US aims to exhume and identify 88 USS Arizona crew members buried as unknowns after Pearl Harbor
HONOLULU– The U.S. military plans to exhume the remains of 88 sailors and Marines killed in the bombing of the USS Arizona during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and who were buried as unknown in a Honolulu cemetery.
It’s part of an effort to use advances in DNA technology to attach names to those the military couldn’t identify after the aerial assault 85 years ago.
Exhumations at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific are expected to begin in November or December, Kelly McKeague, director of the Defense POW/MIA accounting agency, said in a statement Thursday.
About eight sets of remains will be removed every two to three weeks, and the DNA will be compared to samples taken from family members of the missing soldiers.
Dozens of ships sank, capsized or were damaged during the Dec. 7, 1941, bombing of the Hawaiian naval base that catapulted the United States into World War II.
The identification effort follows previous projects dating back a decade to use DNA for Pearl Harbor unknowns. The agency identified hundreds of crew members from the USS Oklahoma, the USS West Virginia and other ships using similar methods.
The Arizona sank just nine minutes after being bombed, and its 1,177 deaths represent nearly half of the servicemen killed in the attack. Today, the battleship still lies where it hit bottom, with more than 900 sailors and Marines buried inside.
The remains in this underwater tomb will remain where they are. Only those from the cemetery will be exhumed.
Robert Edwin Kline was a 22-year-old artilleryman second class when he was killed on the Arizona. Kevin Kline, a real estate agent in northern Virginia, said he was always told his great-uncle’s remains were on the ship. Only a few years ago he learned that some of the crew had been buried as unknown in a cemetery.
Kline doesn’t have much expectation that his great-uncle will be among those identified. But he thinks families who get a DNA match, some of whom continue to struggle with “generational grief,” will be able to move on.
He shared the story of a woman who wondered why she was always so sad at Christmas. She then noted that her grandmother, who lost a son on the Arizona, and her mother, who lost her brother, never celebrated the holiday because it came just weeks after the anniversary of her death.
“As she got older, she realized that her grandmother and mother were still grieving over this loss,” Kline said. “And it fell on her too.”
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, part of the Department of Defense, resisted exhuming Arizona’s remains for years, saying it would not be pragmatic because it only had medical and dental records and DNA samples from relatives for a small portion of the men — just 1% of families in 2021.
Kline and the organization he founded, Operation 85, have spent the past three years locating families and getting them to share DNA. Only 15 of the 1,500 people he contacted refused to participate.
So far, family members of 626 sailors and Marines have shared their DNA, Kline said. This represents just under 60% of the crew members still missing, and sample kits continue to arrive.
Kline was frustrated and even exasperated by the military’s past reluctance. But his feelings have changed.
“I’m glad we were able to put this together and make it a no,” Kline said.
The remains will be transported to the agency’s laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam for analysis. DNA samples will be sent to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.
The decision to exhume the Arizona unknowns was first reported by the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes.
