Tennessee WWII Veteran Finally Laid To Rest After 76 Years

dpaa.mil

On Sept. 22, 2020 the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced that the remains of Army private first class Oliver Jeffers of Huntsville, Tennessee were finally sent home.

Jeffers joined the Army on November 1944 and was assigned to Company L, 3rd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment & 4th Infantry Division. He was sent to Germeter, Germany to fight the Germans and was killed in action on November 10th.

“Men like Oliver Jeffers stood together and sacrificed so that we could have a free world today,” Jim West, pastor of White Rock Baptist Church, told WBIR.

Due to ongoing fighting, his body could not be recovered until the end of the war when the American Graves Registration Command was tasked with recovering missing American personnel in Europe and/or investigating what might have happened to them. In 1951, they declared that Jeffers was non-recoverable.

“While studying unresolved American losses in the Hürtgen area, a DPAA historian determined that one set of unidentified remains, designated X-2735 Neuville, recovered from a minefield near Germeter in 1946 possibly belonged to Jeffers,” DPAA reported.

The remains were sent to a laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska where they were positively identified as Jeffers. After that, they were sent back to his hometown and were finally buried on October 7th, 2020.