American War Hero · World War II · Notice Nearby
No rights-safe contemporary likeness is on file. The record is the service and the writing, not an invented face.
Rose F. Puchalla
November 30, 1917 – unaccounted for since May 30, 1945
Born Holding Township / Minneapolis, Minnesota (ABMC hometown Minneapolis)
Loss location: Atlantic Ocean / Gulf of Guinea off Drewin Point, Ivory Coast (loss location)
Private First Class, Women's Army Corps; passenger, 1202nd Army Air Force Base Unit (Air Transport Command, Accra); C-47 Skytrain 44-76406 Accra to Roberts Field, Liberia, May 30, 1945
Missing in action — DPAA lists Pfc. Rose F. Puchalla as Unaccounted For (Active Pursuit), profile a0Jt0000000BT5CEAW (verified 2026-09-28). One of eighteen WAC passengers plus three aircrew lost when C-47 44-76406 disappeared May 30, 1945 after distress signals between Accra and Roberts Field; extensive SAR found no crash site. Memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at North Africa American Cemetery, Carthage, Tunisia. Structured ABMC Date of Birth November 30, 1917 (prose on same ABMC profile also says born 1918 — use structured DOB). Active Pursuit is not a recovered grave.
Rose F. Puchalla was born November 30, 1917, and grew up in Minnesota — Holding Township first, then Minneapolis with her mother Agnes and four siblings. She finished eighth grade, worked factory floors through the Depression, and by the early 1940s was at the Foley Company making kitchen tools and wartime canteens. On April 13, 1944, she enlisted in the Women's Army Corps.
By November she was one of about 159 WACs posted to Accra with the Air Transport Command's 1202nd Army Air Force Base Unit — clerks and specialists chosen for maturity and work experience. On the morning of May 30, 1945, she boarded C-47 44-76406 with seventeen other WACs and a crew of three for Roberts Field, Liberia. The flight checked in over Takoradi. About an hour and a half later Roberts Field heard five minutes of clear distress. The airplane never arrived. Searchers never found the wreck.
DPAA profile a0Jt0000000BT5CEAW still lists her Unaccounted For, analytical category Active Pursuit. She is on the Walls of the Missing at Carthage. A June 1945 finding of death and a later non-recoverable designation are paperwork. They are not a grave brought home from the Gulf of Guinea.
- Publication
- NN-HERO-1941-024
- Content hash
- f91fc6af e2712cb9 6656cd6e acb79962 f8e9b3b5 215456ad 5bc8f628 cdb4eebf
- Base anchor
- 0xccb1f1 dfbec699 527a03ef e0eefa8e 13456acd f3b40521 d4001cee 6c3db996 50
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.