Error

One day last March Charles Henry Koch, Minneapolis taxicab driver, got a telegram from the Navy that his son, Charles Herbert Koch, 20, had been killed March 12 in action at sea. A week later the body arrived. Father Koch, learning that the body had been disfigured, did not look at his son, preferring to remember him as he was.

The funeral at Fort Snelling National Cemetery was impressive; the procession was four blocks long. Father Koch, who had fought in World War I, took home with him the flag that covered the casket.

But a few days later he began to wonder when he found that a check he had sent his son in February had been cashed in San Francisco March 11. Then came a letter from his son--the handwriting was unmistakably his--dated March 31. "Well, Dad," it said, "I am finally in a position where I can write you again . . . I'm on a different ship now. . . ."

Father Koch sent a frantic telegram to the Navy.

The body was not that of Charles Herbert Koch, but of Curtis Herman Koch of Oak Park, Ill. They had been in training at Great Lakes Naval Station at the same time. Curtis Herman was killed when the tanker on which he was a gunner was torpedoed off the Atlantic Coast.

Last week the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, doing its part to correct the error, approved a bill to pay Father Koch $397.31 for unnecessary funeral expenses.

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