Connecticut National Guard Funeral Honors Team conducts dignified transfer for WWII veteran who died in Philippines POW camp

The Connecticut National Guard’s funeral honors team conducted a dignified transfer of the remains of U.S. Army Air Forces Pfc. Bernard Sweet at Bradley International Airport, July 30, 2026.

Sweet’s remains were transferred to the custody of Brig. Gen. Sarah Albrycht, the Provost Marshal General of the Army and Commanding General of Army Corrections Command, who volunteered to escort Sweet to their mutual hometown of Bennington, Vermont to be buried.

His niece, Shirley McLenithan, was also present planeside to welcome home her uncle.

Sweet enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps on Aug. 1, 1939. In 1942, Sweet, 21, was deployed to the Philippines as a member of Headquarters squadron, 24th Pursuit Group, where he was stationed at Clark Field, north of the city of Manila on the island of Luzon.

The Japanese launched a full-scale invasion of the island on Dec. 22, 1941. In response, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. Army Forces in the Far East, ordered all troops on the island to withdraw and reorganize on the Bataan Peninsula to defend and await reinforcements. Unfortunately, due to the attack on Pearl Harbor, reinforcements were not immediately available.

The 24th Pursuit Group moved to southern Bataan and continued to fly intercept missions. However, by early 1942, the unit began relocating its remaining aircraft to Australia as supplies began to run low.

Despite the depleted resources, Sweet and thousands of other U.S. and Filipino troops maintained a defensive posture and resisted the Japanese advance for months. Then, on April 9, 1942, the defensive line fell and the remaining forces surrendered to the Japanese.

These prisoners of war were then subjected to the infamous Bataan Death March, a 65-mile caravan from the Bataan Peninsula to POW camps in which the prisoners were beaten, bayoneted, shot, or executed. It’s estimated that approximately 500-650 Americans died during the march.

Sweet was one of the lucky few to survive the march and imprisoned at the Cabanatuan POW camp. However, unsanitary living conditions and food and supply shortages led to an infection of dysentery, to which he would ultimately succumb to at 2:15 p.m. on Oct. 20, 1942, according to camp records. He was buried in the camp cemetery in a mass grave later known as Common Grave 701, along with other deceased prisoners.

Following the war, the U.S. Army’s Quartermaster Corps’ American Graves Registration Service (AGRS) personnel exhumed many of the bodies buried at the Cabanatuan cemetery. It recovered seven sets of remains from Common Grave 701. Two of those remains were identified from the presence of ID tags, leaving seven remains, including Sweet’s, as unidentified.

When remains are unable to be identified, the bodies or bones are given a label which includes the cemetery name, “X”, and a number, and their records are stored in “X-files”. The five unidentified remains from CG 701 were issued the designations “X-582 Manila #2” through “X-586 Manila #2”. The remains were interred in the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial.

Over the years, some of these remains were positively identified. X-582 as Pvt. Kusti N. Gayda. X-583 as Pfc. Thomas S. Bourne. X-585 as Pvt. William E. Brown.

In both August 1948 and October 1949, the American Graves Registration Service recommended that X-586 should be identified as Pfc. Sweet. However, the Office of the Quartermaster General rejected the recommendation based on inconclusive evidence. In February 1950, Sweet’s status was changed to “nonrecoverable” after a recommendation from the AGRS because of a lack of any new evidence.

However, in August 2014, the Department of Defense determined there was enough new scientific and historical evidence to support the disinterment of 10 unknown remains from a Cabanatuan common grave. This was not Sweet’s grave, but after forensic analysis at the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, it was revealed that the remains were commingled and extensive segregation, potentially with other interred remains, would be required to accurately determine identification.

In 2020, personnel from the Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA\_, the successor to the AGRS, exhumed the remains associated with common grave 701 and sent them for analysis.

The DPAA identified Sweet’s remains on Aug. 14, 2025. To do so, scientists used dental, anthropological, and isotope analysis, as well as circumstantial evidence. Scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System also used mitochondrial DNA analysis, mitochondrial genome sequencing data, and nuclear single nucleotide polymorphism testing.

Sweet’s remains are scheduled to be buried August 8, 2026. A rosette will be placed next to his name at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial to indicate he’s been accounted for.