Pearl Harbor John Does (1941)

Pearl Harbor John Does
Grave A-1 at National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
Discovered	December 7, 1941-1944
Unidentified for	82 years
Sex	Male
Location	Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
Body condition	Burned Skeletal
Postmortem interval	Minutes-Years
Cause of death	Killed in action

Pearl Harbor John Does are the hundreds of United States Navy sailors and Marines who were killed when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Unknown servicemen killed on the USS Arizona, the USS California, and the USS Utah have separate articles on this wiki.

Pearl Harbor Attack

At about 7:48 AM on December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service conducted a surprise military strike against the United States at the naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The first wave of 140 Japanese bombers and 43 aircraft fighters targeted the eight battleships along Ford Island and the nearby airfields. Shortly thereafter, the second wave of airstrikes inflicted additional damage, although this time the surviving US force was more prepared. The attack was over within 90 minutes.

Overall, 2,335 American servicemen and civilians were killed in the attack and 1,178 were wounded. Additionally, 21 US ships had been sunk or significantly damaged and 347 of the 402 US aircraft was destroyed or damaged. The surprise attack led US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to declare December 7, 1941, "a date which will live in infamy". The following day, the US Congress declared war on Japan, which led to the United States' formal entry into World War II.

Aftermath

Between the day of the attack and 1944, many of those killed were individually buried at the Halawa Naval and Nuuanu Cemeteries. In September 1947, 1,516 sets of remains were disinterred to be identified at the Schofield Barracks Central Identification Laboratory. While dozens of identifications were made, many could not be identified for a variety of reasons. In October 1949, the American Graves Registration Service ruled those who remain unaccounted for as unrecoverable. The remains that could not be identified were then buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, AKA the Punchbowl, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Although some burials were individual burials, others, most notably that of the USS Oklahoma crew, were comingled with one another.

In 2003, Ray Emory, a survivor of Pearl Harbor and national historian for the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association started the push to identify the unknown Pearl Harbor remains. Although many of the bureaucrats within the government and the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) did not take the Emory's efforts seriously, initial exhumations had led to identifications of the unknown servicemen.

In 2015, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the successor to JPAC, began to exhume unknown servicemen associated with the USS Oklahoma, USS West Virginia, USS California, and USS Nevada. Between 2015 and 2021, 355 USS Oklahoma sailors and Marines from the missing 394 were identified and accounted for. Additionally, several identifications have been made for the USS California and USS West Virginia.

Gallery

Sources

• Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency
• Pearl Harbor Attack on Wikipedia