By Alfred Acenas
EBC Hawaii Bureau
PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (Eagle News) — The majority of servicemen who died aboard the USS Oklahoma when Pearl harbor was attacked by the Japanese in 1941 have been identified.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said 388 people have been identified, as nearly 86 percent of the remains the military has exhumed.
“Even more remarkable than the collective success of this project are all the families who were able to receive the remains of their loved one, whose last measure of devotion was made aboard the Oklahoma,” said agency director Kelly McKeague.
Plans are underway to hold ceremonies in Hawaii and the U.S. mainland to honor the fallen sailors and Marines.
Their remains will be turned over to the U.S. Navy for burial at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu on December 7, the 80th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The USS Oklahoma was moored at Ford Island, Pearl Harbor, when it was attacked by Japanese aircraft. She sustained multiple torpedo hits, which caused it to quickly capsize. The attack on the ship resulted in the deaths of 429 crewmen.
From December 1941 to June 1944, Navy personnel recovered the remains of the deceased crew. The remains were interred in various cemeteries on Oahu.
In September 1947, the American Graves Registration Service exhumed the remains from civilian cemeteries and transferred them to the U.S. Army’s Central Identification Laboratory at Central Oahu. Staff there confirmed the identities of 35 men from the Oklahoma.
The unidentified remains were buried in 46 plots at the Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. In October 1949, a military board classified those who could not be identified as non-recoverable.
In 2003, a single casket containing unidentified Oklahoma remains was exhumed.
Since then, anthropologists and odontologists have sorted and analyzed over 13,000 bones and associate them to missing sailors and Marines.
Genealogists from the Navy and Marine Corps Casualty Offices conducted research to find family members so that DNA testing could be conducted by scientists at the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System.
(Eagle News Service)