Ray Emory earned hero status at Pearl Harbor, where he courageously fired back at attacking Japanese planes with a .50-caliber machine gun aboard the light cruiser USS Honolulu.

Later in life the Kahala resident became a legend — waging a much longer battle to add names and other identifying information to the graves of “unknown” casualties from the Dec. 7, 1941, attack buried at Punchbowl cemetery.

On Tuesday the Navy surprised the former chief boatswain’s mate with an honor cordon of sailors that stretched longer than a football field at Pier Bravo 21, where Emory’s ship was moored on the Day of Infamy.

More than 500 sailors were on the pier and “manning the rails” on seven warships. Sailors on the destroyer USS O’Kane gave Emory three “hip, hip, hoorays” as he drove past in a golf cart.

Emory, 97, is moving to Boise, Idaho, to live with his son after Emory’s wife, Jinny, died unexpectedly May 13. Ray and Jinny had married and moved to Hawaii in the mid-1980s.

Emory told sailors, family and friends gathered for a short farewell ceremony on the pier that a couple of weeks ago, when he decided to move to the mainland, he had thought about Pearl Harbor and his ship, and he told friend and local historian Jessie Higa there was one more thing he wanted to do.

“I said, ‘I’d like to go back down and just (stop) off at Pier 21 and say goodbye to that berth,’” Emory related. “So I’m saying goodbye, but I didn’t expect all of these people to be here. Thank you very, very, very much.”

After the ceremony, as he sat in the golf cart, Emory said he “might come back someday and visit awhile, but as of right now I just want to go clear my mind and just go fishing.”

His son “ties flies (and) he loves fishing, too,” he said.

Four relatives, including his sister, Shirley Yates, were at the surprise ceremony.

Fight for the ‘unknowns’

For close to 30 years the sometimes cantankerous Emory has made it his vocation to secure greater recognition for the men who died on Dec. 7, 1941, and are buried as “unknowns” at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as Punchbowl.

His mission to give credit to the defenders arose out of a trip to Punchbowl to ask where the Pearl Harbor casualties were buried. A cemetery representative said she didn’t know.

All these years later Emory is credited with adding ship information and “Pearl Harbor” to graves, with and starting the process that led to the disinterment of more than 388 sailors from the battleship USS Oklahoma for identification.

“Ray fought — and he fought hard,” friend and fellow former Navy chief Jim Taylor said in remarks Tuesday. “(There were) a lot of hard-headed people that were against him when he was trying to get the graves that were marked as unknown at Punchbowl cemetery identified.”

Some cemetery officials thought the “unknown” markers were dignified.

Poring over and cross-­referencing military medical and burial records became part of daily life for Emory to gain identification of, and therefore greater respect for, Pearl Harbor sailors and Marines whose individual sacrifices were hidden beneath anonymous graves.

His background working in mechanical engineering and construction in the Pacific Northwest brought a meticulousness to his research.

The quest filled a room at his Kahala home with files and charts. He took to calling it his “war room,” and in recent years his effort had spread to two rooms.

Asked Tuesday why he undertook the task, he replied in classic Emory style. “Because nobody else was doing it,” he said.

Taylor said that as tough as Emory can be, he is a humble man.

Some governmental agencies used to push back against Emory and his goal to update Punchbowl’s “unknown” graves with ship information or seek disinterment.

But now they acknowledge his role in helping bring greater awareness to the sacrifices made 77 years ago.

Emory determined the identity of 27 men killed on the USS Oklahoma who were buried as “unknowns” at Punchbowl. In 2003 a casket was disinterred that contained commingled remains.

The Pentagon positively identified five men. But incomplete sets of bones of more than 100 others also were found, complicating further identifications until all the remains were recovered.

In 2015 the Pentagon announced that it was taking the unprecedented step of exhuming all of the Oklahoma’s remaining 388 crew members.

In a Distinguished Public Service Award, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which searches for, recovers and identifies missing American war dead, said, “Without Mr. Emory’s efforts on behalf of his fellow sailors, their families and the nation, the USS Oklahoma unknowns might still be buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.”

Emory proposed disinterments that also led to identifications from the USS Curtiss, Pennsylvania and Sicard, the agency said.

One of the identified Oklahoma sailors, 18-year-old Robert Monroe Temple, was reburied in July at Punchbowl with new identifying information. His brother, Jim, then 88, came in from O’Fallon, Mo., for the interment. Emory was there for the service.

“Mr. Emory, who got this started, I thank him dearly,” Temple said at the time.

In a rare show of the emotion behind his analytical findings, Emory said then that all of the Pearl Harbor “unknowns” should get greater respect.

“After all, they were a bunch of young kids that joined the service … and getting killed like they did, they were actually murdered on the first day and never even had a chance to fight,” he said.

Never forget

On the day of the attack, Emory recalled, one Japanese plane was hit by something that stopped it in midair and caused it to explode and drop straight down as its prop kept spinning through the air.

Emory manned a .50-caliber machine gun at one of the best sighting spots in the harbor, according to historian John Di Virgilio.

Crew members on that side of the ship, 45 feet off the water, fired thousands of rounds, and five of the last seven torpedo planes were brought down.

“We don’t know who’s who” with the kills, “but Ray’s group had the best line of them all,” Di Virgilio said previously.

Rear Adm. Brian Fort, commander of Navy Region Hawaii, said Emory fought in seven Pacific invasions.

“Throughout all of the years, Ray has never forgotten his shipmates,” Fort said.

He still has the shell casing from the first round he fired. He doesn’t know why he bent over in the heat of battle and picked it up.

“I’ve had that .50-cal. shell in my pocket or at home since that day,” he said.

Asked why he kept it after all these years, he said, “Just a part of me, I guess. Just a part of me.”