The U.S. military is working on a new effort to identify the remains of service members killed in the infamous World War II-era West Loch Disaster.
On May 21, 1944, as American troops prepared for the invasion of Japanese-occupied Saipan in the Northern Marianas, a series of explosions in West Loch killed at least 163 people and injured 396, though some historians have alleged that shoddy record keeping by military officials in a rush to keep the operation on track may have left more uncounted.
The Oahu-based Defense Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Agency began exhuming the remains of unidentified victims of the disaster in October and disinterred the last eight Jan. 27.
In the aftermath of the carnage, 50 of the bodies recovered were identified using a mixture of dog tags found with them and dental records, while about 49 other bodies recovered from the wreckage were buried as “unknowns” at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Punchbowl Crater — or so it was thought. The violent explosions blew bodies apart, making it difficult to properly sort the remains.
“We see a lot of commingling within these sets, so multiple individuals or bones of multiple individuals are mixed together,” said Reshma Satish, the lead anthropologist working on the project. “I’ve been doing a lot of the analyses on these cases, and I have not actually had a single case that’s been one person.”
With the list of dead greater than the number buried, the graves at Punchbowl might actually contain far more people than believed.
The DPAA, which is headquartered at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, conducts operations across the globe to find and identify missing American service members. The West Loch Disaster has always been an area of interest, but there were deep doubts about actually being able to identify the dead.
Jennie Jin, DPAA’s special projects manager, explained, “We learned in the late ’90s that a lot of remains buried at Punchbowl, they do not yield DNA very well.”
At first they didn’t understand why bodies and bone fragments found on far-flung battlefields and exposed to the elements for decades yielded DNA while better-preserved remains in Punchbowl didn’t. They ultimately learned that many WWII and Korean War dead had been treated with chemicals to mask the smell of death as they were being transported for burial.
“Bone is organic and inorganic, so it killed all the organic part and that’s why it’s so beautifully preserved with all the inorganic parts left,” Jin said. “So when West Loch came on our historians’ radar, we were like, ‘Should we do this or not?’
“It means a lot here, especially because it’s local and it was kept as a classified disaster for a long time, right? So it means a lot. But can we make IDs?”
It’s a serious matter to exhume the dead after they’ve already been buried. But in October 2016, DPAA dug up one of the unidentified dead from the West Loch Disaster and found the remains actually did have strong DNA readings. The agency determined that because the bodies had been recovered and buried locally rather than shipped back from a distant battlefield, the military hadn’t felt the need to chemically treat them to alleviate the smell.
But while they found DNA readings, there was nothing to actually match them to. Those remains are still unidentified.
“If we don’t have anybody, any family members, to compare the DNA results to, there’s no point of doing it,” Jin said. “So after 2016 was successful — it successfully used the DNA — we reached out. We, DPAA internally, decided to make this a project that we want to pursue.”
DPAA staff have been contacting families to collect DNA samples and other information. Beyond DNA samples, they are also looking at the medical records of those listed as killed in the explosion. For instance, Satish explained that near the end of World War II and during the Korean War, soldiers were required to get X-rays of their chest as part of tuberculosis screenings, records DPAA has used in other cases to identify dead service members.
But even with new resources and resolve, it will be a challenge.
“Just the nature of the disaster, we’re going to see a lot of bones with burning,” Satish explained. “There are things that we can’t really assess as well as a result of these explosions, because it wasn’t even just like it (happened) on one ship.”
The West Loch Disaster has sometimes been called a “second Pearl Harbor,” a tragedy that military leaders at the time wanted the public to ignore — and to forget. On May 21, 1944, sailors, Marines and soldiers were working on several vessels docked at West Loch loading weapons and munitions onto amphibious landing ships known as LSTs.
Troops loaded supplies onto the boats throughout the day, but at 3:08 p.m. something caused an explosion aboard LST-353 near its bow. The blast killed service members on board and flung burning debris onto nearby vessels, where it ignited fuel and munitions stored on their decks and setting off an explosive and deadly chain reaction.
Some vessels managed to navigate their way to safety, while others were abandoned and allowed to drift in the channel leaking oil. The oil spread across the water and caught fire, igniting piers and the shoreline.
The fires raged for more than 24 hours before more tugboats and salvage ships from Pearl Harbor managed to contain the spreading fires. In the end, explosions and airborne debris destroyed six LSTs. In the immediate aftermath, the military ordered a press blackout, even though the sounds of the explosions rang out loudly in the surrounding area and billowing smoke could be seen far and wide for days.
Four days after the incident, officials released a notice telling the public simply that an explosion had occurred causing “some loss of life, a number of injuries and resulted in the destruction of several small vessels.” Those who survived were ordered not to mention the disaster in letters home or to even speak of it.
The official investigation determined that the most likely cause of the explosion was mishandled munitions, probably a service member dropping a mortar round and causing a chain reaction. About a third of the casualties that day were Black members of the Army’s segregated 29th Chemical Decontamination Company.
During the war, Black service members were often assigned menial but sometimes hazardous tasks that white troops didn’t want to perform. Two months after the West Loch Disaster, another munitions-loading accident at Port Chicago in California caused explosions that killed 320 sailors and wounded 390, most of them Black.
A month later Black sailors at Port Chicago mutinied due to continued unsafe conditions.
The West Loch and Port Chicago disasters forced the Navy to change the way it handled munitions, and ultimately played a role in spurring the military to begin desegregating its ranks.
But the West Loch Disaster would remain secret until the military finally declassified all files on the incident in 1962. Now, more than 80 years later after the tragedy, DPAA is navigating all the records and samples it can get a hold of to match the dead recovered from West Loch to the names of the men who were there.
“It is an absolutely amazing feeling to be able to do this,” Satish said. “I mean, some of these families, they’ve been waiting for eight decades at this point, right? So to be able to provide them with answers and be able to give them — even if it’s not all of their service member, even if it’s like a couple of bones — I think that’s really meaningful.”
