HONOLULU — The US military plans to exhume the remains of 88 sailors and Marines who were killed when the ship sank The USS Arizona was bombed During the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor They are buried as unknown in Honolulu Cemetery.
It’s part of an effort to use advances in DNA technology to link names to people the military was unable to identify after the air attack 85 years ago.
Removals from National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific It is scheduled to begin in November or December, Kelly McCaig, director of the POW/Department of Defense Accounting Agency, said Thursday in a statement.
About eight sets of remains will be removed every two to three weeks, and DNA will be compared with samples collected from family members of missing soldiers.
Dozens of ships sank, capsized or were damaged in the bombing of the Hawaii Naval Base on December 7, 1941, which plunged the United States into World War II.
The identification efforts follow previous projects dating back a decade to use DNA to identify the unknown at Pearl Harbor. Agency Hundreds have been identified Of the crew members USS OklahomaThe USS West Virginia and other ships used similar methods.
The Arizona ship sank just nine minutes after it was bombed, killing 1,177 people, nearly half the number of soldiers killed in the attack. Today, the warship still lies where it hit the bottom, with more than 900 sailors and Marines buried inside.
The remains in this underwater grave will remain where they are. Only bodies from the cemetery will be exhumed.
Robert Edwin Cline was a 22-year-old Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class when he was killed in Arizona. Kevin Klein, 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 heard that some crew members were buried as unknowns in the cemetery.
Klein doesn’t have high expectations that his great uncle will be among those identified. But he believes the families who get a DNA match, some of whom still suffer from “generational grief,” will find some closure.
He shared the story of a woman who was confused about why she was constantly sad at Christmas. She later noted that her grandmother, who lost a son in Arizona, and her mother, who lost her brother, never celebrated the holiday because it came only weeks after the anniversary of his death.
“As she got older, she realized that her grandmother and mother were still grieving this loss,” Klein said. “And it fell on her too.”
The POW/Department of Defense Accounting Agency, part of the Department of Defense, He resisted exhumation Arizona has been sitting around for years, saying it wouldn’t be practical because it contains medical and dental records and DNA samples of relatives for only a small percentage of men — just 1% of families as of 2021.
Klein and the organization he founded, Operation 85has spent the past three years locating families and arranging for them to share their DNA. Only about 15 of the 1,500 people contacted declined to participate.
So far, family members of 626 sailors and Marines have shared their DNA, Klein said. This means that less than 60% of the crew are still missing, and sample samples are still arriving.
Klein was frustrated and even angry at the military’s past reluctance. But his feelings changed.
“I’m glad we were able to pull this together and get through this tough thing,” Klein said.
The remains will be transported to the agency’s laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam for analysis. The DNA samples will be sent to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The decision to eliminate the unknown in Arizona was first reported by the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes.