‘Carrying the torch': WWII soldier who died in prison camp in Philippines identified, buried in S.F.

San Francisco Chronicle​

7 hours ago

During a routine visit to his parents' home in San Jose this past November, Eric Ulrich began to tackle a mound of mail, boxes and old packages that had accumulated over the past few weeks.
As he sorted through a pile stacked high of envelopes and loose paper, Ulrich came across a FedEx package labeled with a return address from Fort Knox, Ky.
'U.S. Army,' read the envelope addressed to his father Gerald, Ulrich recalled. Confused as to why his 89-year-old father was receiving mail from the Army, Ulrich opened the package.
Inside was a message from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or the DPAA — the federal agency tasked with recovering missing military personnel and prisoners of war.
The letter would kick off an eight-month journey that culminated in an emotional ceremony Friday at the San Francisco National Cemetery in the Presidio. Cpl. Ernest Ulrich, a World War II soldier who died in the Philippines after being subjected to the brutal Bataan Death March, was finally laid to rest in the U.S. after 80 years of being labeled 'Unknown.'
For several weeks, the DPAA had been trying to notify Ulrich's father that recent dental and DNA testing had identified the remains of an unknown World War II soldier as belonging to Cpl. Ulrich — the half-brother of Ulrich's paternal grandfather, or his father's uncle.
'It was pretty incredible,' Ulrich told the Chronicle, but 'I had no idea who this person was.'
No one had ever mentioned him, not even his grandfather — a World War I veteran who would often tell his grandchildren stories far beyond their years.
When Ulrich reached out to the DPAA phone number listed at the bottom of the letter, he learned that the path to his great uncle's identification involved several burials and subsequent exhumations, spanned two countries separated by the Pacific Ocean and took over 80 years.
Cpl. Ulrich, who was from China, Texas, served in the medical department of the 200th Coast Artillery Regiment during World War II, the DPAA told Ulrich (and later shared in a news release). After enlisting in March 1941, Cpl. Ulrich was transported with the rest of the 200th to the Philippines in October. When Japanese forces invaded the islands that December, the regiment provided ground support through several months of intense combat.
Fighting continued until the United States surrendered the Bataan peninsula and Corregidor Island in the late spring of 1942. Japanese forces captured thousands of American and Filipino troops, including Cpl. Ulrich, as prisoners of war and subjected them to the 65-mile Bataan Death March, along with 78,000 others, toward the Cabanatuan POW Camp, DPAA officials said.
Cpl. Ulrich, then 26, was admitted to the camp hospital for pellagra and beriberi — illnesses caused by vitamin deficiencies — as well as dysentery in September 1942, according to camp records cited by the DPAA in documents provided by Ulrich.
He died of his illnesses on Nov. 22, 1942, according to camp records and other historical evidence. Cpl. Ulrich was buried in the camp's Common Grave 807, alongside several other servicemen. According to federal estimates, the camp saw upwards of 800 deaths per month and over 2,700 prisoners of war were buried in the camp cemeteries by 1945, when troops liberated the camp.
After the war, American personnel relocated Cpl. Ulrich's remains from the Cabanatuan graves to the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, where they were considered unidentifiable and labeled 'Unknown,' federal officials say.
According to DPAA documents provided by Ulrich, federal investigators in the mid-1940s identified three service members from the same grave, but were unable to identify any others due to 'inconclusive' dental records and forensics.
At the time, an expert anthropologist said the remains were 'jumbled beyond belief' and in 'such a state of deterioration that evidence on which identification depends had been largely obliterated.'
At the end of the Vietnam War in 1973 the Department of Defense designated an agency to search for all missing personnel and prisoners of war. At its launch, the DPAA's predecessor estimated that nearly 73,700 American soldiers who fought in World War II were missing. Today, only about 1,800 of those missing soldiers, or roughly 2.4%, are accounted for.
After finding sufficient evidence to exhume several unresolved cases in August 2014, DPAA excavated the remains of nine unknown soldiers associated with Common Grave 807 in late 2018, agency officials said. The remains were transported to the agency's testing site in Hawaii.
The agency's scientists identified Cpl. Ulrich's remains by using dental, anthropological and historical evidence, while personnel from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner system confirmed the results by using Y-chromosome DNA analysis, officials said. Ulrich noted that the DPAA used a DNA sample from Cpl. Ulrich's nephew, Boyce Ulrich, who has since passed away after providing the sample.
Of the 999 service members from Camp Cabanatuan who were originally deemed missing, only 117, or just under 12%, have been accounted for, according to federal estimates.
Cpl. Ulrich's remains arrived in the Bay Area on Tuesday, according to a Facebook post from Honoring Our Fallen, a nonprofit aiming to support military families. Personnel performed military honors at Oakland International Airport upon his arrival.
The family knows little about their long-lost uncle. They have no photographs and merely one faded memory of him.
Ulrich's father told him he recalled visiting Cpl. Ulrich on Angel Island before the regiment left for the Pacific Theatre; at the time, his father was less than five years old, and didn't remember anything about his uncle. After the war ended, all the family knew was that Cpl. Ulrich died during the Bataan Death March, Ulrich said.
'I didn't think I would have cried for a great uncle who I didn't know, who died in 1942,' Eric Ulrich said, describing Cpl. Ulrich's arrival ceremony. 'But with everybody standing around, everybody thinking about the historical moment — there are thousands of people that are never going to have this moment.'
Since hearing the details of his great uncle's story, Ulrich's goal has been 'to do the right thing for this gentleman that did his service to his country,' he said. 'My role is to try to facilitate and see this through.'
Wanting to learn more about his newly found relative, Ulrich looked further into the 200th Coast Artillery Regiment and came across a book, titled 'Beyond Courage: One Regiment Against Japan, 1941-1945,' which detailed the experiences of a small group within the 200th regiment via first-hand accounts and archival research.
Ulrich was particularly drawn to a moment in the book when the ship carrying the 200th passes under the Golden Gate Bridge, prompting one soldier to tell another that 'some of us won't see that bridge again.'
The Ulrich family originally wished to bury Cpl. Ulrich next to his half-brother in Palo Alto, or in the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno. But in telling the story of the 200th and the Golden Gate Bridge, the family secured a resting place at the San Francisco National Cemetery in the Presidio, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.
The coveted resting place, reserved for military veterans and their spouses, is completely full, according to Greg Silva, funeral director and general manager of Twin Chapels Mortuary, Cpl. Ulrich's funeral home. All of its burial spots are either occupied or reserved for spouses.
But a very select few of the reserved spots can sometimes become vacant due to spouses changing their plans or other extraordinary circumstances, Silva explained. 'We got lucky,' he noted.
'To have him return back to San Francisco to be buried at the Presidio in the last place he saw before he left America (is) amazing,' Ulrich said, 'It's a celebration of this man who has paid his dues.'
Under a partly sunny sky Friday, with the Golden Gate Bridge peaking through the fog, Cpl. Ulrich's remains arrived in the Presidio, just a couple miles away from where he was over 80 years ago.
Surrounded by a new generation of family members, almost all of whom were born after he passed, Cpl. Ulrich received a full military honors ceremony that included a playing of military taps, a six-gun salute and an emotional flag-folding ceremony.
For Ulrich's wife, Marti, the celebration was the 'feel-good, happy ending' to a long journey of 'picking up the pieces and carrying the torch.'
'This whole process has been something else,' Marti Ulrich said at the ceremony. 'To see it finally come full circle — the pieces of the puzzle just kept falling into place.'
One war and 80 years later, Cpl. Ulrich was laid into the ground on the northern side of the cemetery, with a picture-perfect view of the Golden Gate Bridge.