Aerial view of the USS Arizona Memorial at Ford Island, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Honolulu, Hawaii, taken on July 1, 2016. Photo by Ace Rheaume/U.S. Navy/UPI | License Photo
A federal agency wants to exhume unknown servicemembers who died in the Pearl Harbor attack in Honolulu, Hawai, including on the battleship Arizona, 84 years ago.
The Defense Department’s Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Agency announced it “will seek exhumation of dozens of unknowns from the Pearl Harbor attack once an advocacy group is confirmed to have reached the required mark in its genealogy work,” Stars & Stripes reported last week. The agency has a searchable list of missing military personnel dating to World War II.
They want to remove 86 sets of commingled remains buried as unknowns from the Arizona in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and 55 sets of remains with no known ship affiliation, DPAA director Kelly McKeague told Stars & Stripes.
Since the surprise attack on Dec. 7, 1941, the Arizona has been underwater as a gravesite for more than 900 entombed.
The Pearl Harbor National Memorial straddles the sunken battleship with an oil sheen. The names of all 1,177 casualties are engraved on a marble wall in the Shrine Room of the memorial.
The U.S. Navy considers the site a final resting place.
In all, 2,403 were killed at Pearl Harbor, including on the USS Oklahoma with 429 fatalities.
Of the ship’s dead, 277 of the sailors and marines are buried in Honolulu’s National Memorial of the Pacific with the 86 unknown remains.
The Pentagon requires a general threshold of family reference samples from 60% of the “potentially associated service members” before removal.
With the Arizona, that means 643 families. Once the threshold had been reached, final approval from the Defense Department can be sought.
The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory had DNA from 613 families and is awaiting additional test kits, DPAA director Kelly McKeague said.
Rear Adm. Darius Banaji, the agency’s deputy director, said in 2021 the Navy had no plans to exhume the remains and try to identify them because there is insufficient documentation, the Military Times reported.
It would cost approximately $2.7 million and take 10 years to track down enough families.
In 2023, Virginia-based real estate agent Kevin Kline formed Operation 85 with a “mission to identify 85 or more crew members removed from the ship in 1942, or found near the U.S.S. Arizona after the attack, never identified, and left buried in commingled graves ten miles away from Pearl Harbor, marked only as “UNKNOWN USS ARIZONA.”
His great-uncle, Robert Edwin Kline, a gunner’s mate second class petty officer, was among those killed on the Arizona, and his remains were never recovered or identified.
Kline brought in research analysts and a forensic genealogist to track down the appropriate family member DNA donors and worked with the Navy and Marine Corps casualty offices to send DNA kits to the families.
They have tracked down 1,415 family members from 672 families
“What DPAA is preparing to do now is exactly the mission we built the foundation for,” Kline said. “When the system said ‘no,’ families stepped forward and made ‘yes’ possible.”
James Silverstein is a California attorney and maternal grandnephew of Pearl Harbor casualty Petty Officer 2nd Class Harry Smith.
“So much hard work and dedication has gone into something that should have been so uncontroversial, yet has been so difficult to receive approval for,” he told Stars & Stripes. “It will be such a glorious homecoming and well-deserved sendoff when they are identified.”
