Seventy-five years after Montanan William Gruber died in World War II, his body will finally return to Jefferson County August 5. Gruber was 22 when he died in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in the Philippines in 1942, a camp in which he was imprisoned after surviving the infamous Bataan Death March. He was buried in a multiple body grave in the Philippines. Family members worked in vain for decades to get him returned.
In the 1950s, efforts to identify bodies resulted in some soldiers’ families getting closure, but the Gruber family was told their loved one’s remains were not determined from among several unknown soldiers who died around the same time. When DNA came into the picture decades later, the soldier’s relatives submitted samples and hoped for news. But time passed without any progress.
Hoping to spur action, a nephew living in California sent packets of information to several news outlets in late summer 2015. No one responded for more than a month, but then the nephew, Kim Gruber, heard from Boulder Monitor editor Jan Anderson.
