100 killed at Pearl Harbor identified

The battleship Oklahoma crew members had been listed as missing. Of the 429 crew members killed aboard the Oklahoma on Dec. 7, 1941, only 35 were identified in the years immediately after World War II.

HONOLULU — The military has identified 100 sailors and Marines killed when the U.S. battleship Oklahoma capsized during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 76 years ago.

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

Officials had the bodies exhumed after determining that advances in forensic science and genealogical help from families could make identifications possible.

The buried crew members have been classified as missing since the attack on Dec. 7, 1941. The agency has said it expects to identify about 80% of them by 2020.

The most recent identification came in late November, the agency said in a news release. The family hasn’t been notified yet, however, so the name hasn’t been released.

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

One reburial is planned for Dec. 6: Navy Radioman 3rd Class Howard W. Bean of Everett, Mass., will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Bean was 27 when he was killed.

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

Many remains buried in Hawaii were commingled with those of other sailors and Marines. The 388 sets of remains 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 in Nebraska for analysis. The lab sent about 5,000 samples to a military DNA lab.

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

More than 2,300 sailors, Marines and soldiers were killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Oklahoma’s casualties were second only to the those of the battleship 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.

Audrey McAvoy Associated Press A GRAVESTONE marks the site where seven crew members were buried in a Honolulu cemetery, where nearly 400 sets of remains were removed for analysis.