Dr. Ian Spurgeon is a military historian with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Since 2010, he has conducted investigations for the agency at World War II aircraft crash sites and battlefields in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Okinawa, and Poland. Currently, he specializes in resolving cases of American soldiers lost during ground combat in Germany, and in particular those missing from the Hürtgen Forest campaign.
From September 1944 to February 1945, soldiers from at least nine U.S. divisions battled German forces in the Hürtgen Forest, a roughly 70 square mile area of wooded, hilly terrain in Germany near the Belgian border. It was one of the U.S. Army's longest battles during World War II, and led to more than 24,000 American casualties. This video briefly explains how the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's Hürtgen Forest Project has helped lead to the recovery and identification of more than 30 American soldiers previously missing from combat there, and what methods DPAA continues to use to find the more than 160 service members still unaccounted-for from that campaign.
