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Arthur "Bud" Kelder: Fourteen Men in One Grave, Seventy-Two Years to One Name

Arthur Kelder was never lost — the fact his family spent years in federal court establishing. The Army knew the grave he was buried in, because the prisoners who buried him kept a roster. The Army dug that grave up after the war, carried the remains through three burials, charted the gold inlays in one set of teeth in 1946 — and then lost the teeth, closed the file, and told his parents in 1950 that their son was non-recoverable. He spent sixty-four years under a white cross in Manila, in a grave marked as an Unknown, while his file sat in government custody naming the ten graves that held his burial party. What returned his name was not a new technology appearing on its own. It was a cousin who would not stop asking, two federal lawsuits, a court that signaled it would order the remains produced, and only then an exhumation. This page is the record of his service, of what the institution did with his remains and his family's questions, and of what his case set in motion.

The service and the promise

Arthur Herman Kelder — “Bud” to his family — was a Chicago son. His parents, Herman P. and Julia Kelder, lived at 6151 Newburg in Chicago, a few blocks from the dental office at 6807 Raven Street run by his brother Herman, a dentist — addresses that survive in his personnel file because they later became evidence. He enlisted in the Army in 1941 — the laboratory that finally identified him recorded him as a 26-year-old at his death, service number 36016623 — and he was trained for dental work. When the war reached the Philippines he was stationed at Sternberg General Hospital in Manila, serving as a dental assistant, according to NPR’s later reporting. The family record, maintained at BataanMissing.com, adds that when fighting began his hospital was folded into General Hospital #2 on the Bataan Peninsula.

Japanese forces invaded the Philippines on December 8, 1941; fighting continued until the surrenders of Bataan (April 9, 1942) and Corregidor (May 6), and the memorandum records Kelder as “reported as captured on, or subsequent to, 7 May 1942.” The family record follows the garrison’s ground truth: he endured the Bataan Death March, passed through Camp O’Donnell, and was transferred to the prisoner-of-war camp at Cabanatuan, on Luzon — the camp the records variously call Camp #1 and, for its cemetery, the Camp #3 cemetery. Nearly 2,800 American prisoners perished at Cabanatuan, the memorandum states. Kelder was one of them, but not an anonymous one, even then: prisoners kept the camp’s burial roster themselves, and the roster is why everything afterward can be proved — the dead of Cabanatuan were recorded by the men who buried them, grave by grave, name by name.

The promise underneath all of this was the Army’s standing pledge: the dead would be accounted for, identified where possible, and buried under their own names. Kelder’s parents spent years writing letters asking for their son, and were told, his nephew Douglas Kelder later said, that Arthur was “unidentifiable.” The record shows something narrower and worse: he was unidentified — a statement about the effort made, and the effort, not the evidence, is what ran out.

What happened

On November 19, 1942, fourteen men died at Cabanatuan and were buried together in Common Grave 717 in the camp cemetery — thirteen American servicemen and one American civilian. Kelder was among them. The memorandum attributes that day’s deaths, in the camp hospital, to “malnutrition and medical neglect.” The family’s record names malnutrition and diphtheria; NPR’s reporting names malaria, a vitamin deficiency, and diphtheria. The camp killed by combination — starvation, deficiency disease, and infection together. The date, the grave, and the fourteen names are consistent across every record. His fellow prisoners buried him and recorded him. He was twenty-six.

After the war, the American Graves Registration Service recovered the grave. From December 1945 through March 1946, AGRS personnel exhumed the Cabanatuan cemetery and moved the remains to a temporary cemetery near Manila, Manila #2. In late 1947 and early 1948 they were exhumed again to a Manila mausoleum, where AGRS examined them in an attempt to identify each individual. Four of the fourteen men of Grave 717 were identified by dental comparison and sent home: Harvey A. Nichols, Juan E. Gutierrez, Lawrence Hanscom, and Daniel C. Bain. The remaining ten could not be individually identified with the forensic science of the day, against remains that repeated handling had commingled. They were reburied as Unknowns — designated X-812 through X-824 of Manila #2 (ten numbers, with gaps), later renumbered X-4849 through X-4858 — in ten separate graves at the Manila American Cemetery, in 1950 and 1952. In 1950 the government determined that Pvt. Kelder’s remains were non-recoverable, and his parents were so notified; his set was one among 3,740 unknowns at that cemetery, under the epitaph “Here Rests In Honored Glory A Comrade in Arms Known But To God.”

