Identified after 80 years missing, WWII soldier to be buried in Salisbury on Friday – Salisbury Post

ROCKWELL – Eighty years ago, almost to the day, Technical Sergeant Thomas Odell Moss was killed by German artillery after three years of fighting in Europe. After the battle, the German army recaptured Moss’s position, making his remains irrecoverable at first and unidentifiable after the war.

This year, Army officials were able to identify Moss, and his surviving family will bury him Friday at the National Cemetery Annex.

Moss’s closest relative is his niece Ann Adcock, who was one year old when he died and now lives in Kannapolis. So when the Defense Department’s POW/MIA Accounting Agency finally identified the remains as T. Sgt. Moss, agency sergeant. Josh Buckner contacted Adcock to tell her the news.

“I want to thank the military for everything they do for the MIA soldiers. Even though I didn’t really know him, I wanted to cry. It’s a miracle,” Adcock said.

Adcock said that during this time her family knew that her uncle had died during the war and how, but not much more. She said her father, Moss’ brother, didn’t talk much about Moss, but she knew something about him.

“He just said he always helped out on the farm, and that he was a good, caring man,” Adcock said.

Moss was married before the war to Nettice Buckhardt, who sadly died in childbirth along with their only child. Nettice had one daughter, Katie, before the marriage, and although legal adoptions were not common at the time, Adcock said, Moss listed Katie as his daughter on his draft papers. After Moss and Nettice’s deaths, Katie would be raised by Moss’s parents.

‘I think she looked a lot like her father. She was such a loving person and she would do anything she could to help everyone in the family,” Adcock said.

Katie had no children of her own and died in 2006, leaving Adcock as Moss’s closest surviving relative.

“It’s truly a miracle that they found him and we can give him the burial he deserves,” Adcock said.

Moss’ funeral will take place Friday and begin with a family visitation ending at 1:15 p.m. Russ Roakes of Powles-Staton Funeral Home, who is assisting the family, said the funeral procession will be escorted by the Patriot after the visit. Guard, the Rowan County Sheriff’s Office and the Rockwell Police Department to the National Cemetery in Salisbury, where he will be buried with full military honors.

Adcock said she chose to go with Powles-Staton because her brother was aware of the funeral home’s work with veterans and the military community, especially their dealings with previous MIA soldiers. Roakes pointed to the funeral of Bertha Dupree, a World War II and Korean veteran who died at age 97 with no surviving family, as a funeral that had a special impact on him and the funeral home staff.

“There were a lot of people who came to honor her and they kind of stepped into her surrogate family. The same goes for Mr. Moss, he had no children because he died at such a young age, so the public is welcome to come to the visitation and funeral. That day we will intervene as his family,” Roakes said.

Roakes invited the community to attend and honor Moss by lining up along the route, which runs from the funeral home in Rockwell along Highway 52 until the procession turns onto Statesville Boulevard and ends at the National Cemetery Annex , located at 501 Statesville Blvd.

Moss joined the Army in April 1941 at the age of 27, months before the United States entered World War II. He served in the European Theater during the war, culminating in his service in the Hürtgen Offensive, the longest battle on German soil in World War II. The operation was part of the larger Siegfried Line campaign, the operation that pursued the retreating German army through northern France after D-Day.

Moss was involved in fighting near the village of Kommerscheidt, located in the forest. For the American military commanders, the village and its surroundings were seen as a strategically important point because of its value in fortifying the nearby major city of Aachen. Conversely, German military commanders considered the area an extremely important staging area for the planned Battle of the Bulge, and therefore German soldiers fiercely protected it.

Moss’s unit’s participation in the battle began on November 2, 1944. Five days later he was killed by an artillery shell, which was seen and confirmed by a fellow soldier several months later. However, because the German army controlled the area at the end of the fighting, his remains were considered irrecoverable.

After the end of the war, the American Graves Registration Command searched the area for unrecovered American soldiers and found Moss’s damaged dog tags in a mass grave, reporting that he had been buried there along with at least seven other American soldiers and three German soldiers. soldiers. Four American soldiers in the grave were identified, but three others could not be identified, with Army officials saying one of the three could be linked to the dog tags.

Moss’ story was not over, however, as new research by historians and scientists recommended that the three soldiers be exhumed so that new testing and identification methods, including modern DNA testing, could be used. The three were exhumed for forensic analysis in August 2018, and Moss was positively identified in 2024 and returned to his family.