78 years after his death, World War II soldier from Utica will be buried at Arlington

Steve Howe, Observer-Dispatch
·2 min read
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A Utica-born World War II soldier killed in combat in modern-day Myanmar will finally be laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery on Aug. 1.

The federal Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced in February that Army 1st Lt. Myles W. Esmay was accounted for in May 2021. Esmay was an infantry engineer with Company B of the 236th Engineer Combat Battalion.

The battalion was tasked with holding the airfield in Myitkyina, Burma upon arrival. On June 4, 1944, Esmay’s battalion attacked Japanese forces in a village northwest of the airfield. He was reported killed in action June 7.

A photo of Lt. Myles Esmay from the October 1944 edition of the Acacia Triad.
A photo of Lt. Myles Esmay from the October 1944 edition of the Acacia Triad.

The remains of servicemen killed during the battle were buried in at least eight different temporary cemeteries and isolated burial locations, the NDAA release said. All known burials were concentrated into the U.S. Military Cemetery at Myitkyina; in 1946, those remains were then disinterred and transferred to the U.S. Military Cemetery at Kalaikunda, India.

In the 1947 exhumation of the cemetery, one set of remains was not identified and subsequently buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu in 1949.

Those unidentified remains were disinterred on April 15, 2019 ,and transferred to the DPAA laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii.

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Scientists from DPAA identified the remains as Esmay’s using dental and anthropological analysis, as well as circumstantial evidence. The Armed Forces Medical Examiner System also completed a mitochondrial DNA analysis.

Esmay, who was born in Utica in 1917, attended Utica Free Academy and graduated with honors from the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University in 1940.

Records show Esmay enlisted in February 1941 in the Army Air Corps as an aviation cadet while a resident of Oneida.

Steve Howe is the city reporter for the Observer-Dispatch. Email him at showe@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Observer-Dispatch: Remains of Utica soldier killed during WWII to be buried at Arlington