Remains of first U.S. Coast Guard POW brought back from PH

Lt. Thomas Crotty died in the Cabanatuan POW camp and was first buried there with other American WWII prisoners. His remains were recently identified. DPAA

FORT SHAFTER, Hawaii — The remains of the first Coast Guard serviceman to be taken prisoner of war during World War II will be flown to Buffalo, New York for burial. The remains had lain in a grave for unknowns in the Philippines for more than a half-century, the Stars and Stripes reported.

Lt. Thomas Crotty, 30, died July 19, 1942, at the Cabanatuan Prisoner of War Camp in the Philippines after the fall of Corregidor earlier that year. He was the first Coast Guard member to become a prisoner of war since the War of 1812, according to the service.

Crotty, a native of Buffalo, graduated from the Coast Guard Academy in 1934. He served on cutters out of New York, Seattle, Alaska and Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.

He was among the 76,000 Filipino and American prisoners forced into the Bataan Death March by their Japanese captors. He died from disease and was first buried in the Cabanatuan Camp Cemetery, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

After the war, unidentified remains were reburied as “unknowns” in what is now known as Manila American Cemetery and Memorial.

Those remains were again disinterred in January 2018 and sent to the DPAA lab at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, where Crotty’s remains were identified, DPAA said in a news release.