By now readers may be tiring of our coverage of the return after 75 years of the remains of WWII soldier Pvt. William Gruber, but there are just a few tidbits remaining that we thought readers should know. Last week’s Monitor carried a front-page photo of the presentation of the American flag to family members.
A sharp-eyed reader with connections to Montana’s military pointed out that the man presenting the flag was Brigadier General Jeffrey Ireland. That the Army chose to send someone of such high rank indicates the importance they placed on honoring Gruber, said the reader. Ireland is Montana’s senior federal full-time management official for the Army. Nowhere have we told readers of the outpouring of interest our coverage generated.
Veterans from both in and out of state contacted us well in advance of the ceremony day, interested in taking part in some way. Some we simply provided with information on service times, locations, and so forth. Others we referred to the family.
One man called from the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas, saying he believed his older brother served in the Philippines with Pvt. Gruber. That brother never returned, he said, adding that he has joined a half dozen other families in filing suit against the government to try to get the remains returned.
We suggested to him that he try what the Gruber family had done by contacting a local newspaper to get coverage for their plight. He said the big city newspapers where he lives did not care. He also said they had tried contacting members of Congress to no avail. That is truly sad if true. But we suspect it is a fairly common story since there are tens of thousands of service members missing in action.
We referred that man to a Gruber family representative, who said he would contact the caller. The Monitor also heard from a woman in California who said she was a documentary filmmakers currently working on a film about WWII in the Philippines. Her father had been a guerrilla fighter in the Philippines, she said. She had read our coverage and hoped we could connect her with the Grubers, she said. She provided her contact information plus her website address which we passed on to the family. Although she called less than a week before the ceremony, she made it to Montana and filmed all of the events of the day, She said the family had contacted her on the same day that she called the Monitor.
We don’t know for sure whether the Gruber story ended with the family finally able to bring home their loved one because of pure luck or something more, but we do know it took less than two years from the time we got involved until that result.
We also know we focused a lot of time and energy on letting people know about the situation and making sure that word got to folks with some leverage. We have to admit that the Texas man indicated he would like us to cover the story of his older brother and the other families joining in the lawsuit, and we had to decline.
As a newspaper with a single reporter, we simply cannot take on a task like that, no matter how noble it might be. The Department of Defense reports that more than 73,000 WWII veterans are considered missing in action. That is overwhelming to think about, much less try to change from the editor’s desk at a tiny Montana newspaper. But we hope that others will take up the cause and do their best to help other families find the peace finally experienced by the Grubers.
