WWII Portales soldier coming home

Remains of a Portales soldier killed during World War II are coming home.

The Defense Department Accounting Agency announced last week that Army Pvt. Homer J. Mitchell, 20, was accounted for in July.

His remains are scheduled to be buried in Portales on April 26, according to a DoD news release.

Portales learned the news that Pvt. Mitchell was missing in action in late December 1944. On Dec. 29, 1944, The Portales Daily News reported: "Mr. and Mrs. Roy Mitchell received a telegram yesterday afternoon that their son ... had been missing in action in Germany since December 10."

The newspaper also reported that Pvt. Mitchell had been wounded in fighting on July 5 and hospitalized. He'd returned to action on Oct. 2.

Family members said they'd last heard from him in a letter dated Oct. 21, his birthday. He told his parents in that letter he was writing from a fox hole.

Clovis' Patsy Acuff, Mitchell's niece, said she first received word in August that her uncle's remains had been positively located. Someone from the military contacted the family and has since provided multiple Army records related to Mitchell's service.

Mitchell's remains are at a military lab at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska now, and arrangements are being made to have them flown to Oklahoma City where he will be cremated. Acuff said she hopes to then have him buried with his mother in the Portales cemetery. Mitchell's father and other family members also are buried in Portales.

Acuff said her 82-year-old brother is the only family she knows who ever met Mitchell; he appears to be about 2 years old in a photo that also includes the teenage Mitchell.

In 2015, Acuff submitted an essay to the Clovis News Journal honoring her uncle.

Acuff wrote that Mitchell sailed from New York on March 13, 1944, to join the 359th Infantry of the 90th Division.

"He was in the invasion on Normandy on June 6, 1944, and was wounded on July 5 by a sniper," she wrote.

"His mother (my grandmother) received a telegram in December 1944 stating that Homer was reported missing in action, then on April 27, 1945, she received another telegram stating that he'd been killed in action on Dec. 10, 1944, in Germany.

"He had just turned 20, two months before he was killed. Although little is known about him, his family is proud that he was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for his country. For this we owe him our sincerest debt of gratitude."

The Defense Department news release reported Mitchell's battalion was tasked with holding defensive positions in the Pachten Forest Dillingen, Germany, when he was reported killed by enemy artillery fire.

"His body could not be evacuated due to intense fighting against heavily reinforced German forces," the DoD news release read.

"American commanders eventually ordered the regiment to withdraw, but many casualties were nonrecoverable due to the intensity of the mortar and artillery strikes."

After the war, the American Graves Registration Command conducted investigations in the Pachten Forest area but was unable to recover or identify Mitchell's remains. He was officially declared killed in action in November 1951.

Then in 2018, a historian with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) determined that unidentified remains interred in St. James, France, could be those of Mitchell. Those remains were disinterred in August 2021 and sent to a DPAA lab for identification.

"(L)aboratory analysis and the totality of the circumstantial evidence available established an association between this set of remains and Private Mitchell," DoD reported.

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