Mystery of missing Acadiana WWII soldier finally solved after after 79 years

The final combat moments amid intense fighting that U.S. Army Private Hillary Soileau encountered during one of the fiercest battles of World War II remain secretive, but after 79 years the case of his missing body is finally closed.

Soileau, who was 22 when he left his family in the Whiteville area of St. Landry Parish for military service in 1942, has been positively identified by military forensic testing, dental records and DNA analysis. He was one of two formerly unidentified soldiers that were involved in action and later killed on Guadalcanal in January, 1943.

Burial services with full military honors for Soileau, who was awarded posthumously by the Army with the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, will be conducted at noon May 21 in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Washington, Louisiana.

Soileau, according to an obituary notice posted April 18 on the Sibille Funeral Home of Opelousas website, has one surviving sibling, Mary Soileau Badeaux.

Gregory Badeaux, nephew of Hillary Soileau and son of Mary Badeaux, said his uncle who was born in Bunkie is one of eight children of Odey and Leona Soileau.

“The family was living in Whiteville during the time he was drafted. My mother was probably six or seven years old at the time when (Soileau) was drafted and then deployed.

"The military contacted us in April, 2019, that (Soileau’s) remains, which had been brought to Hawaii, were suspected to be his,” Gregory Badeaux said during a telephone interview.

Badeaux said his mother was young when Hillary Soileau left for his initial training in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and has only vague recollections what occurred at the time.

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“Over the years, the family became separated and moved away and were scattered around. What happened (to Hillary Soileau) apparently never came up much in the conversations.

"I know that all of his brothers served in the military at some point during the war, but all we heard was that Hillary was first classified by the Army as missing in action and then (in 1945) declared killed in action,” said Gregory Badeaux.

Badeaux said the Daily World closely monitored the World War II service records of Hillary Soileau and others in St. Landry. Stories about Soileau from the time he was inducted until he was declared as missing and then killed in action appear often in the Daily World during the war years, Badeaux said.

“There are a bunch of articles in the Daily World about him as just one of the local guys who were going off to war and then of a letter he sent to his parents with $50 for Christmas. My mother remembers there was a lot of crying around the house at the time they were notified of his death,” Badeaux noted.

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Notification by military officials on Dec. 8, 2020 that Soileau was identified brought a sense of relief to family members said Gregory Badeaux.

“When we got the original notification, as you can imagine, there was a lot of joy, elation and of course tears. Years had gone by, but receiving official word from the military was a thankful event and as you could imagine, emotional as well,” Badeaux said.

The problem for military officials with identifying Hillary Soileau said Badeaux, was the absence of Soileau’s military identification tags normally carried by soldiers who were in combat.

“From the information that we have, my uncle told some of the other soldiers the night before he went missing that he had lost his dog tags. What (Hillary Soileau) did instead to identify himself, was he wrote his name, rank and serial number on a piece of cardboard was carrying that with him. That cardboard identification was never found,” said Badeaux.

Burial, exhumations and identification

There are no written or documented military accounts of how Hillary Soileau was killed presumably on Jan. 14, 1943, as he and other members of the 25th Infantry Division of the Army’s 27th Infantry Regiment were involved on an undulating series of Japanese-fortified hills known as Galloping Horses.

All military records have concluded about Soileau is that he disappeared at some point during the fighting and what happened to him after interviews with other soldiers serving with Soileau, was never accurately determined.

Military records show that two unidentified soldiers were discovered near the head of the Galloping Horses area about two months after the fighting in the hills ended.

Badeaux and military accounts of the fighting around Galloping Horses Jan. 10-14 indicate that it was intense and often hand to hand between Soileau’s division and the Japanese.

Soileau was declared on Feb. 7, 1943 by the military as missing in action and on Dec. 13, 1945, Soileau was declared killed in action.

On Feb. 22, 1943, according to military records and a Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency report indicate that Soileau, still unidentified, was buried on Guadalcanal at the Army, Navy and Marine Main Cemetery.

Military officials later exhumed Soileau and reburied him March 11, 1947, at the National Military Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii.

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One of the bodies of the two unidentified soldiers found near Galloping Horses was later positively identified, but the other one remained buried in Hawaii until April 2019, when military researchers at Joint Base Pearl Harbor disinterred the unknown remains and determined after testing that the remaining unidentified body was probably that of Hillary Soileau.

According to military records, historians and anthropologists connected with examining unidentified remains reviewed the case of soldier then known as X-52 found on Guadalcanal in 1943 and suspected the body was that of Soileau.

The decision was then made, military records show that X-52 was disinterred and additional forensic testing was performed.

Further testing performed in Hawaii used DNA taken from Soileau’s sister and maternal nephews, dental records and other methods to make the final conclusions that the remains belonged to Soileau, military records indicate.

This article originally appeared on Opelousas Daily World: World War II Acadiana soldier's body identified, returning home