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Show Will BringWar'" DeaclBackHome Under Present Plans Next Of Kin Will Be Polled On Reburial Wishes. WASHINGTON. Preparations have been completed for the work" of returning 200,000 or more of the nation's war dead. The necessary legislation has passed both houses of congress. The measure authorizes an outlay out-lay which may exceed 200 million dollars. Under present plans, next of kin will be polled to determine whether they desire reburial in national or private cemeteries in this country, or prefer to let those who gave their lives overseas rest there. The entire program will require from two to five years officials estimated, the Associated Press reports. Meanwhile, in 359 scattered cemeteries ceme-teries in Europe, Asia, the Pacific islands and elsewhere, approximately approx-imately 241,500 of the approximately approximate-ly 325,000 American war dead have found temporary resting places, by latest reports. Plan Fewer Cemeteries. Official plans call for a continuous continu-ous reduction in the number of overseas cemeteries so adequate care and protection may be given graves. In the Pacific, for example, bodies not brought back to this country coun-try may be placed in permanent resting places in Manila and Honolulu. Hono-lulu. Reports to the army quartermaster quartermas-ter general's American graves registration service indicate that graves searching parlies have had to match the exertions and ingenuity ingenu-ity of the fighting men. In New Guinea isolated graves have been marked by crosses 15 feet high to stand above fast-growing jungle vegetation, pending transfer of bodies. One party required almost al-most two months to reach the scene of an air crash on a 9,000 foot peak and then to return to base by plane. In the Philippines the consolidation consolida-tion of cemeteries is almost complete, com-plete, except for the jungle-choked Bataan peninsula. A report from Capt. S. J. Gladys, who was General Gen-eral MacArthur's graves registration registra-tion officer on Bataan and Corregi-dor, Corregi-dor, suggested that Japanese inhumanity in-humanity in the 1942 fighting makes unlikely the identification of hundreds of Americanajd -Ifilipino dead. Task Difficult in China. He said that after Corregidor's fall the Japanese refused American Ameri-can pleas and heaped up and cremated cre-mated American dead along with their own fallen troops. In China the task of finding and identifying American remains has been as difficult. More than 1,000 missing army and navy men were being sought recently by eight-man search teams in the isolated "hump" area of the Himalayas between India In-dia and China and in coastal re. gions from which aerial sweeps against Japan were made. The bodies of thousands of persons, per-sons, particularly those lost at sea, may never be recovered. The number num-ber of those officially listed as "missing" is being steadily reduced by painstaking checking of records and reports, but the briny, navy and marines and coast guard together togeth-er count 14,605 still in this category. The graves registration service dates to 1867. At the close of the American Civil war there were 316,233 recorded burials of which 140,469 were unidentified men. From World War I, 1,643 bodies never have been identified. After World War I, 43,610 bodies were returned, the others being left in eight permanent cemeteries in France, Belgium and England. 1 |