The Pentagon announced Tuesday it will take the unprecedented step of exhuming for identification the remains of all 388 sailors and Marines from the USS Oklahoma buried as "unknowns" at Punchbowl cemetery years after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work approved the disinterment and also established a broader policy that defines threshold criteria for disinterment of additional unknowns.
The exhumation of 61 Oklahoma caskets with commingled remains is expected to start in three to six weeks and be completed within six months, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said. Identifications would be completed within five years.
The decision to disinter so many Punchbowl unknowns and the policy shift accompanying it are ways to step up the number of MIAs identified annually by the Pentagon. More than 83,000 Americans remain missing. Of those, between 25,000 and 35,000 are believed to be recoverable.
Bob Valley of Escanaba, Mich., said he received a call Tuesday from the Navy Casualty Office in Millington, Tenn., informing him of the Oklahoma decision.
His 19-year-old brother, Lowell, was a fireman down in the boiler room of the ship, which took the brunt of Japanese torpedoes. Eventually the big ship rolled over, trapping hundreds of crew members inside.
"I can hardly talk," said the 82-year-old Valley after hearing the news of the disinterment plan. "Families want some kind of closure."
His parents received a telegram right before Christmas 1941 saying their son was missing, Valley said.
"And then the next telegram they got was on my birthday, Feb. 20, 1942, saying that he had lost his life," Valley said. "And that’s all they ever got. They never got any information about Punchbowl cemetery. They never heard of a Punchbowl cemetery."
His parents "had congressmen working on it trying to get some information. They couldn’t get anything," Valley said.
"It was pretty hard on them. In fact, they didn’t want to give up, and would think he would pop up someplace," Valley said. "They’d see a picture in the paper and say, ‘Oh, that looks like Lowell.’"
Valley said he wants to "bring him home."
"I’ve got a cemetery plot — the family lot in my hometown — and we’ve got a marker there, a government marker for him," he said. "That’s where he would go."
The new Pentagon disinterment policy applies to all unidentified remains from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, the formal name of Punchbowl, and other permanent American military cemeteries.
The policy does not extend to those sailors and Marines lost at sea or to remains entombed in U.S. Navy vessels serving as national memorials, such as the USS Arizona Memorial.
"The secretary of defense and I will work tirelessly to ensure your loved one’s remains will be recovered, identified, and returned to you as expeditiously as possible, and we will do so with dignity, respect and care," Work said in a release. "While not all families will receive an individual identification, we will strive to provide resolution to as many families as possible."
The new threshold criteria for disinterment includes research, family reference samples to compare DNA, obtaining medical and dental records of the missing service members, and having the scientific ability and capacity to identify the remains in a timely manner.
To disinter cases of commingled remains, the department must estimate the ability to identify at least 60 percent of the individuals associated with a group. A likelihood of at least 50 percent identification must be attained for individual unknowns.
DPAA personnel head to remote locations around the world to make recoveries, but American cemeteries such as Punchbowl and Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines will fall under the new expanded disinterment policy, DPAA said.
A common refrain among those who don’t have a relative buried as an unknown is to let them rest in peace at Punchbowl.
But for many families who do have a loved one buried as an unknown, the desire for identification is strong.
Indiana resident Lisa Ridge wants that for her grandfather Paul Andrews Nash, who was 26 when he was killed on the Oklahoma.
"These men are not resting in peace in a mass grave with no identification," Ridge said. "My family members who live today, as well as any future generations that will follow us, deserve the ability to have a place to go and recognize the supreme sacrifice made by this heroic man that only lived a short 26 years."
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 of Kahala.
Using military records and personnel files, Emory confirmed the identities of 27 men killed on the Oklahoma buried as unknowns. The Pentagon 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 great," Emory said of the decision announced Tuesday. The government is "finally getting with it and doing something."
Punchbowl Director Jim Horton said his crews can disinter the Oklahoma unknowns over time. DPAA said it already exhumes and identifies Korean War unknowns from Punchbowl, with 21 service members disinterred and 10 identifications made in fiscal 2014.
"We’re not talking about going out and digging everything in one week," Horton said. "We’re talking about spreading this out, much the same way we do right now (but with) a little bit faster pace than what we’ve been doing with the Korea unknowns."
Upon disinterment the Oklahoma remains will be transferred to the DPAA laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam for examination, the Pentagon said. Analysis of all available evidence indicates that most USS Oklahoma crew members can be identified.
A total of 429 USS Oklahoma sailors and Marines were killed in the Dec. 7, 1941, attacks.
In the years immediately following the attacks, 35 crew members were positively identified and buried, the Pentagon said.
From June 1942 to May 1944, during salvage operations, other service members’ remains were removed from the ship and interred as unknowns in Nuuanu and Halawa cemeteries.
In 1947 all remains in those cemeteries were disinterred for identification, the Pentagon said. Twenty-seven unknowns from the USS Oklahoma — those that Emory later would research — were proposed for identification based on dental comparisons, but all proposed identifications were disapproved.
By 1950 all unidentified remains associated with the ship were reinterred as unknowns at Punchbowl.
