The Last Full Measure (An American Family and How the United States Brought Home the Dead of World War II)

The Last Full Measure tells the forgotten story of the sacred mission to return America’s fallen from foreign battlefields.

In the fall of 1944, German flak shredded an American bomber in the skies over Austria. Four crew parachuted from the burning aircraft, but six spiraled five miles to their deaths. Among the dead was tail gunner Delbert Trueman. It had been his first mission. His remains would not return home for more than four years.

In the years following World War II, Trueman’s journey home would be repeated 170,000 times, as poignantly described in The Last Full Measure, a powerful work blending one family’s story with the history of a monumental military effort.

The young airman’s death in 1944 began a long process—burial, recovery, identification, reburial, overseas shipment, and final burial—carried out by the U.S. government as a sacred obligation to the fallen and their families. Informed that Trueman was missing in action, his family spent months in the dark, receiving slivers of information and finally—ten months later—confirmation of his death. In the summer of 1946, the military exhumed his remains, identified them from dental records, and buried them in a temporary military cemetery. Two springs later, Trueman was disinterred again, packed in a coffin, shipped across the Atlantic, and carried by train to his hometown in Indiana for a long-awaited funeral and burial.

Clarke masterfully weaves this emotional journey and deeply personal family drama together with the larger story of the army’s Return the Dead Program that brought home more than 170,000 fallen soldiers from around the world. Here are accounts of the Japanese-American soldier who began the war in an internment camp and led a small unit that searched France and Austria for dead Americans; the civilian embalmer who processed some 10,000 soldiers; the captain of a transport ship that ferried 6,500 caskets at a time across the Atlantic; the military escorts who accompanied the dead on the final legs of their trips home; and the career soldier who managed the operation.

Solemn and heartrending, but also inspiring, The Last Full Measure completes the war story of those who died in foreign lands during World War II. It stands as a tribute to those who gave the last full measure in battle and to the unsung heroes who gave their own full measure to bring them home.