The Pentagon is considering ordering the exhumation of nearly 400 sailors and Marines who died on the battleship USS Oklahoma on Dec. 7, 1941, and were buried as "unknowns" at Punchbowl cemetery, so they can be identified and returned to families.
Those exhumations could be followed by the disinterment of unknowns killed on the battleships California and West Virginia,and other World War II losses, as the U.S. military tries to increase its annual identification of Americans missing from past wars.
"No decision has been made on USS Oklahoma disinterment yet, but it is under review and has been discussed at the highest level," said Air Force Lt. Col. Melinda Morgan, a spokeswoman for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
The move would be an unprecedented step toward the identification of Pearl Harbor defenders whose remains were unidentifiable three-quarters of a century ago in the aftermath of the bomb blasts, flames, oil and twisted ship metal from the Japanese aerial attacks.
A decision is expected to come from Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work. A decision to exhume the Oklahoma casualties would go against the Navy’s wishes, with the service stating it wanted to maintain the "sanctity" of the graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, the formal name of Punchbowl. The cost of disinterment also was raised as a concern.
However, officials with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, tasked with investigating, recovering and identifying missing American war dead, use words such as "favorable" and "optimistic" to describe the expected outcome of the current Oklahoma exhumation review.
"The families really want this," said Indiana resident Lisa Ridge, whose grandfather Paul Andrews Nash was 26 when he died on the Oklahoma and is buried as an "unknown" at Punchbowl.
"My mom and granny never had closure," Ridge said. "Neither of them could ever really speak of it or ever really feel like it was for sure. I think they always had doubts. So my brothers and my dad and I, we just need to know for sure."
Impetus to disinter the Dec. 7 casualties also has come from lawmakers and potential litigation, with the Pentagon concerned that Congress could legislate exhumation if it doesn’t act, or that families could sue, a DPAA official said.
The 429 deaths on the Oklahoma were second in quantity only to the 1,177 who perished aboard the USS Arizona, according to the National Park Service, which maintains a memorial to the Oklahoma dead on Ford Island.
The Oklahoma took up to nine torpedoes on its port side in rapid succession and rolled over, trapping more than 400 men inside, the park service said.
Thirty-two were rescued by frantic civilian shipyard crews trying to cut through the keel of the ship with pneumatic hammers and torches, according to the government agency.
Military accounting indicates that 387 Oklahoma crew members remain buried as "unknowns" at Punchbowl.
The Navy has resisted an exhumation plan put forth by the former Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command based in Hawaii, which was recently merged with two other organizations to create the DPAA.
In 2013 the Navy said the Oklahoma sailors and Marines would be "outside the sanctity of the grave" again (the crew members were initially buried in Nuuanu or Halawa cemeteries prior to being moved to Punchbowl), and that DNA testing and accounting could take many years and still leave some crew members unidentified.
Recent reporting by the DPAA, which is still partially based in Hawaii, suggests that the exhumation of 61 caskets containing the commingled remains of the 387 Oklahoma crew members could be completed over six months.
With 84 percent of family DNA reference samples and 90 percent of dental records available, 80 percent of the individuals could be identified within five years, the command said.
"I would say go ahead and do it, because it supports the mission of full accountability," said retired Marine Col. Gene Castagnetti, former director of Punchbowl cemetery.
The DPAA’s stated mission is to "provide the fullest possible accounting for our missing personnel to their families and the nation."
The ability to identify the men and return them to families is possible because of advances in science, including DNA analysis, made in the past 15 years. In addition, congressional pressure has been placed on the military to increase identifications of MIAs, an effort that costs more than $100 million a year.
Congress mandated in 2009 that the Pentagon have the capacity to identify up to 200 MIAs a year by fiscal 2015 — a goal accounting officials acknowledged wouldn’t be met.
The Hawaii command identified 87 individuals in fiscal 2014, according to an internal report.
More than 83,000 Americans remain missing. Of those, between 25,000 and 35,000 are believed to be recoverable.
The former JPAC sought to disinter the Oklahoma remains in 2013 to help it meet the benchmark of 200 annual identifications. The plan would be to lay out the remains for analysis at a lab at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.
Other "unknowns" who are candidates for subsequent identification include about 100 casualties from the Battle of Tarawa in 1943 and nearly 400 service members, mostly soldiers, who died in 1945 as captives on the Japanese "hell ship" Enoura Maru.
The accounting command continues to exhume and identify Korean War "unknowns" from Punchbowl, with 21 service members disinterred and 10 identifications made in fiscal 2014.
The exhumation process for the Oklahoma unknowns already has begun in a sense — with a casket unearthed in 2003 as a result of research by Pearl Harbor survivor Ray Emory, who lives in Kahala.
Using military records and personnel files, Emory confirmed the identities of 27 men killed on the Oklahoma buried as unknowns. JPAC, the Hawaii accounting command, exhumed one casket of commingled remains and identified five men — Lawrence Boxrucker, Eldon Wyman, Irvin Thompson, Charles Swanson and Gerald Lehman — for return to families.
According to Emory’s research, 22 other identified men are buried in five caskets in three graves. Emory, 93, said it’s long past time for the exhumation and identification of all the Oklahoma crew members.
"It’s been so long, it’s been dragging out," Emory said.
A year ago a bipartisan group of 15 U.S. senators pressed the Defense Department on behalf of family members to disinter the caskets containing the 22 other men.
Among that group of 22 is the grandfather of Ridge, the Indiana woman.
The longer the Defense Department waits, "the fewer family members remain," Ridge said. "Maybe that is their hope: Wait long enough, and no one alive at the time will be left to push for this. Well, this family, for one, will never stop the battle to at least identify our grandfather and give him a marked grave."
Paul Goodyear, an Oklahoma crew member, was a strong proponent of exhuming his shipmates — whom he would call "kids" — for return to families, before he died last year at age 96.
"About 135 percent," Goodyear said in 2013 of the interest level. "Not only amongst the families, but amongst the little towns, the communities that these kids came from."
The Arizona man said he had seen entire towns turn out with banners and firetrucks for the return of fallen service members from World War II.
"I cannot tell you how many brothers and sisters, grandsons and granddaughters, are just dying to have those kids home," he said.
