The remains of this Pearl Harbor sailor, and many others, are finally coming home

KEENE, N.H. — Edwin Chester Hopkins’ casket was draped with an American flag that had hung above the state Capitol. Boy Scouts saluted as the motorcade weaved around the colonial town square to the cemetery, where a military bugler readied to play taps in the dappled sunlight of a cool autumn day.

It was a grand funeral, one of the most memorable this New England town had witnessed, for a young man who had perished just past his 19th birthday. All that was lacking were the copious tears one would expect for someone whose death was so tragic and premature.

None of the several hundred mourners had met Hopkins, not even his near relatives. He was truly an unknown soldier, but the sense of loss, of what might have been, was still palpable. Hopkins was one of 2,403 Americans killed during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the date that would live in infamy.

His ship, the Oklahoma, suffered five torpedo hits, capsized and rolled over with its mast touching the bottom. By the time crews salvaged it two years later, the nation was in the thick of World War II, and nobody had the time, inclination or technical means to sort out the entangled remains of the 429 crewmen dead.

Hopkins’ funeral in mid-October this year was the result of decades of lobbying by family members and POW advocates, as well as leaps in forensic science. As the nation prepares to mark the 75th anniversary of the surprise attack, more and more of those who died that day are finally returning home.

This year alone, the remains of more than 20 sailors from the Oklahoma have been identified and reburied with full military honors — some at Arlington National Cemetery and others at their hometowns.

Eddie Hopkins was 18 in 1940 when he dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Navy. His older brother, Frank, had joined six months earlier. Their decisions were motivated as much by pragmatism as patriotism.

Although their postcard-perfect hometown, renowned for its brilliant fall foliage, now draws thousands of weekend tourists to its quaint bed-and-breakfasts, back then it was barely recovered from the Great Depression. There were dairy farms, cornfields, a woolen mill and a small company that manufactured crates and buckets, but hardly any jobs for a young man with ambition.

Hopkins wrote on his enlistment papers that he had chosen the Navy because he “wanted to learn a trade.” After three months of training in Detroit and Chicago, he earned the rank of fireman third class.

His last communication, dated Sept.

9, 1941, as he was about to board a train to San Francisco harbor, was a postcard of the Oklahoma, the message scrawled in a childish cursive that scrunched up to save space at the bottom, and he mailed with a 1-cent stamp.

“Dear Folks. Here is the picture of the ship I am going to be on. … We are all ready to leave tonight at nine o’clock, Love Eddie.”

‘Nobody talked about it’ Hopkins’ brother, Frank, had three children, and they knew little about the uncle killed at Pearl Harbor. It was a topic their father, a taciturn man, and grandparents, flinty Yankees, were reluctant to discuss.

“It was the white elephant in the room. Nobody talked about it,” said Edwin Hopkins Jr., 72, a retired Navy yard worker who lives in New Jersey and was named after the uncle he never knew.

“My grandparents were New Englanders who hid everything inside and covered it with a smile,” said Faye Hopkins-Boore, 70, his sister, who lives in Lewes, Del.

The unspoken death haunted the family. “I bought a Subaru when I was 35 years old, and I was afraid to tell my grandmother,” Hopkins-Boore recalled. Each year when Dec. 7 rolled around, she would switch off the radio and television to avoid reminders of the anniversary.

It was not that Hopkins death was forgotten. Dillant-Hopkins Airport, adjacent to Keene, had been named for Hopkins and another local son killed in World War II. But the man, or the boy as it were, was something of a cipher. There were only a handful of photos of the teenage Eddie, skinny and jug-eared with a long nose and a cowlick sprouting from the back of his head.

An energetic, take-charge type, Hopkins-Boore had time on her hands after she retired as an operating room nurse, and decided to make it her mission to find out more about this uncle and what happened to his remains.

Each time her grandparents had moved, first from the farmhouse to downtown Keene, and then to Florida, she rummaged through drawers and suitcases looking for old letters. She found nothing — only that last postcard with the picture of the Oklahoma.

But as her father aged, slipping into dementia in his final years, it was like opening a time capsule of the past. The memories spilled out: The one-room schoolhouse he and Eddie attended as children. The frozen stream where they ice-skated. How Eddie raised a calf for the 4-H club and named it Helicopter Petunia.

Sorting the skeletons

Aside from the Arizona, the Oklahoma suffered the most damage and highest casualties in the Pearl Harbor attack. When the ship was turned upright and drained of water in 1943, the salvage crew “literally just shoveled the remains out,” said Natasha Waggoner, a spokeswoman for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

Then workers did something that modern forensic scientists find inexplicable. They sorted the skeletons by like body parts. “They had been underwater for two years so there was no flesh left. They put skulls with skulls, arm bones with arm bones,” Waggoner said.

The various body parts were buried as unknowns in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, nicknamed the Punchbowl for its setting in an extinct volcano in Hawaii.

Hopkins-Boore had started going regularly to Hawaii, strolling through the graves of about 2,760 unknown soldiers from Pearl Harbor and other conflicts. In 2008, just a few months after her father died, she learned something shocking.

An elderly Pearl Harbor survivor, Ray Emory, had been meticulously combing through mortuary documents and found that the Navy knew all along where some of the casualties were buried. Hopkins was among 22 Oklahoma victims who had been tentatively identified through their dental records in 1943 but buried with unknowns because there was no second source of identification.

At first, the families encountered stiff resistance from the Navy. But in 2015, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work issued an order allowing for the Oklahoma remains to be disinterred as part of the Pentagon’s commitment to its “sacred obligation to achieve the fullest possible accounting for U.S. personnel lost in past conflicts.”

On Oct. 15, Hopkins was buried next to the family tombstone his mother had commissioned earlier.