Inside that failure sits the dental evidence. The family’s account — Eakin’s research, the federal complaint, Douglas Kelder’s statements to reporters — is that Bud’s brother Herman, the Chicago dentist, had placed distinctive gold inlays in Bud’s teeth before his induction, and that Herman’s treatment records survived. The Army’s own laboratory memorandum independently records the physical half of that story: the remains designated X-816, examined in 1946, “exhibited gold inlays on teeth #5, #12, #18-#21, and #29-#31.” And then the memorandum records the loss in the same flat tone: “By 1952, when the remains were reburied in Manila, these teeth were no longer present in the remains.” The jaw fragments finally attributed to Kelder exhibit the empty sockets corresponding to those teeth. Of the ten Grave 717 sets, only X-816’s file showed gold dental work at all. The available military dental information for Kelder, the memorandum notes, “is very limited and does not chart any restorative work” — the Army had never obtained the one set of records, in a brother’s dental office a few blocks from the family home, that matched the one set of remains with gold in its teeth. Whether the teeth were stolen or misplaced in Army custody is not known — the family’s complaint said exactly that; the record establishes only that they were charted in 1946 and gone by 1952.

The commingling did a second kind of damage, which the family alleges and later government conduct partly corroborates: if remains were mixed across caskets, the four men identified in the 1940s and shipped home may not all have gone home as themselves. The family record states it flatly — the Army “managed to ship the wrong remains to these families,” and all four were buried in the United States in that belief. A peer-reviewed case report from inside the later project (Forensic Anthropology, 2019) documents the structural version without names: one Grave 717 man identified by dental comparison on October 29, 1946, was buried in a U.S. family plot in 1949, and the identification could not be sustained once the commingling was understood. And in its own 2019 court filing in a related case, the government acknowledged arranging the disinterment of three of the four “identified” Grave 717 sets, to be examined again. The four families who thought the system had worked for them were holding the same uncertainty as the ten families told nothing could be done.

For the Kelder family, the decades ran on letters, answered with the vocabulary of closure — unidentifiable, non-recoverable — words describing an administrative decision as if it were a physical fact. Both parents died without a grave. What changed the case was a cousin, John Eakin, who in 2009 began researching Bud’s life and obtained the Army’s records of his death — records indicating, in the family’s words, that his remains “had been buried and recovered from the Cabanatuan Camp Cemetery and were among ten specific sets of remains not identified.” He had never been an Unknown in the sense his parents were led to believe: a named man in a numbered grave, in a file, the whole time.

What the institution did afterward

Eakin’s research from 2009 forward assembled the identification himself. He obtained the X-files for the ten Grave 717 unknowns, collected the family evidence — his uncle the dentist’s records and recollections among it — and put the conclusion to the government: X-816 was Arthur Kelder. His sworn affidavit of 2011 laid out the chain — the burial roster, the dental pattern, the gold inlays recorded on only one of the ten sets — and closed with the request the government would spend years resisting: that the records be amended, the remains disinterred, and his cousin returned. Two forensic dentists who had consulted for the command itself, and a former deputy chief of its World War II research branch, backed his conclusion, as Stars and Stripes reported. The answer from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command was refusal: it would not disinter, would not test, would not identify — an agency that, as NPR summarized, rarely digs up the graves of unknown soldiers at all.

The records had to be sued for first: when the Department of Defense did not provide the files on his Freedom of Information Act request, Eakin sued on September 28, 2010, in the Western District of Texas — Eakin v. United States Department of Defense, No. SA-10-CV-0784. The litigation ran into judgment in January 2012; the family’s account records the outcome that mattered: the records were received in 2012, along with thousands of other World War II unidentified-remains records, and Eakin made the Grave 717 files available to other families through BataanMissing. His later filings add that, weeks after judgment, the department released digital copies of the files publicly.

With the records in hand and the agency still refusing the remains, the family sued a second time. On October 18, 2012, Eakin filed in the same district — No. SA-12-CV-1002, against the American Battle Monuments Commission and the defense establishment — petitioning for a writ of mandamus ordering identification and return. The government’s position, preserved in its own motion practice, was jurisdictional before it was factual: it conceded an obligation to return identified remains, but contended it had no obligation to identify them, and that because only the government held identification authority, the family lacked standing. The evidence could be overwhelming, in other words, and still not the family’s to act on. In March 2014, NPR and ProPublica published their investigation — “Grave Science” and “Failing the Fallen” — with the Kelder case as a central exhibit: an agency spending roughly $100 million a year that had identified sixty service members in 2013 out of some 83,000 missing, described as slow, risk-averse, and reliant on outdated science. Within the month, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel ordered the accounting agencies reorganized; their merger into the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency followed in January 2015.

The turn came on April 10, 2014. At a hearing on the family’s discovery motion, the magistrate judge stated that discovery would be granted and that, should the family request production of the remains themselves, the court would be inclined to grant that too. On July 30, 2014, the defendants filed notice that the remains would be disinterred on August 12, 2014. The laboratory memorandum records the execution: with the Secretary of the Army’s permission, personnel from the U.S. Army mortuary in South Korea exhumed the ten graves on August 15, 2014, and the remains were accessioned in Hawaii on August 28, 2014, as CIL 2014-122 through CIL 2014-131. After more than five years of asking and two lawsuits, the ten caskets were on laboratory tables within weeks of a judge saying the word “production.”

