Bloomfield soldier memorialized in Dutch book

BLOOMFIELD, NJ — Sgt. Larry S. Wassil from Bloomfield has been memorialized in a book created by residents of the Netherlands to honor soldiers killed fighting to free their homeland.
Wassil was reported missing in action on Dec. 28, 1944, after leading a three-man reconnaissance team during the Hurtgen Forest offensive, near Hurtgen, Germany. He was 33 years old.
Wassil’s remains were not initially found but he was memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial in the small Dutch town of Margraten.
Decades later, his remains were identified using dental and anthropological analysis and he was reburied at Arlington National Cemetery in the United States in 2022.
Now, almost 80 years after his death, a group of volunteers in the Netherlands has created a memorial book to show appreciation for the sacrifices of soldiers like Wassil, whose story is among the 250 that have been included in the book.
The Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial is the final resting place of almost 8,300 American World War II casualties. The names of another 1,722 soldiers are recorded on the Walls of the Missing. The cemetery is one of the 26 overseas American cemeteries that are administered by the American Battle Monuments Commission.
In 2014, volunteers of the Fields of Honor Foundation initiated The Faces of Margraten project. During the biennial tribute, the graves and Walls of the Missing are decorated with the soldiers’ personal photos. Volunteers in both Europe and the U.S. have collected over 8,500 faces so far.
On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands in 2020, the volunteers put together a book titled “The Faces of Margraten: They Will Remain Forever Young.”
The authors of the book, Jori Videc, Sebastiaan Vonk, and Arie-Jan van Hees, said in a press release that they wanted to create a lasting monument in print to these men and women.
“This commemorative book stands as a testament to their service and sacrifice and is not meant to be tucked away on a shelf. Rather, we believe, it is deserving of a prominent place on anyone’s coffee table, in a classroom, in the library, or in a veterans’ post as a daily reminder of those to whom we owe so much,” the release said.
The Dutch edition quickly sold out twice. Three years later, an American edition was created and officially presented to the Deputy Chief of Mission Aleisha Woodward of the U.S. Embassy in the Netherlands on Friday, March 3, 2023.
“We wanted to bring the stories of service, sacrifice, and remembrance home,” the authors said.
Wassil was leading a three-man reconnaissance team scouting enemy positions near Bergstein when they started taking enemy machine gun fire, forcing them to scatter.
When the gunfire stopped, the other two men found each other, but were unable to find Wassil. German forces never listed him as a prisoner of war and the War Department issued a presumptive finding of death for Wassil on Dec. 29, 1945.
Following the end of the war, the American Graves Registration Command conducted several investigations in the Hurtgen area between 1946 and 1950, but were unable to recover or identify Wassil’s remains. He was declared nonrecoverable in December 1951.
While studying unresolved American losses in the Hurtgen area, a historian with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency determined that one set of unidentified remains, designated X-9118 Griesheim Mausoleum, originally discovered by German woodcutters near Bergstein and recovered by the AGRC in 1952, possibly belonged to Wassil.
The remains, which had been buried in Ardennes American Cemetery, were disinterred in April 2019 and sent to the DPAA laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, for examination and identification.
Wassil was accounted for by the DPAA on July 27, 2021, after his remains were identified using circumstantial and material evidence, as well as dental, anthropological, mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome DNA, and autosomal DNA analysis.
His name is still recorded on the Walls of the Missing at the Netherlands American Cemetery but a rosette was placed next to his name to indicate he has been accounted for.
The book is available through the publisher, Amsterdam University Press, and other regular book outlets in the U.S., including Amazon and Barnes and Noble.