Upcoming 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor brings end to victim-identification program
Twin brothers Leo and Rudolph Blitz were 16 when they applied to join the Navy. They were so young that their father had to go to the recruiting office in Omaha and give his permission. Rudolph wanted a Navy career. Leo wanted to learn a trade.
It was 1938. Times were hard and the boys lived with their family in a two-bedroom house in a neighborhood of Russian immigrants in Lincoln, Neb. They enlisted that May. Three years later, on Dec. 7, 1941, they were killed when their ship, the USS Oklahoma, was sunk during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
For 78 years, they rested among hundreds of the ship’s fallen who were recovered but never identified, buried as unknowns in a cemetery in Hawaii. Then, in 2019, a remarkable Pentagon forensics project identified them as part of an effort to put names with all of the ship’s unknowns.
Now, after identifying the bones of the Blitz twins and almost 400 other Oklahoma men over six years, the Defense POW/ MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is closing down the program.
On Dec. 7, the 80th anniversary of the attack that plunged the United States into World War II, the last of the remains that could not be identified will be reburied in Honolulu’s National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific known as the “Punchbowl.”
“It marks the end of the project, of all the work that we’ve been doing” said Carrie B. Legarde, the lead DPAA forensic anthropologist on the program. “Not to say that identifications (couldn’t) still occur someday in the future. But our active effort will be over.”
“It’s going to be ... a little bit of relief, and excitement, and I think a bit of sadness too,” she said in a recent interview from the DPAA laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base outside Omaha.
“All the families that we were able to give these answers to,” she said. “It’s pretty emotional. It’s been such a huge part of my life over the last few years. I’m actually getting kind of choked up [talking about it].”
“We’ve done so well, but also thinking about those we weren’t able to individually identify ... (is) a little disappointing,” she said. “But we knew that would happen.”
The battleship’s loss of life at Pearl Harbor totaled 429 sailors and Marines — second only to the 1,100 lost on the USS Arizona, whose wreck remains a hallowed historical site.
Most of those killed were recovered from the tangled wreckage of the ship, which rolled over after it was torpedoed by enemy planes, entombing hundreds inside.
With the limited technology of the time, only 35 of the dead were identified during and after the war. Six more were identified in the early 2000s, the DPAA said.
Six years ago, remains of what turned out to be 388 individuals were exhumed from the Punchbowl, where they had rested as unknowns. They were taken to the DPAA lab in Nebraska and to one in Hawaii for analysis.
Of those, 355 have now been identified — meaning that eight decades after the attack, only 33 of the 429 killed on the Oklahoma on Dec. 7, 1941 have not been individually identified, the DPAA said.
More than 5,000 DNA samples were taken in the quest to identify the men, according to Timothy Mcmahon, director of DNA Operations for the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System.
DPAA experts had to inventory almost 13,000 bones that had been on the ship and in the oily waters of Pearl Harbor, sometimes for months, Legarde said.
After their recovery during the war, they had been buried, then exhumed for initial examination, sorted through twice, and reburied.
When they were exhumed again in 2015, they were found wrapped in white cloth bundles fastened with big safety pins.
The bundles were in 61 rusty caskets in 45 graves. Each casket held five to seven bundles. But one held 22, the DPAA has said.
One casket held nothing but upper arm bones. Another had neck vertebrae from five different people. Often a single skeleton was found to be made of bones from multiple individuals.
Some of the bones still smelled of oil.
Among the remains were those of Navy Musician 1st Class Henri Clay Mason, whose wife, Mary May, lived on Park Road, in Washington, D.C.’S Columbia Heights neighborhood. He was identified in 2018.
Also, the remains of Navy Chief Petty Officer Albert Eugene Hayden, 44, of Mechanicsville, Md. He was identified in 2016 and was buried beside his parents in St. Mary’s County.
And Marine 2nd Lt. Harry H. Gaver Jr., 24, who was born in Annapolis and whose father had taught math at the Naval Academy. He was identified in 2017 and buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
There, too, were the bones of the Barber brothers — Malcom, 22, Leroy, 21, and Randolph, 19, of New London, Wis. They were identified last June. And the Trapp brothers, Harold, 24, and William, 23, of La Porte, Ind., who were identified in 2020.