On February 14, 2025, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) identified the remains of Pvt. Ben F. Leslie, missing from World War II.
Leslie entered the U.S. Army from New Mexico and served with Battery H, 200th Coast Artillery Regiment in the Philippines. He was captured by enemy forces during the Japanese invasion of the islands in April 1942 and was interned in the Philippines until December 13, 1944, when Japanese forces in the Philippines began the transfer of 1,621 Allied prisoners of war (POWs) to Japan aboard transport ships whose harsh conditions and extreme overcrowding led survivors to refer to them as "Hell Ships." On December 14, 1944, unaware of the POWs onboard, Allied aircraft attacked the first ship, the Oryoku Maru, in Subic Bay in the Philippines. Survivors of the bombing were put aboard two other ships, the Enoura Maru and the Brazil Maru, to continue on to Japan. During the journey, while anchored in Takao Harbor, Formosa (present-day Taiwan), the Enoura Maru was attacked by Allied aircraft from the USS Hornet (CV-8). The Japanese government reported that Leslie died aboard the Enoura Maru on January 9, 1945.
Following the end of the war, the American Graves Registration Command (AGRC) was tasked with investigating and recovering missing American personnel. In May 1946, an AGRC Search and Recovery Team exhumed a mass grave on a beach at Takao, Formosa, recovering 311 bodies. Some of the remains which could not be identified at the time due to severe comingling were buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (NMCP) in Honolulu as Unknowns. Between October 2022 and July 2023, DPAA disinterred Unknowns from the NMCP linked to the Enoura Maru. The remains were accessioned into the DPAA Laboratory for further study. The laboratory analysis and the totality of the circumstantial evidence available established an association between one set of these unknown remains and Leslie.
Leslie is memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines.