Leslie's burial is set in White Oaks, a Lincoln County community sometimes referred to as a ghost town, in July — about 80 years after his death at the age of 31.
The development brings into focus history familiar to many in New Mexico: Although many of the survivors of World War II have passed on, the bodies of men who never returned to the U.S. continue to be identified as technology makes strides, providing closure to families generations later.
'The DNA technology has exploded recently,' said Laureta Huit, director of the New Mexico Military Museum, noting the ability to use maternal DNA has aided the identification process.
How Leslie was identified
Leslie, who was from Capitan, was captured during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in April 1942 and kept as a prisoner of war from 1942 to 1944. He was being moved to Japan aboard the Enoura Maru when the ship was attacked, killing some 300 men, according to reports.
Identifying Leslie proved no simple task. In 1946, a search team of the American Graves Registration Command, charged with investigating and recovering missing U.S. personnel in the war's aftermath, exhumed a mass grave on a beach at Takao, unearthing some 311 human bodies.
Severe commingling, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, meant some of the remains could not be identified and, as a result, they were buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. But that would not be Leslie's final resting spot.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency recently disinterred unidentified remains from the cemetery linked to the Enoura Maru and took the remains to a lab for analysis. In the identification of Leslie's remains, dental and anthropological analysis was employed, with scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System also using mitochondrial and nuclear DNA analysis to tackle the job.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, part of the Defense Department, is tasked with recovering and identifying unaccounted-for personnel listed as prisoners of war or missing in action from designated past conflicts. According to the National World War II Museum, there are still nearly 72,000 service members unaccounted for from that war.
'I'm very excited for the family of Pvt. Leslie. His loved ones, obviously, they've not had closure on his whereabouts until now,' said Jamison Herrera, Cabinet secretary for the state Department of Veterans Services. 'I think this is a critical aspect of our country never giving up on finding our prisoners of war and missing in action.'
'He's lost his vision'
New Mexico played an outsized role in the Bataan Death March. Of the 1,800 men in the 200th Coast Artillery, which was made up primarily of soldiers from the state, fewer than half survived the war, their lives ended in a medley of brutal circumstances.
Many were killed in the fighting before they surrendered on April 9, 1942. Others died during a brutal 65-mile march to the camps. Still others were lost in prison camps or ships. Families were devastated by uncertainty over the fates of their loved ones as they saw the news overseas about the American losses and the prisoners of war in Japanese custody.
Agapito J. Silva, the son of Agapito E. Silva of Gallup, one of the young men who joined the New Mexico National Guard in World War II and became a prisoner of war under brutal conditions after the fall of the Bataan Peninsula, recently recounted what he had been told of his father's return.
His father would survive those torturous years in the Pacific and live to be 87, but the son described the toll on family members who initially had no way of knowing whether he would come back.
In an interview last month, Agapito J. Silva spoke about the day his father finally made it home and stepped off the train in his Western New Mexico hometown, having been released from a hospital in California. At the station, the soldier was quickly embraced by his mother. But his father hung back.
Agapito J. Silva said his father asked, ' 'Mama, what's going on with dad?' She says, 'Hijto, he's lost his vision. He went blind.' '
He added, 'Whether myth or not, they had related that my grandpa was a railroad worker, and he would work nights, and work throughout nights thinking about his son, Agapito, and that the tears that he would shed froze his eyes' in the cold. So that's why he couldn't greet my dad.'
Some of the stories of the New Mexico families who waited for news with bated breath and considerable agony are memorialized in the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives off Cerrillos Road, specifically the facility's Gov. John E. Miles Papers collection, which features letters written to the governor who was in office from 1939 to 1943 hoping for information.
'The suffering, it's not just them,' Agapito J. Silva said. 'It's the families they leave behind.'
'We would certainly appreciate any word, good or bad, from our brother, Samuel Clarence Begley,' wrote Ruby Bailey of Mountainair, The New Mexican reported in 2024. 'We have heard nothing from him since November.'
Leslie is not the only missing man from New Mexico who has recently been identified. Last year, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced Private Manuel Trujillo, 22, of Santa Fe, who was captured and died as a prisoner of war during World War II, was accounted for in July 2023. Trujillo was buried in Santa Fe National Cemetery last summer, having survived the Bataan Death March in the Philippines only to die a captive of Japan at age 22.
Herrera said the burial of prisoners of war like Leslie provides 'that final honor for sacrifices made for the freedoms that we continue to enjoy today.'
