Glenn Hodak, a corporal in the U.S. Army Air Forces, has been accounted for nearly 80 years after he died in a fire at the Tokyo Military Prison in 1945. Defense POW/MIA Accounting AgencyAn American soldier who was killed during World War II has been accounted for nearly 80 years after his death.Last week, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced that it had identified the remains of Glenn H. Hodak, a 23-year-old corporal in the United States Army Air Forces from Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania. Hodak was accounted for on September 25, 2024.During World War II, Hodak was a gunner with the 93rd Bombardment Squadrons 19th Bombardment Group. He was on a bombing mission to Tokyo when his B-29 Superfortress plane was shot down in March 1945.At first, Hodak was reported as missing in action. But investigators later realized that Japanese forces had captured Hodak as a prisoner of war. He was taken to Tokyo Military Prison, where he was killed in a fire on May 26, 1945.The blaze was the result of heavy U.S. aircraft bombing of the Japanese capital, reported Military.coms Richard Sisk in 2024. On the evening of May 23, 1945, more than 500 American B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean. When they reached Tokyo, they firebombed the city with highly flammable explosives under a strategic shift that was intended to force a Japanese surrender.The May 1945 bombing came on the heels of another intense U.S. firebombing campaign known as Operation Meetinghouse. Two months earlier, Operation Meetinghouse had killed an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people in Tokyo, many of them civilians.After the war, members of the American Graves Registration Service searched for the remains of American soldiers throughout the Pacific region. In early 1946, they visited the Tokyo Military Prison, where the Japanese government indicated they would find the remains of 62 U.S. service members. In the end, they recovered 65 sets of remains and were able to identify 25 of them, including one set that belonged to a repatriated Japanese unknown.The services staff could not identify the remaining 39 bodies, so they buried the servicemen as unknowns in the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines.Decades passed without any answers for surviving relatives of the unidentified service members. Meanwhile, the American Battle Monuments Commission meticulously cared for the unknown service members graves at the cemetery, according to the agency statement.In March and April 2022, the remains were disinterred and sent to the agencys laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii. In 2024, the agency launched its Tokyo Prison Fire Project, with a goal of identifying the American service members who perished in the 1945 blaze.The project faces considerable forensic challenges due to the condition of the remains, which were burned, damaged and commingled, the agency wrote in a social media post. Within one casket, for example, the agency found at least four sets of DNA.Eventually, forensic anthropologists Aelwen Wetherby and Kristen Grow were able to use dental and anthropological techniques, as well as circumstantial evidence, to identify Hodaks remains. They also used mitochondrial DNA, drawing on a sample provided by Hodaks great-nephew Benjamin Hodak.The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency has had recent success accounting for Americans from the Tokyo Prison Fire, the agency says in a statement shared with CBS News Kerry Breen. We have accounted for two service members thus far for this project.Now that his family has been notified, Hodak will be laid to rest in Spring Creek, Pennsylvania, in May. He will be buried next to his mother and two of his brothers, reports Erie News Nows Mike Ruzzi.I was happy that a match was able to be made, Benjamin tells WENYs Jackie Palmer. It's amazing that they were able to find his remains, that we matched, and now they are bringing him home. I just want him back home; the whole family wants him home.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: American History, Bones, DNA, Fire, Genetics, History, Japan, Military, Prisons, Teeth, US Government, US Military, Warfare, World War II