On Memorial Day in 1945, the year World War II ended, Oahu paid respect to its war dead not at Punchbowl, but at a cemetery that’s long gone and few now know even existed.

Many of those killed in the Dec. 7, 1941, attack were laid to rest at Halawa Naval Cemetery, some in blood-soaked pine boxes.

The number of dead — 2,403 service members and civilians — was overwhelming, and the military turned to Halawa, Oahu Cemetery, Schofield Barracks and the Naval Air Station at Kaneohe Bay to bury them all.

"Burial of remains was commenced on Dec. 8 in the Oahu Cemetery, Hono­lulu, necessary additional land being obtained for the Navy plot there," said a Dec. 19, 1941, memo from the U.S. Naval Hospital at Pearl Harbor.

"On Dec. 9 it became evident that sufficient land was not available in Oahu Cemetery for this purpose," the report states. "By direction of the commandant (of the 14th Naval District), a site for a new cemetery was selected by the public works department. This site was approved by the district medical officer and remaining burials were made in this new cemetery."

That site was "in the Red Hill area, Halawa."

"When present construction work in that vicinity is completed, the new cemetery will be in a beautiful location and it is hoped will be made into a new national cemetery," the Navy report said. "It is suggested that this new cemetery be called the Halawa National Cemetery."

That never came to pass, and although burials continued at Halawa into early 1947, about 1,500 graves — some containing multiple sets of remains — were exhumed later that year.

The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl buried remains for the first time in 1949. Hawaii State Veterans Cemetery in Kaneohe opened in 1991.

Today, there’s not much left of the Halawa cemetery, the site of which is sandwiched between Moanalua and H-3 freeways and Halawa Valley Road, but the sacrifice that was entombed there lives on in records, photos and memories.

"It was a very special place in particular for war dead from Pearl Harbor," said Daniel Martinez, chief historian for the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument.

His grandfather, Harlan Gray, was a heavy equipment operator who helped dig some of the graves.

"He remembers seeing these wooden boxes of bodies and some of them blood-stained because none of those bodies were (embalmed) for burial," Martinez said. "They were placed in boxes almost immediately."

Navy burial records obtained by Pearl Harbor survivor Ray Emory show there were more than 115 burials at Halawa on Dec. 9, 1941, alone.

Those burials included:

» Harvey Rushford, who was on the USS Nevada and had just turned 18. He died of second-degree burns to his head, arms and legs.

» William Harton, 21, who was on the USS West Virginia, and died of drowning.

» Michael Yugovich, who was on the USS Helena and also was 21. Yugovich died of third-degree burns.

The list of the Dec. 7 dead, handwritten in cursive, runs into the hundreds for Oahu Cemetery (sometimes called Nuuanu Naval Cemetery) and Halawa.

Emory, now 93, and his shipmates on the light cruiser USS Honolulu were among the lucky ones that day.

The Kahala resident manned a 50-caliber machine gun and a swooping Japanese plane was hit by something that stopped it in midair and caused it to explode as its prop kept spinning through the air.

"Who knows who hit what," Emory said. "Everybody was shooting at it."

An aerial bomb exploded nearby and caved in the side of the ship, but no one on the Honolulu was killed, Emory said.

For decades, Emory has sought to identify service members killed in the attack buried as "unknowns" at Punchbowl — some of whom came from Halawa — and his search for and discovery of the Halawa gravesite grew out of his research.

"I’m so interested in getting the layout and the size of it, where it was," Emory said of the old cemetery. "Other than that, I know from the records who got buried there."

His hunt for the Halawa cemetery site took him to the state Department of Transportation Highways Division construction field office, a series of office trailers on the leased Navy land.

The 1937 bridge that went over nearby North Halawa Stream as part of the old highway access — which remains but is unused today — was a key reference point to locate the cemetery.

"I just started walking up there one day and I found that damn bridge down there behind a bunch of brush, and I went from there," said Emory, who remains a crusty Navy chief petty officer after all these decades.

The sea of white crosses with a name or "unidentified" on each are long gone.

Between August and September 1947, the U.S. military exhumed 18 remains at Kaneohe Bay, 339 from Oahu Cemetery, and 1,516 at Halawa, according to a 1957 government report.

About 135 sailors, Marines and spouses remain buried at Oahu Cemetery, the Navy said.