Officials with a U.S. Department of Defense agency are preparing to exhume the remains of an unidentified WWII soldier known simply as “X-3” who is buried in the Sitka National Cemetery. They say it could be a man named Eugene Christensen, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Forces who they believe died in a plane crash in the Aleutian Islands Campaign in 1942.
“We really don’t ever want unknown soldiers. We want them to be identified and returned to their family,” said Michael Livingston, a WWII historian who grew up in Cold Bay, Alaska, who’s been advocating to get X-3 disinterred and identified through DNA testing. “For the families that I’ve talked with that have unidentified [family members], it’s like a nagging hole that’s tearing at them that they want fixed.”
In December of 1941, the Japanese Imperial Navy bombed Pearl Harbor, prompting the U.S. to declare war on Japan. Six months later, the Japanese Navy bombed Unalaska — also known as Dutch Harbor — a community about 800 air miles from Anchorage in the Aleutian Islands. The U.S. military responded, sending resources from Anchorage to the island community to help defend against the attack.
“One of the planes crashed outside of Cold Bay, roughly between Cold Bay and Nelson Lagoon on the north side of the Alaska Peninsula,” Livingston said. “All the service members on that plane perished.”
Sixteen soldiers were on the C-53 aircraft when it went down. The plane and 10 service members were never found. But Livingson said a local trapper found the remains of six soldiers who washed up on the shore and buried them in a temporary grave near his cabin until he could notify authorities. The military later recovered the remains and buried them locally in Fort Randall Post Cemetery. Five of the six recovered soldiers were identified.
“Then, after 1945, when the war ended, the United States military dug up those remains and moved them to their respective communities,” Livingston said. “One of the remains was X-3. He was moved to Sitka, and we’ve been trying to get X-3 identified for a long time.”
Livingston has been coordinating with 70-year-old Chris Pfeiffer in that effort. Pfeiffer believes X-3 is his maternal great uncle, 2nd Lt. Eugene Christensen of Nebraska.
“We’ve always known that we lost a great uncle in the Aleutian Islands,” Pfeiffer said. “And here we are, 83 years later.”
Pfeiffer, a military vet himself, said his great uncle went to college for one year before, at 21, he enlisted in the Army ahead of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Pfeiffer has gathered more than 800 pages of documents about Christensen and about the plane crash to help piece together the puzzle of his death.
“Could it be my uncle? Yes. Could it not be? Yes. We have to manage our expectations on this,” he said.
Dr. Ian Spurgeon, a military historian and disinterment manager with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), agreed. He said all 11 unidentified soldiers from the plane crash are considered “likely candidates.”
“We have good, strong historical circumstances and association for these remains to this specific airplane crash, but because there’s 11 individuals still missing, in the past, the grave registration personnel could not confirm exactly who it was, and rather than make a misidentification, they declared the remains to be unidentifiable and buried them as an unknown service member,” Spurgeon said.
The DPAA is the agency under the Department of Defense in charge of recovering and identifying missing service members from World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Cold War.
“We’re looking for over 80,000 Americans missing from conflicts worldwide, in the Pacific and Europe,” Spurgeon said.
He said their job is to combine the historical information — like circumstances of the crash and soldiers on board — with modern scientific techniques, including anthropology, odontology (studying teeth), and DNA testing, to identify remains.
And the case of X-3 is kind of a big deal. Spurgeon said the DPAA has been looking at this case since 2017, and there aren’t many unknowns in the Sitka cemetery, or in Alaska as a whole.
“This will be the very first unknown to be exhumed from Sitka, at least during DPAA’s time. Before that, it would have been previous Army efforts decades before,” he said. “So we’re kind of breaking new ground, both literally and figuratively.”
But the disinterment could be a bit challenging. The grave is on a terraced hill, which won’t accommodate heavy equipment, so it’ll have to be excavated by hand. Spurgeon said Sitka’s cemetery is also prone to “subsurface movement.”
“There’s concern that the casket may have shifted a little bit underneath the ground and may not be directly located under the headstone,” he said. “And we want to make sure we do not dig up the wrong casket.”
If the casket has shifted, Spurgeon said they’ll have to stop the excavation and make a game plan to try again. He said it’s part of the military’s promise to its service members and families of soldiers to leave no one behind.
“World War II may seem like a long time ago, but there are many, many living people who remember their brothers or their fathers or uncles who were lost during World War II,” Spurgeon said. “This is still within living memory, and a lot of those families passed down the memories and the mission of trying to bring their loved ones home.”
If X-3 turns out to be Christensen, Pfeiffer said he hopes to bury his great uncle’s remains in a Lutheran cemetery in Nebraska where the rest of his family lies. But if it turns out that X-3 is another unknown soldier, Pfeiffer said that’s okay too.
“This is a positive story,” he said. “However it ends up, this is a really positive event.”
The DPAA will be in Sitka this week to disinter the remains of the unidentified soldier, known as X-3. If they’re successful, it could still take up to four years to officially identify the remains.
