A U.S. soldier who went missing during World War II has been accounted for more than eight decades after he disappeared, federal officials said Wednesday.

Willibald Bianchi, a former U.S. Army captain from New Ulm, Minnesota, earned a Medal of Honor for his wartime conduct, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA, a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense that is in charge of finding and identifying missing American military personnel.

In 1942, while serving as a battalion commander on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines, Bianchi volunteered to help clear machine gun nests that belonged to Japanese armed forces and continued to lead the effort even after he was wounded, said DPAA. For those actions, he received the Medal of Honor, which is the highest honor a

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