SAN DIEGO SAILOR KILLED AT PEARL HARBOR FINALLY ID’D
He was on battleship Oklahoma when it was hit; burial set for March
His name was Harry E. Walker. He was 36 years old. He hailed from San Diego. And for nearly 80 years, his unidentified remains were among 429 battleship Oklahoma crewmen killed when Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Finally, thanks to DNA and forensic analysis, Navy Storekeeper 1st Class Walker is now accounted for.
On Thursday, the De- fense Prisoner of War/Miss- ing in Action Accounting Agency announced that Walker’s remains had been identified last spring. It came as part of a yearslong effort to identify the remains of hundreds of sailors killed on the Oklahoma when it capsized.
Walker was assigned to the battleship, which was moored off Ford Island in Pearl Harbor, when it was attacked.
According to the National WWII
Museum recounting of the incident, the Oklahoma was struck by at least five torpedoes. The large ship quickly capsized — about 12 minutes.
Just 32 men were rescued. Trapped inside were the bodies of 429 crew members.
From December 1941 through June 1944, the Navy recovered the remains of crew members, and interred them in Halawa and Nu’uanu military cemeteries on the island of Oahu, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
In 1947, two years after the end of World War II, the American Graves Registration Service had the remains taken from the cemeteries to the Central Identification Laboratory at Schofield Barracks, an Army installation also on Oahu.
But they could only figure out the names of 35 of the fallen Oklahoma crew members.
The rest of the unidentified remains were buried in 46 plots at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, commonly called Punchbowl, in Honolulu. And in October 1949, those who could not
be identified were classified as non-recoverable. Walker’s name was on that list.
More than 65 years passed. Then in 2015, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency went to work trying to identify the remains of Oklahoma victims buried at Punchbowl.
Walker’s remains were identified using dental and anthropological analysis as well as mitochondrial DNA analysis.
In December — marking 80 years since the attack on Pearl Harbor — The Washington Post reported that the Defense POA/MIA Accounting Agency closed down the program. Their efforts had identified the remains of almost 400 Oklahoma victims. Those who could not be identified were reburied at Punchbowl.
Walker’s name is among others listed on the Walls of the Missing at Punchbowl. Now that Walker has been accounted for, a rosette will be placed next to his name.
He will be buried in California next month.