Found and sent home

A Doughboy Killed in Action Is Home at Last

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 24, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 22 (AP) — Eighty-eight years after Pvt. Francis Lupo fell in battle near the Marne River east of Paris, his remains have been recovered and identified by the Pentagon.

Private Lupo, of Cincinnati, was killed on July 21, 1918, while attacking German forces near Soissons, France. His remains were found by a French archaeologist in 2003 and identified by the Pentagon’s Joint P.O.W.-M.I.A. Accounting Command and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory.

He is the first World War I casualty to be recovered and identified by the special command. The Pentagon said on Friday that Private Lupo, of the Army, would be buried Tuesday at Arlington National Cemetery.

Private Lupo was 23 when he was killed in some of the most gruesome fighting of the war. An extract from the diary of an officer in his unit described the artillery and aerial attacks in stark terms. “Oh, how maddening are these horrible bloody sights!” he wrote, according to an Army history of the war. “Can it be possible to reap such wholesale destruction and butchery in these few hours of conflict?”