Blackshear native, Private Bennett Hubert Waters, has been found
Private Bennett Hubert Waters of Blackshear has been missing in action in World War II for the past 80 years. He is missing no more.
Waters family members in Pierce County were notified in recent weeks that Bennett’s remains have been identified.
Waters’ niece, Laura Waters Anderson, said the family is currently awaiting a briefing from the United States Defense Prisoner of War/Missing in Action (POW/MIA) Accounting Agency.
“We understand they will give us more information and share more details with us then,” said Anderson.
Anderson said members of her family were contacted by the accounting agency almost three years ago asking for family DNA samples in the hopes that Waters’ remains could be recovered.
Waters, 26, enlisted in the United States Army Air Force, 17th Bombardment Squadron, 27th Bombardment Group in 1940, before World War II broke out.
Survivors who served with him described him as a “likeable lad” and “very considerate and friendly”.
He was later captured by forces of the Empire of Japan as they invaded the Phillipines in 1942. He was part of the infamous Bataan Death March.
Waters survived the march and was imprisoned in a POW camp. Waters reportedly survived the POW camp by saving some of the excess food that was to be fed to the pigs.
He was to be transfered by Japanese forces to Japan aboard transport ships whose harsh conditions and extreme overcrowding led survivors to refer to them as “hell ships.” Unaware of the POWs onboard, Allied aircraft attacked the first ship, the Oryoku Mara, in Subic Bay in the Philippines in December, 1944. Survivors of the bombing, including Waters, were put aboard two other ships, the Enoura Maru and the Brazil Maru, to continue on to Japan. During the journey, while anchored in Takao Harbor, Formosa, presentday Taiwan, the Enoura Maru was attacked by Allied aircraft.
The Japanese government reported that Waters died aboard the Enoura Maru on Jan. 9, 1945. Following the end of the war, the American Graves Registration Command was tasked with investigating and recovering missing American personnel. In May 1946, an American Graves Registration Command Search and Recovery Team exhumed a mass grave on a beach at Takao, Formosa (now the island of Taiwan), recovering 311 bodies.
However, the remains could not be identified at the time and were buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu as unknowns. Between October, 2022 and July, 2023, the accounting agency disinterred Unknowns from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific linked to the Enoura Maru. The remains were moved into a laboratory for further study and scientific analysis. The laboratory analysis and the total circumstantial evidence available identified one set of the remains as those of Waters.
He is memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines. There is a gravestone for him in the Blackshear City Cemetery.
