New forensics methods could help ID remains of Pearl Harbor victims

When Japanese torpedoes sank the battleship USS Oklahoma on Dec. 7, 1941, 429 sailors and Marines lost their lives. In the years immediately following the war, only 35 crew members were positively identified and buried. The other service members’ remains were eventually interred as unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii.

But advances in forensic and DNA analysis techniques in the decades since World War II prompted the Department of Defense (DoD) to update its policy defining threshold criteria for disinterment of unknowns. On Tuesday, DoD announced the remains of up to 388 unaccounted for sailors and Marines associated with the USS Oklahoma will be exhumed later this year for identification and burial.

“I can hardly talk,” 82-year-old Bob Valley of Escanaba, Mich., told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser after he received a call from the Navy Casualty Office in Millington, Tenn., informing him of the decision. “Families want some kind of closure.”

Lowell Valley, then 19, worked in the ship’s boiler room as a fireman. That side of the ship bore the brunt of the Japanese attack, eventually rolling over and trapping him and other sailors underwater.

Bob Valley told the Star-Advertiser he just wanted his brother home.

“I’ve got a cemetery plot—the family lot in my home town, and we’ve got a marker there, a government marker for him,” he said. “That’s where he would go.”

Victims of the Pearl Harbor attack aren’t the only ones who could be exhumed for identification under the new policy, which covers all permanent American military cemeteries. It does not include service members lost at sea or to those entombed in the ships that now serve as national memorials.

The threshold criteria include the availability of family reference samples to compare DNA, the ability to obtain the missing service members’ medical and dental records, and the scientific ability and capacity to identify the remains in a timely manner. Officials must believe they have a 50 percent chance of identifying the remains of any individual service member to justify exhumation.

“The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is prepared to begin this solemn undertaking in concert with ongoing worldwide recovery missions,” said Rear Adm. Mike Franken, the agency’s acting director. “Personally, I am most privileged to be part of this honorable mission, and I very much appreciate the efforts of many people who saw this revised disinterment policy come to fruition.”

The remains of service members who can be identified will be returned to their families for burial with full military honors.

“While not all families will receive an individual identification, we will strive to provide resolution to as many families as possible,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, who authorized the disinterment decision.