American War Hero · Korean War · Notice Nearby
No rights-safe contemporary likeness is on file. The record is the service and the writing, not an invented face.
Harold Matthew Steele
April 30, 1929 – unaccounted for since December 1, 1950 (died in captivity February 1951)
Born Mobile, Mobile County, Alabama
Loss location: POW Camp 5, Pyoktong, North Korea (captivity death location; captured near Kunu-ri)
Corporal, U.S. Army; Headquarters Company, 9th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division; Chongchon River / Kunu-ri withdrawal, December 1, 1950
Missing in action — DPAA lists Cpl. Harold Matthew Steele as Unaccounted For (Deferred), profile a0Jt000000eX8UNEA0 (verified 2026-09-28). Captured December 1, 1950 near Kunu-ri during the 2nd Infantry Division fighting withdrawal; marched to Camp 5 at Pyoktong; fellow POWs reported death from exposure/pneumonia in February 1951; not identified among remains returned after hostilities. Memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and on the Korean War Veterans Memorial Wall. Birth date and Mobile, Alabama, from ABMC Silent Heroes profile. Deferred is an analytic category, not a recovered grave.
Harold Matthew Steele was born in Mobile, Alabama, on April 30, 1929, and grew up in the Maysville neighborhood with his parents Thomas and Catherine and a younger brother. He left Heart of Mary High School for the Army in March 1948, trained at Fort Dix, and spent two years at Fort Lewis before the 9th Infantry — the Manchus — shipped into Pusan at the end of July 1950.
By late November the regiment was north on the Chongchon line when Chinese forces hit. On the fighting withdrawal from Kunu-ri toward Sunchon — the gauntlet that tore up the 2nd Infantry Division — Steele was captured on December 1. He was marched to Camp 5 at Pyoktong. Fellow prisoners later told the Army he died there of exposure and pneumonia in February 1951. He has not been identified among remains returned after the armistice.
DPAA profile a0Jt000000eX8UNEA0 still lists him Unaccounted For, analytical category Deferred. He is on the Courts of the Missing in Honolulu and on the Korean War Veterans Memorial Wall. A camp death report without a returned body is not a closed grave.
- Publication
- NN-HERO-1950-025
- Content hash
- 14fd32c0 032608d5 369cbd01 6a161f6a 2ac6d458 061059dd b9d65d1e d118fd51
- Base anchor
- 0xdab3e8 325de463 31aec8c1 aa954dd2 47f67505 ebbef6f8 c33c92b7 c786edfd bb
Base stores the content hash, publication number, memorial id, and timestamp — not the full obituary text. The complete memorial remains on Notice Nearby. This is not a legal affidavit.