High Point welcomes home World War II POW after 83 years

High Point received one of its own back at Piedmont Triad International Airport, where a flag-draped casket and military escort marked the return of U.S. Army First Sgt. David D. Crouse after more than eight decades missing from home.

Crouse enlisted in High Point in 1908, long before World War II turned the Philippines into one of the war’s most punishing battlegrounds. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency says the Army sergeant was 55 when he was accounted for on April 22, 2025, after being captured in Bataan with the 808th Military Police Company, then dying of beriberi on November 22, 1942, at Cabanatuan Prison Camp in Nueva Ecija Province.

His return to Guilford County closed a chapter that began with Japan’s invasion of the Philippine Islands in December 1941 and the collapse of American and Filipino defenses in 1942. After the surrender of Bataan on April 9 and Corregidor on May 6, thousands of service members were captured and forced into prison camps. Crouse was buried in a communal grave at Cabanatuan with other deceased American prisoners of war, and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency says he is memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at Manila American Cemetery.

For family members Susan Hurst and Terry, the homecoming carried the weight of a burial and a reunion at once. One relative called it “his day,” a blunt reminder that the obligation to the dead does not expire with time. For relatives who had lived for decades with a missing name instead of a grave, the return brought a measure of finality that wartime loss had denied them for generations.

Crouse’s funeral is planned at Cumby Family Funeral Home in Archdale, followed by burial with military honors at Floral Garden Park Cemetery. For High Point, the moment tied a local enlistment more than a century old to a global accounting effort that is still working through World War II losses, one soldier at a time, long after the guns fell silent.