In 1945, a “Buffalo Soldier” was killed. His remains have just been identified.

Company L of the 366th Regiment was hit particularly hard, losing 13 men that day, including Pfc. Lemuel Dent Jr. of Charles County, Maryland, whose body was lost in the fighting.

But this month, the Pentagon agency that oversees the search for missing soldiers announced that the remains in the grave had been identified as those of Dent, 79 years after the February 8, 1945, battle.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) said the identification was part of an ongoing project to locate approximately 50 men of the 92nd Division who were reported missing during World War II.

The 92nd Division was called the Buffalo Division, after a name originally given to African-American soldiers serving in the Western United States in the late 19th century.

During World War II, the division was criticized by the Army for its poor performance in combat, but historians say it was poorly trained, poorly led and largely unprepared when it was thrown into fighting in Italy in 1944 and 1945.

“These individuals served in a segregated military where they were not treated like other soldiers,” said DPAA forensic anthropologist Traci Van Deest, who leads the 92nd Division project.

“They were not treated with the same honor and respect,” she said in a video interview. It is important that their lives are remembered and their stories are told now, she said.

Dent, who was 30 at the time of his death and was from rural Ironsides, Maryland, is only the fourth soldier from the division to be identified and the first in five years, according to the DPAA.

When the remains of the grave were found near the battlefield on May 5, 1945, the army assumed that the soldier belonged to the 92nd Division, but at that time it was not possible to make an identification.

The body was classified as “unknown” and buried in what is now the Florence American Cemetery, south of the Italian city.

In June 2022, the Department of Defense and the American Battle Monuments Commission exhumed the remains for forensic analysis, the DPAA said. Most of the missing 92nd Division are buried in Florence Cemetery.

The remains were taken to the DPAA laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base outside Omaha for anthropological examination. Examination of the bones suggested that they may have belonged to a person similar in stature to Dent. He was 5 feet 5 inches tall.

The bones also showed signs of blunt trauma and projectile trauma that could be related to explosion incidents, Van Deest said.

DNA was extracted from one of the femurs and experts from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System compared it with DNA samples from members of Dent’s family to make the identification, the DPAA said.

Members of his family could not be reached for comment.

In the 1930 census, Lemuel Dent Jr., then 16 years old, his father and his two brothers were described as “lumberjacks.” In the 1940 census, the elder Dent was listed as a farmer.

According to the census, there were many other Dents in the community, and in subsequent years several of them, including Lemuel Jr., appear to have moved north from rural Maryland.

When he joined the Army in 1941, according to government records and the Chester Times newspaper, he was living in Linwood, Pennsylvania, a small industrial town south of Philadelphia.

When he was killed, the newspaper reported that he was employed by the nearby American Viscose Corporation, a company that manufactured viscose in a factory on the Delaware River.

Dent’s 92nd Division consisted primarily of black soldiers and white officers, with the exception of the 366th Regiment, which had colored officers. Company L was commanded by Captain Wejay S. Bundara, who was of Indian descent and a graduate of Howard University.

The Americans fought in Italy to drive out the powerful forces of Nazi Germany, which was allied with fascist Italy during the war.

Dent rode a tank as he and his force crossed the shallow Cinquale Channel at its mouth in the Ligurian Sea on the northwest coast of Italy.

The tank hit a mine. The Germans caught the Americans in the open field and killed Dent and 12 other soldiers from Company L with mortars, machine guns and artillery.

Part of the battle was described by Lt. Dennette Harrod of Company I from Washington, DC:

The tanks had stopped on the beach, some hit by artillery, some knocked out by mines. … I don’t know how we managed it, but we kept moving forward, despite the artillery and machine gun fire, losing dead and wounded at every step of the way.

After the battle, the black soldiers were withdrawn from the mission and criticized by the army leadership.

“The infantry of this division lacks the emotional and mental stability required for combat,” said Lt. Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr., according to Hondon B. Hargrove’s 1985 book, Buffalo Soldiers in Italy.

According to DPAA, 700 men from the 92nd Division lost their lives in Italy and thousands more were wounded. Almost half of the men still missing are members of the 366th Regiment.

Two men of the division, 1st Lts. Vernon J. Baker and John R. Fox, were received the Medal of Honor, the country’s highest award for bravery, in 1997.

Fox was killed in action. He had called for an artillery attack on his own position when the enemy surrounded him. When the gunners hesitated, he ordered: “Fire! They are more numerous than we are.”