The laboratory work was real, and its results cut in two directions at once. The laboratory submitted 151 samples to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, from an assemblage first inventoried at a minimum of eleven individuals. The samples indicated at least fourteen individuals in ten caskets — fourteen mitochondrial DNA lineages where ten men were supposed to be — confirming that the commingling reached beyond the ten Unknowns into the four sets sent home in the 1940s. Metal tags inside the casket accessioned as CIL 2014-125 tied it to X-816 and X-4858, the family’s candidate. Mitochondrial DNA from samples in three of the ten accessions — CIL 2014-122, CIL 2014-125, and CIL 2014-128 — matched a maternal-line cousin, a sequence found in about 0.70 percent of the reference database, and Y-chromosome data from the same accessions matched a paternal-line cousin, a haplotype found in about 0.06 percent. On January 17, 2015, Thomas D. Holland, the scientific director, signed the finding: the remains designated CIL 2014-125-I-01 — a calvarium, fragmentary maxilla and mandible, a left humerus, a right fibula, and a left tibia, assembled from three different caskets — “are those of Pvt Arthur Herman KELDER, 36016623, U.S. Army,” with the caveat that, given the commingling, “it is possible that additional remains of Arthur H. KELDER may be identified in the future.”

The caveat was not boilerplate. On May 21, 2015, a second memorandum, CIL 2014-125-X-01, identified more of him: a left femur from accession CIL 2014-124, and a right humerus and right tibia from CIL 2014-125 and CIL 2014-122 — the combined DNA evidence making the tibia, in the laboratory’s calculation, 16,000 times more likely to have come from Kelder’s lineages than from an unrelated person. By July 2015 his nephew Douglas, his primary next of kin, had brought the identified remains home from Hawaii for interment in the family plot near Chicago, beside his parents, as they had wished. What came home was partial — the family record describes the first return as the skull and three long bones — and the family’s later filings, as late as 2018, were still seeking the balance for a proper burial, stating that only token portions had been received despite nearly complete sets having been recovered. Both things are in the record: the identification was genuine, the homecoming was real, and how much of Bud Kelder actually came home remained in dispute years after the headlines.

Where it stands now

Kelder’s was the first identification of the Cabanatuan effort — and, in the family’s phrase, he was the first World War II Unknown returned to his family in modern times. The ten caskets became the pilot of the Cabanatuan Project, launched in 2014 to work through the camp’s 1,002 unknowns, on the agency partners’ figure — of 2,729 Americans buried in the two camp cemeteries, 1,756 identified in the 1940s and 973 left as Unknowns on the family’s accounting. The other men of Grave 717 followed Bud home one at a time: Pvt. Evans E. Overbey, identified in December 2015, buried in Tennessee on July 15, 2016; Cpl. Frederick G. Collins, buried in California on September 15, 2017; Pvt. Charlie M. Waid, accounted for on July 24, 2019. Government filings in 2019 reported more than 350 DNA tests on Grave 717 material and results indicating at least eighteen distinct individuals among the remains of a fourteen-man grave. The forensic literature reports twelve of the fourteen ultimately identified. The rest — and the sorting of what was sent home wrongly in the 1940s — remains the hard residue of the case.

The agency passed its hundredth Cabanatuan identification in 2024; at a January 2025 honorable-carry ceremony for thirty-six more unknowns repatriated from Manila — thirty-five of them Cabanatuan dead — the agency stated that the project had accounted for more than ninety personnel and that more than nine hundred from the camp remain unaccounted for, against a stated pace of two Philippine disinterment operations a year. The Manila American Cemetery still holds thousands of Unknowns under the same inscription that stood over Kelder’s grave for sixty-four years, hundreds of them Cabanatuan men whose burial rosters, like his, survive in the files.

For the Kelder family, the account is open in the ways the ledger below records: more of Bud Kelder may still be identified in the continuing work on the assemblage — the memoranda say so — and the family’s position, stated in court as recently as the Patterson litigation over other families’ disinterments, is that token portions were returned while the balance stayed in the laboratory. BataanMissing continues to supply the records his FOIA suit pried loose to other families, and his litigation became the template — family pressure first, disinterment after — that the agency’s own historian credits with starting the project. The institution now runs, as a program, what it spent five years refusing one family as a request.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

No camera was pointed at Kelder’s case while it was being fought, and no film of him is in the grounded record. What the record on video holds is the road north from Bataan, where his journey began, and the accounting mission today — still counting the missing home, more than nine hundred Cabanatuan names short of done. Two films, in that order. A third film — survivors telling the march and the camps that killed him — exists, but its publisher has embedding disabled, and this site does not carry what it cannot show.

The march itself. The fall of Bataan and the 65-mile march north — the surrender, the road, the boxcars to the camps — drawn from Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman's *Tears in the Darkness*. (History Drawn.)

The mission now. DPAA's principal deputy director, Kelly McKeague, reports to the VFW National Convention on accounting for 80,754 missing Americans — the mission the Cabanatuan Project, opened by the Kelder exhumation, carries for the camp's remaining nine hundred. (VFW.)

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.