More than 75 years after William Gruber died in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in the Philippines, his remains have been positively identified and are slated for return to Montana. For decades his family tried to get him back home. An empty grave next to the final resting places of his parents awaited him at St. John’s Catholic Church in the Boulder Valley. Soon Gruber will join them, his family has been notified.
“The family was informed yesterday that Wiliam Gruber’s remains have been identified…and will be returned to Montana in about six to eight weeks,” the soldier’s nephew reported to the Monitor last week. Gruber was one of six brothers, four of whom served in the war and are now in or near their 90s. They knew where he died after surviving the infamous Bataan Death March and they knew efforts to identify his remains from among others at the POW camp had been abandoned in the 1950s.
With new genetic information available, the brothers provided DNA and asked again and again for the remains to be tested in the decades since. In 2013 and 2015, the four surviving Gruber brothers who served in WWII, formally asked for the disinterment and in August 2015 the army told the family “the affair is now in the hands of the Defense POW/ MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), and only when the DPAA makes their recommendation to the Secretary of the Army can a final decision be made.”
