REMAINS OF A YOUNG WWII SOLDIERS MACEO A. WAS 20 YEARS WHEN HE WAS KILLED IN THE BATTLE OF CINQUALE CANAL.

 REMAINS OF A YOUNG WWII SOLDIERS MACEO A. WAS 20 YEARS WHEN HE WAS KILLED IN THE BATTLE OF CINQUALE CANAL.

It was a bloody battle, fought in the rain and mud as enemy artillery pounded the Americans crossing the waterway.

A young WWII soldier’s remains could be those of Spike Lee’s lost cousin.

Maceo A. Walker was 20 when he was killed in the battle of the Cinquale Canal, a little-remembered, four-day struggle between men of the segregated African American 92nd Division and German forces in northern Italy during World War II.

It was a bloody battle, fought in the rain and mud as enemy artillery pounded the Americans crossing the waterway in 1945.

 Walker, a native of Baltimore and the only child of a butler and his wife, was lost in the chaos. His body was never found.

Seventy-five years later, Army genealogists, seeking to put names to unidentified remains of some of the dozens of men killed in the battle, could find only two living relatives of Walker’s who might provide DNA for family comparison.

One, a second cousin, was a man in New York City named Shelton Lee, who went by the nickname, Spike. The other was Lee’s brother, David.

While experts later determined that DNA from the famous filmmaker and his brother could not be used for comparisons because they were on another branch of the family tree, the Pentagon gained a high-profile ally in its effort to help African American families who may have relatives missing in World War II.

Earlier this year, Spike Lee made a public service video announcement for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), urging people who think they might have a relative who went missing in the war to contact the agency.

It was a bloody battle, fought in the rain and mud as enemy artillery pounded the Americans crossing the waterway in 1945. Walker, a native of Baltimore and the only child of a butler and his wife, was lost in the chaos. His body was never found.

Seventy-five years later, Army genealogists, seeking to put names to unidentified remains of some of the dozens of men killed in the battle, could find only two living relatives of Walker’s who might provide DNA for family comparison.

One, a second cousin, was a man in New York City named Shelton Lee, who went by the nickname, Spike. The other was Lee’s brother, David.

While experts later determined that DNA from the famous filmmaker and his brother could not be used for comparisons because they were on another branch of the family tree, the Pentagon gained a high-profile ally in its effort to help African American families who may have relatives missing in World War II.

Earlier this year, Spike Lee made a public service video announcement for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), urging people who think they might have a relative who went missing in the war to contact the agency.

“It’s not just my cousin,” Lee said in an interview at the time, “but all those brothers in the 92nd Division. Buffalo Soldiers, who fought for this country, who believe in this country, and came home to the United States and were still not full-class citizens.”

On June 21, experts working on a project to identify lost men of the famous Black division, exhumed from a cemetery in Italy two bodies of soldiers from the 92nd killed in the fighting there.

One set of remains, designated X-124, was initially recovered near the Cinquale Canal after the battle, and experts wondered if it could be Lee’s second cousin, officials said.

The bodies were exhumed from the Florence American Cemetery, where almost 4,400 U.S. service members who perished during World War II’s Italian campaign are buried. They will be flown to a government laboratory in Nebraska for analysis.

The work is part of an effort by the DPAA to account for 53 men of the much maligned 92nd Division who were listed as missing in action during World War II. The agency has already accounted for hundreds of service members missing from the war.

“They were essentially fighting a war on two fronts,” said Sarah A. Barksdale, a DPAA historian working on the project: One on the battlefield, and one in the segregated Army and segregated America.

The project “is not going to make up for the treatment they received,” she said. “But I think it’s really important to make sure that they’re part of our country’s memory of World War II.”

So far, only three from the division have been identified. And the DPAA says it has been hampered, in part, by the difficulty in locating living relatives willing to provide their DNA for comparison with the DNA from unidentified remains.

Even when relatives are found, African Americans can be suspicious of government intentions and wary of providing DNA, officials said.

The government has a history of unethical medical treatment of African Americans, most notably during the notorious Tuskegee experiment of the mid 1900s, in which infected participants in a syphilis study were not told a treatment for the disease had been found.

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