The deck of the capsized battleship USS Oklahoma breaks water at Pearl Harbour May 24, 1943. Photo / AP file
The deck of the capsized battleship USS Oklahoma breaks water at Pearl Harbour May 24, 1943. Photo / AP file
The remains of nearly 400 US servicemen killed aboard the battleship USS Oklahoma during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour are to be exhumed for identification, the Pentagon said this week.
Some 429 sailors and marines went down with the Oklahoma after it was hit by torpedoes duringthe surprise attack on December 7, 1941, which drew the US into the Second World War. Yet only 35 of the remains of men killed on the ship were ever identified.
The rest of the remains from the Oklahoma were buried at a Hawaiian cemetery in graves marked "unknown", after being retrieved by divers during salvage operations between 1942 and 1944. Some of those remains were disinterred in 1947, but the US denied requests to attempt identification using dental records, and by 1950 all the unidentified remains from the ship had been reinterred at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.
In 2003, the US Department of Defence lab in Hawaii exhumed one casket and managed to identify the commingled remains of five further servicemen based on evidence provided by Ray Emory, a survivor of the attack who spent years amassing information to help name the dead.
The new plan calls for 61 caskets to be disinterred from 45 separate grave sites. Experts hope to identify as many as 388 crew members from the Oklahoma over the next five years, using new forensic and DNA technology, as well as evidence from the servicemen's surviving family members.
"Recent advances in forensic science and technology, as well as family member assistance in providing genealogical information, have now made it possible to make individual identifications for many service members long buried in graves marked 'unknown'," Robert Work, the US Deputy Secretary of Defence, said in a statement. "We will strive to provide resolution to as many families as possible."
Officers from the US Navy and Marine Corps began notifying the men's surviving next-of-kin, the Pentagon said. Those servicemen whose remains are positively identified will be afforded individual burials with full military honours.
