85 years after he left home, WWII Medal of Honor recipient will be buried in New Ulm
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Exactly 85 years after U.S. Army Capt. Willibald C. Bianchi left his hometown of New Ulm on April 24, 1941, the remains of the WWII Medal of Honor recipient finally returned home to his family.
Bianchi’s living relatives witnessed the dignified transfer at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport last Friday, April 24, and they are now preparing for his internment at the New Ulm City Cemetery this Saturday, May 2. His remains were finally identified on Aug. 11, 2025.
Sue Marti, 71, and her sister Carolyn Marti Smith, 79, of New Ulm are among the 17 living nieces and nephews who grew up listening to stories about their “Uncle Bill,” whom they never did meet.
“He was killed before any of us were born, so we never got to know him except through Mother’s eyes,” Sue Marti said. “But that was really her brother, her only brother, and so that love and affection and admiration that she had for him was because he was her brother, and he wasn’t able to come back.”
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Throughout Sue’s home, there are meticulously preserved collections of books, photos, and newspaper articles about Bianchi.
The stories they shared, Carolyn said, kept “Uncle Bill” Bianchi’s memory alive over all these years.
“He just always was part of our lives,” she said. “He was always Uncle Bill.”
Bianchi was the commander of Company D, 1st Battalion, 45th Infantry Regiment, Philippine Scouts on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines. On Feb. 3, 1942 he volunteered his company to try to clear a series of Japanese machine gun nests. He was shot and wounded multiple times, and yet he still continued leading the attack.
For his actions, Bianchi was awarded the Medal of Honor, according to the National Medal of Honor Museum. It is the highest U.S. military award for valor.
Capt. Bianchi was captured by Japanese forces on April 4, 1942 and survived the brutality of the Bataan Death March that same month. He was held as a prisoner of war in the Philippines until 1944. The Japanese military moved prisoners to Manila for transport to Japan on the Orkyoku Maru transport ship.
A U.S. carrier-borne aircraft attacked the ship, unaware that the prisoners of war were on the ship and it eventually sank in Subic Bay in the Philippines. Hundreds of American POWs were killed, but Capt. Bianchi survived. The Japanese then transported him and other POWs aboard the Enoura Maru to Takao, Formosa, which is known today as Taiwan.
While anchored in Takao Harbor, the Enoura Maru was attacked by U.S. warplanes too, and the transport ship was sunk. According to Japanese records, Bianchi was killed in the attack, along more than 300 other U.S. POWs, on Jan. 9, 1945. He was 29 years old.
After the war, The American Graves Registration Command investigated and recovered American personnel who were killed in WWII. About 311 bodies were recovered in May 1946 in a mass grave that were believed to be those who perished in the Enoura Maru bombing. The remains were declared unidentifiable and reinterred as Unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (NMCP), known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
For eight decades, Bianchi’s remains were unidentified, and while the family waited and hoped, Sue said they eventually got the phone call they never thought would happen.
“If you’re looking for a loved one from a recent conflict or a recent war that might have been going on, and they might be MIA, [you should] never quit, never give up hope,” she said.
The Defense Department’s POW/MIA Accounting Agency never gave up, and in 2022 and 2023, the remains of those killed in the Enoura Maru attack were disinterred and sent to the DPAA laboratory for analysis with modern forensic techniques. Through those methods, including advanced DNA testing, Bianchi was positively identified in August of last year.
Greg Peterson, director of Brown County Veterans Services, said identifying remains is a long and tedious process, with many military families never receiving closure. So for Bianchi’s remaining family to finally have him back home is a bittersweet outcome.
“It really helps. It helps them to go into their old age knowing that that missing man has been recovered,” Peterson said. “They have mentioned they wish their mothers, his sisters would have been alive to be able to have that relief of the anguish that they never knew what happened.”
This kind of work is also important to the veteran community, Peterson said, who also carry a different kind of grief.
“A lot of military members say never leave a fallen comrade behind,” he said. “There are many accounts of people going back and to save a life, or to carry the body out of a comrade that was killed in action, just so we can get the body back home to their family.”
‘It really matters to people’
Even though Bianchi died more than eight decades ago, Sue Marti said she hopes her family’s story will give others comfort and compassion if they’re currently awaiting news and are searching for a loved one who may have gone missing.
“Unless you know someone who’s missing, and you have a friend that has a family member missing. … it’s heartbreaking for those people,” Sue said. “It’s heartbreaking when someone’s gone now 80 years seems like ‘oh geez. That shouldn’t matter to anybody anymore’, but it does. It really matters to people.”
And for Carolyn Marti Smith, seeing her uncle to finally return after these many years is a different kind of homecoming. She said witnessing the dignified transfer at the airport and seeing the thousands of people lining streets to welcome Bianchi back was “beautiful.”
“He was always part of our lives,” Carolyn said. “That’s how you would feel. That’s how anybody would feel to get a loved one back.”
