For families, closure to the day of infamy
Pearl Harbor remains ID’d, including League City man
Betty Thomson Perkins remembers the last time she saw her brother Dick Thomson. It was late August 1941, when the Navy battleship he served on docked briefly in California.
Her parents drove west from League City on Route 66 for days. Perkins spent her 10th birthday that weekend in San Francisco with the brother she called her “champion,” who always defended her when the three other boys in the family pestered her.
Perkins, now 88 and living in Beeville, also remembers the day three months later — 78 years ago today — when radio reports delivered news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, where
Thomson’s battleship, the USS Oklahoma, was moored.
A telegram arrived a few days later confirming that Seaman 2nd Class Richard J. Thomson, 19, was among 429 crew members of the Oklahoma who were unaccounted for and presumed dead.
“That was a very bleak day,” Perkins recalled.
Like thousands of other family members who lost relatives in the attack, Perkins and her family were unable to give Thomson a proper burial. His remains could not be identified in the wreckage. Until this year.
In March, the Defense POW/ MIA Accounting Agency announced it was able to identify Thomson’s among the exhumed remains of the USS Oklahoma crew, part of a renewed effort this decade to identify the 394 sailors and Marines aboard the ship who were presumed dead but never identified.
Thomson is one of 236 Oklahoma crewmen — including at least six other Texans — the POW/MIA agency has been able to identify
in the past several years. It’s now conducting similar projects for the USS West Virginia and the USS California.
“It’s a daunting task but an important one,” said Lee Tucker, a spokesman for the agency. “It’s a national imperative to not only provide answers to the families, but we also owe it to those service members who gave the ultimate sacrifice.”
Five other Texans who were assigned to the Oklahoma remain unaccounted for, along with 95 others assigned to different ships, according to the agency’s database of missing service members. Eighty-three of them were serving on the USS Arizona, which exploded and sank with remains that weren’t recovered.
A total of 2,403 U.S. personnel were killed during the surprise attack and 1,178 were wounded.
The POW/MIA agency’s identification project has its origins in the three years immediately following the attack, when the Navy recovered remains from the Oklahoma. Those remains were interred at the Halawa and Nu’uanu Cemeteries in Hawaii until 1947.
They were then disinterred and taken to a laboratory at Schofield
Barracks in Honolulu for testing, but the effort could identify only 35 of the men. In 1950, the rest of the remains were labeled nonrecoverable and were buried in 62 caskets at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the “Punchbowl.”
Lee said analysts did their best to place what they thought were individual remains in each casket.
Ray Emory, an independent researcher and Pearl Harbor survivor, contacted the agency nearly 20 years ago after learning that at least one set of remains could be individually identified if it was disinterred for a forensic examination.
The first tests were done in 2003. They led to the identification of five USS Oklahoma service members, but the sample contained the DNA of about 100 distinct individuals — an indication of “severe commingling” of the remains, Lee said.
One more casket was disinterred in 2007, yielding another ID, and the agency began taking up the full remains in 2015. It has used DNA analysis and other evidence to identify 236 of 394 missing sailors and Marines.
They were able to identify Thomson’s remains using a DNA sample from Perkins and a niece.
“It’s a wonder that they did,” Perkins said. “It’s amazing what they could do now.”
In June, Thomson’s remains were brought home to League City, and were buried next to those of his two brothers, who enlisted in the Navy after his death, and his parents. Thomson had a full military funeral, with hundreds in attendance. Perkins said three admirals were among those in the crowd.
“It was really impressive,” she said.
Every time a sailor or Marine is identified, a rosette is placed next to his or her name on the Walls of the Missing at the Punchbowl.
Perkins and her surviving brother are the “only two left” in the family, Perkins said.
After nearly eight decades, survivors of the attack and veterans of World War II are rapidly disappearing.
As of Sept. 30, just 389,292 of the more than 16 million American veterans of the war still were alive, including 22,704 in Texas, according to the National World War II Museum.
Perkins she said she was happy that Thomson got his rosette while she and her surviving brother were alive, and that they were able bury him at home.
“We always wondered what he was thinking at that time,” Perkins said of that Dec. 7 so long ago. “He was a real home boy. He loved home. We know he was thinking of that.”