For more than eight decades, the remains of a young Navy sailor who died starving and sick in a Japanese prison camp sat unidentified among thousands of other unknowns recovered after World War II. Now, Robert Glenn Shove finally has his name back. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency confirmed his identity on Dec. 9, 2025, and his family will lay him to rest in Sioux City next month, 82 years after his death.
According to WBAL News Radio, Shove was a Navy Fireman First Class who enlisted in Des Moines in 1940 and served aboard the submarine tender USS Canopus during the war. As reported by CBS2 Iowa, accounts differ on where exactly Shove was born — one report says Cherokee, Iowa, while his obituary on Legacy.com lists Washta, Iowa — but both agree he came into the world on May 2, 1922.
Captured After the Fall of the Philippines
After U.S. forces surrendered in the Philippines in April 1942, Shove was taken prisoner and held at Camp Cabanatuan, the same outlet reports. Conditions at the camp were brutal, and Shove did not survive them. Records show he died of pulmonary tuberculosis on Oct. 27, 1943, while still a prisoner of war.
Fellow prisoners buried him in a common grave at the camp cemetery, the station's report notes. After the war, U.S. forces recovered remains from that cemetery, but Shove's remains could not be identified at the time — leaving him among the many unknowns from the camp whose fates remained a mystery for generations.
DNA Testing Finally Solves the Mystery
The breakthrough came years later. In 2019, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency exhumed remains from a grave associated with Shove, and DNA testing and other evidence eventually established that those remains were his, per the same account. The agency confirmed the identification on Dec. 9, 2025.
Shove's case fits into a much larger, painstaking effort. According to DVIDS, the agency's Cabanatuan Identification Project began after ten unknowns linked to a common grave were disinterred in August 2014, and the agency has continued working to recover and identify more than 900 remaining unknowns from the camp. Scientists involved in the project found that remains from Cabanatuan were significantly commingled, which made identification far more difficult and time-consuming.
A Years-Long National Effort
The scale of that effort has been considerable. As detailed by Marine Corps Times, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency reported 120 identifications in one recent fiscal year, including 82 from World War II, and at one point returned about 40 sets of unidentified World War II remains from the Philippines to Hawaii for examination. The outlet also notes that officials conducted 55 exhumations at the Manila American Cemetery between November 2019 and January 2020 alone, part of a broader identification campaign that has included cases like that of Army Sgt. Cread Shuey of Kansas, identified in 2019 through dental, anthropological and mitochondrial DNA analysis.
Shove's funeral services are scheduled for 11 a.m. on Nov. 7, 2026, at Meyer Brothers Morningside Chapel, according to his Legacy.com obituary. Interment with military honors will follow at Memorial Park Cemetery in Sioux City, finally bringing the young sailor home more than eight decades after he enlisted and set off to serve his country.
