Outside St. Mary of the Angels Chapel at Siena University Thursday morning, police escorted a silver hearse to the foot of the stairs. Uniformed officers marched in formation toward the rear doors of the hearse, and carefully removed a flag-draped casket.
The casket contained the remains of U.S. Army Air Corps Second Lt. Joseph LeRoy Burke. Eighty-one years after his death, he would finally receive his funeral mass.
Burke’s remains had been missing all these years because of the circumstances of his death. Deployed to the Philippines during World War II, Burke was captured by Japanese forces in May of 1942 on the Island of Corregidor, about 30 miles southwest of Manila. Along with 11,000 other Americans and Filipinos, he was imprisoned at Cabanatuan POW Camp.
Conditions at Cabanatuan were brutal. In July, two months after his capture, nearly 800 people died. Some 2,700 would eventually be killed by a combination of torture, food shortages, and diseases like malaria and dengue fever.
Somehow, Burke survived.
Then, in 1944, he was loaded onto an unmarked prison ship called the Oryoku Maru. It was bound for Japan, where POWs would either be enslaved or used as leverage in negotiations with the United States. But the Oryoku never made it. U.S. planes and submarines attacked the ship, not realizing it contained American soldiers, and sank it.
Again, Burke survived. This time, he was transferred to a different prisoner ship – also unmarked – called the Enoura Maru. The ship made it to Taiwan before U.S. planes struck again. The Enoura Maru sank, and Burke along with it. He was one of 406 prisoners mistakenly killed by the U.S. attack.
Burke’s unidentified body was buried in a mass grave, where it stayed until 2015, when an agency working on behalf of families of POWs contacted Burke’s descendants, requesting a DNA sample. His nephew provided one, and in May of last year, Burke’s remains were finally recovered from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, where they’d been resting in an anonymous tomb.
At the funeral mass yesterday, the story of Burke’s death was not mentioned by Friar Kevin Mullen, who presided over the ceremony. Mullen focused instead on a pair of colorized photographs, showing Burke in uniform, with an arm around his mother and father.
"This picture of his parents reminds us of all that is good in our country," said Mullen. "People with great hope and great faith that believed in their son, and his future."
Burke’s medals were displayed in a case, which also contained a neatly-folded flag. The mass was filled with prayers and songs about the virtues of honorable death and sacrifice.
At the end of the mass, a pianist played several verses of “I Know That My Redeemer Lives,” as the mourners filed out to the parking lot. Burke was loaded back into the hearse and taken to Saratoga National Cemetery, where he was finally laid to rest.
