“No man left behind” isn’t just a saying. It’s a promise for the U.S. military.
After 81 years, that promise was fulfilled for the family of Utah’s Howard Allan Holding. He was finally laid to rest in Salt Lake City, Oct. 17, 2025. But his story began decades earlier.
On Sept. 6, 1944, Ensign Holding took off from the USS Enterprise in his Grumman Hellcat fighter in the South Pacific Ocean. He and 14 other naval aviators were tasked with a routine sweep over the small island of Yap, about 500 miles east of the Philippines.
By then, the tide had begun to turn in the Pacific theater of World War II. The Japanese military was slowly pushed back toward its home islands. Holding and his squadron expected little resistance.
Flying was smooth until, suddenly, the skies above Yap erupted in a fury of anti-aircraft fire. Holding’s plane was last seen spiraling toward the earth. There was no parachute.
He was 22 years old.
“I feel like I've known him all my life, even though I've never met him, which is odd, but both my mother and my grandmother kept him very much alive,” said Holding’s niece, Terri Trick, who made the trip from her home in Walla-Walla, Washington, for her uncle’s funeral.
Trick wasn’t born yet when her uncle was lost on that mission. But she said he still felt like someone she always knew.
“He loved to tease,” she said. “He loved to tease my mother, loved to tease my grandmother. He was a musician. At the time that he was sent to active duty, he was a pretty well-known musician in Salt Lake City.”
Holding was an accomplished jazz trumpet player and a graduate of Salt Lake City’s East High School. When he enlisted in the Navy Reserves in the summer of 1942, he was a student at the University of Utah.
After the war ended on Sept. 2, 1945, his remains were not accounted for. The Navy issued a presumptive finding of death in early 1946.
Despite keeping her uncle’s memory alive, Trick never had much interest in WWII. That is, until one fateful day 15 years ago, when she got a call from an independent researcher who was looking for a missing family member of his own on Yap.
“He called me totally out of the blue in 2010,” Trick said. “And he said, ‘Are you Terri Trick?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you Howard Holding’s niece?’ And I said, ‘I am,’ and he said, ‘I hope you're sitting down, because we've discovered your uncle's plane.’”
Ultimately, it turned out that the plane was not Holding’s, but the realization that her uncle and his plane were still out there — somewhere — lit a fire underneath Trick.
“I wanted to know more about it,” she said. “I wanted to know what happened to Howard. My family never knew what happened to Howard. All that information was classified until 2010.”
Identifying the remains of fallen servicemembers can be complicated.
Professional genealogist Megan Smolenyak has worked on more than 1,700 similar cases dating as far back as WWI and has positively identified 215 service members and counting. She was not a part of Holding’s case, but said the advent of DNA matching and other modern scientific advances has made identifications like his possible.
“Sometimes, it's just a matter of now we have the technology to get to hard-to-reach places like the plane crashes at tops of mountains,” she said. “They're getting better at recovering remains that went down in seas, oceans, that kind of thing.”
Smolenyak said the work can be arduous.
“For the most part, it's trawling through archives and all the old records,” she said. “And then I'm trying to look at the topography today and see what makes sense, what matches up with it.”
Nearly 72,000 service members are still unaccounted for from World War II. And there’s no guarantee they will all be found.
“Many of them, this is one of the biggest obstacles, went down in ships,” Smolenyak said.
If remains are recovered, the next step is finding a suitable DNA match, a process that becomes harder as more next-of-kin die. Plus, records from the 1940s aren’t always reliable. Back then, it was a lot easier to lie about your age or who you really were.
“Sometimes the primary next-of-kin has never even heard of the soldier these days,” she said. “People trust me when I cold call them that they're going to get a lot of their family history that they didn't know, and they find out that they had a hero in the family.”
Post-war investigations on Yap discovered several crash sites on the island. At some, no remains could be found.
Trick never lost hope.
“For 15 years, I just kept bugging people,” she said. “I sent my DNA to the Navy in 2010 or 2011, and my two sons did too, and also his brother, who was still alive at the time … And then I kept thinking, ‘Well, here it's been years and years and years, and the Navy hasn't done anything with my DNA. I wonder if it was even a good idea to send it?’”
Investigators eventually discovered four sets of unidentified remains that were later buried in the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines. In 2020, the remains were exhumed and taken back to the United States for further testing. That all came to a head on June 10 of this year.
“They finally identified him using the four of our DNAs and made a match with every single bone that they had,” Trick said.
The remains, until then only called Unknown X-31, were Howard Holding.
He was coming home to Salt Lake City. For Trick and her family, the news brought emotions but also a sense of joy that this saga was finally coming to its conclusion.
“I like to think of it as a 81-year-old story that the family's been reading for all this time and never getting to the end of the story,” she said. “But we keep persisting on, reading that story, and then finally we reach the end chapter, and we can close the book. That's what I think closure is. It's just closing the book on a very, very long story.”
After 81 years, Holding’s final resting place is in the military section of the Salt Lake City Cemetery. He received full military honors with his surviving family in attendance, his favorite jazz music playing in the background.
