Finding a hero: Efforts to identify North Dakota soldier Irvin C. Ellingson’s remains took years

DAHLEN, N.D. — Four years ago, Lon Enerson started writing a book about his uncle, Staff Sgt. Irvin C. Ellingson, and the work to identify his remains.

As Enerson stood in front of the Dahlen Lutheran Church on Saturday, June 20, a casket inside waited for the

funeral and burial

of Ellingson, a soldier who waited 81 years to come home.

“I never thought I would get the final chapter,” Enerson said.

Enerson, along with scores of Ellingson relatives, waited to hear about the identification of Sgt. Ellingson from Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Honolulu, Hawaii, where efforts took place to identify soldiers who died in a Tokyo prison fire during World War II. Ellingson was the third to be identified, with 10 successfully identified so far.

There were a number of Gold Star families — those whose relatives died in the line of duty — present at the Ellingson funeral. Enerson had attended a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery of the second person to be identified.

“We’re cheering for each other,” he said.

Ellingson was 25 and serving as a radar observer on a B-29 in the Pacific Theater when, on April 14, 1945, his plane was shot down during a bombing mission over mainland Japan. He was captured alongside 61 other Air Corps members, interrogated and held at a Tokyo prison. A few weeks later, on May 26, an Allied bombing run over Japan sparked a fire at the prison, killing Ellingson and the others.

The Ellingson family’s wait to bring home his remains began that year, and 81 years later, it finally happened. Enerson said the passion his grandparents felt when Ellingson died filtered down to him and his generation. It created, he said, a “common bond that we needed to get him home.”

In 2018, Enerson received a letter from Michael Krehl, instigator of the search to identify and recover the remains of the prison fire soldiers. Krehl was told by the Defense POW MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) about a process involving DNA that could identify the remains. To get the remains — interred at the American Cemetery in Manila — to Hawaii to start the identification process, 60% of the 62 families of the soldiers had to submit DNA, since the remains were commingled.

Enerson’s mother had died the year before, but two uncles, Bud and Dennis Ellingson, were still alive. They both gave their DNA, along with Enerson.

“I called them, and they were overwhelmed to tears,” Enerson said. “I said ‘I’m going to give the DPAA your address and they’re going to send you DNA sample kits.’ So we got three Ellingson DNA there. Sibling DNA is like gold.”

Barbara Geisler, a family genealogist who found Enerson so he could be sent the letter, prayed over Ellingson’s casket at Saturday’s funeral.

She said the group had to find the families for both missing and identified soldiers.

“We went for the missing first. We thought it was most important,” she said.

Though the Ellingson family submitted their DNA, by November of 2021 the percentage of given DNA was stuck at 59.68%, Enerson said. The family went to Washington, D.C., to speak with 17 senators, including North Dakota Sens. John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer, who signed a bipartisan letter to then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to get the remains.

As the letter went through, one more person submitted DNA to get over the 60% threshold, Enerson said. In spring 2022, the caskets were brought to the lab in Hawaii to begin the identification process.

Kristen Grow and Melissa Menschel were two forensic anthropologists involved in the process. Grow led the Tokyo Prison Fire project in 2024 and Menschel joined last year. They said the process involves an inventory of the remains, taking samples, finding what remains go together and looking at chemical signatures of the bones. There are also forensic odontologists who analyze teeth.

Both Grow and Menschel were present for the funeral and burial.

From 2022 to 2025 seven groups of Ellingsons visited the lab to “potentially be in that same place as Irvin would be,” Enerson said.

“There was no guarantee all along, but we always told them that the Ellingson family does have one guarantee — and that is that we’re not going to stop looking for him,” he said.

Last summer, the family got the call that Ellingson had been identified. The family was told his remains would be escorted home and a full military honors funeral would be provided all at government expense. In September, the family formed a committee made up of family members to map out the details. Enerson said the family decided upon three days of celebration.

Terry Ellingson, Enerson’s cousin, said it “takes a village to get this done.”

“Everybody decided to take care of a certain area,” he said Saturday. “It all got done, but it took a lot of contacts. Even this morning, we were short of buses for people to go to the cemetery. (And then came) a call that Midway Public Schools would provide a couple more buses for us.”

Through it all, Enerson held tight to one sentence within a deceased personnel file he received. It contained all the information the government went through to locate Ellingson.

“The sentence goes like this: ‘Sgt. McGrath saw Staff Sgt. Irvin Ellingson being interrogated at the Kempeitai military headquarters in Tokyo, leaving with 2nd Lt. Andrew Litz, to the Tokyo Military Prison,’” Enerson said. “That was a sentence that I hung onto, and we all hung onto.”

Enerson noted that 2nd Lt. Litz’s nephew and niece were at the Saturday funeral, too.

Enerson has been collecting information through the eight-plus years it took to get Ellingson home. Four years ago, people told him, “Lon, if something happens to you, no one’s going to know (this information),” he said.

“So, I started writing a book,” he said.

His sister, Jane Wood, is editing.

“He’s almost to 400 pages,” she said.

Eric Hylden / Grand Forks Herald