Military IDs 100 killed in Pearl Harbor

HONOLULU — The military has identified 100 sailors and Marines killed when the USS Oklahoma capsized during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 76 years ago, officials said last week.

The milestone comes two years after the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency dug up nearly 400 sets of remains from a Hawaii cemetery.

Officials exhumed the bodies after determining advances in forensic science and genealogical help from families could make identifications possible. The buried Marines and sailors have been classified as missing since World War II.

The agency has said it expects to identify about 80 percent of the battleship’s missing crew members by 2020.

The most recent identification came last week, the agency said in a news release. The person has not been named as officials were waiting to notify family.

A sailor from Massachusetts was another person identified. The funeral service and reburial for Radioman 3rd Class Howard W. Bean, of Everett, took place Wednesday at Arlington National Cemetery.

Bean was on the crew of the USS Oklahoma, which capsized after sustaining multiple torpedo hits during the surprise attack on Dec. 7, 1941. Bean, 27, was one of 429 USS Oklahoma crewmen who perished.

The remains were exhumed in 2015 and tested using modern DNA technology not available in the 1940s.

Bean was identified by comparing DNA with living relatives, dental comparisons and circumstantial evidence.

Many of those identified have been buried in their hometowns. Others were reinterred at the National Memorial Cemetery in the Pacific, in an extinct volcanic crater in Honolulu.

Altogether, 429 people on board the battleship were killed in the attack that plunged the United States into World War II. Only 35 were identified in the years immediately after.

Many remains buried in Hawaii were mingled with other sailors and Marines. The 388 men disinterred in 2015 were buried in 46 plots.

The agency has been studying dental records and DNA to make identifications. It sent exhumed remains to a lab at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, for analysis. The lab sent some 5,000 samples to a military DNA lab.

The agency has family DNA reference samples for 85 percent of the unaccounted for Marines and sailors.

More than 2,400 sailors, Marines and soldiers were killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Oklahoma’s casualties were second only to the USS Arizona, which lost 1,177 men. The Arizona is still resting at the bottom of the harbor with most of its crew entombed on board.

Marco Garcia / Associated Press Military pallbearers in 2015 escort the exhumed remains of unidentified crew members of the USS Oklahoma killed in the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor that were disinterred from a gravesite at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.

Audrey McAvoy / Associated Press A gravestone identifying the resting place of seven unknowns from the USS Oklahoma at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.