The battleship USS Oklahoma capsized at its mooring after being struck by torpedoes in the first minutes of the Japanese attack Dec. 7, 1941.
The ship sank so quickly, hundreds of USS Oklahoma sailors were trapped in spaces below decks. Rescuers worked through Dec. 7 and Dec. 8, 1941, to free U.S. Navy sailors trapped in the hull of the battleship. Thirty-two men were rescued this way, but more than 400 others died during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The battleship USS Oklahoma remained where it lay until it was salvaged in late 1942 and early 1943. The ship was rolled upright March 19, 1943. The oil- and mud-stained bones of nearly 400 were recovered and buried as unknowns in two Honolulu cemeteries.
In the late 1940s, the Army disinterred the remains and spent two years attempting to identify them. While they were able to identify 27 skulls through dental records, officials chose not to notify the families. Instead all the bones were reburied anonymously in graves like this at Hawaii's Punchbowl Cemetery, with the bones of perhaps dozens of men interred in each casket.
Under pressure from still-living veterans of the USS Oklahoma, the Defense Department decided in 2015 to dig up the 61 caskets containing the remains of up to 400 men and attempt to identify them using DNA technology. They were disinterred during ceremonies like this one.
The bones were brought to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's lab at Offutt Air Force Base in 2015. Carrie Brown led a team of forensic anthropologists that catalogued 13,000 bones recovered from the USS Oklahoma graves, and took DNA samples from 5,000. Of the 388 unidentified USS Oklahoma sailors and Marines, about 20 are from Nebraska and western Iowa.
Petty Officer 3rd Class Eli Olsen of Exira, Iowa, was a storekeeper aboard the USS Oklahoma at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. Eli was one of nine children born to Chris and Inger Olsen, who had immigrated from Denmark and farmed near Exira. Five boys in the family served in the military during World War II. All survived except Eli, who was 23 when he died at Pearl Harbor. He was identified in September 2017.
Fireman 2nd Class George C. Ford grew up on a farm near Carroll, Iowa. He was the second-youngest of seven children and joined the Navy in August 1940 after studying diesel engineering. His family learned that he was missing from the USS Oklahoma, and two months later he was declared to "presumed dead." "His (three) sisters never got over it," said Krisin Ford, who is married to Ford's nephew, George. Ford was buried in a small town near Carroll.
Petty Officer 1st Class Chester Seaton was the fourth of six children, all born in Omaha to Ernest and Alice Seaton. The family moved to Tacoma, Washington in the mid-1920s. His father died young of a heart attack, and Chester quit school in 10th grade to work as a landscaper until he was old enough to join the Navy, in 1940. Seaton, 20, served aboard the Oklahoma with his brother-in-law , Petty Officer Lorentz Hultgren, 23. Both were killed in the Pearl Harbor attack. Both were identified in early 2018. Seaton was buried in Tacoma last August.
Fireman 1st Class Bert McKeeman of Council Bluffs also left high school early to support a family impoverished by the Great Depression. He joined the Navy in 1940. The 25-year-old sailor was probably working below decks in the engine room of the USS Oklahoma when the ship was sunk by Japanese torpedoes. All of his immediate family had died by the time he was identified, but about 80 relatives attended his burial at Cedar Lawn Cemetery in Council Bluffs in November 2018.
Grant Cook was a football star at Cozad High School. After graduating in 1939, he worked at a local garage. He joined the Navy a year later. He and his sister, Jean, had been inseparable. She was in nursing school in Denver when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The family didn't know Grant's fate for weeks. More than 70 years later, she gave a DNA sample to the Navy. And when he was identified, Jean, 96, decided he should be buried in Hawaii, where he died.
Seaman 1st Class Joseph Maule was a handsome fellow from a big family in Bloomfield, Nebraska Ñ "a sweet kid, friendly," said Cindy Maule, his nephew's wife. An older brother signed a form allowing Joseph to enlist in the Navy at 17, and was tormented by that decision for the rest of his life when Maule died in the Pearl Harbor attack 11 months later. The family put a gravestone in the Bloomfield cemetery, and prayed that someday his body would be found. None of them lived to him buried there in June 2019.
Jerry and Bob Clayton were cousins, the same age and inseparable friends growing up in Central City, Nebraska. They wrote letters after Bob's family moved to California in 1937, just before their senior year in high school. After graduation, both joined the Navy. On Dec. 7, 1941, both were aboard battleships at Pearl Harbor: Jerry on the USS Oklahoma, Bob on the USS Arizona. Both were killed in the first minutes of the attack. Jerry was identified and buried with honors in Central City in July 2019. Bob remains permanently entombed inside the Arizona, which is a national memorial.
Twin brothers Leo and Rudolph Blitz grew up together in Lincoln, joined the Navy together, and both served aboard the USS Oklahoma. Years after the Pearl Harbor attack, another sailor told Blitz family members that Rudolph went below decks to look for his brother when the order came to abandon ship. He was never seen again. The brothers, who were the only identical twins to die in the attack, were identified, and buried in Lincoln in August 2019.
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Dee Dee King, 68, has worked under contract with the Navy since 2009, tracking down and collecting DNA samples from family members of missing Navy service members dating back as far as World War II. The work is not so different from what many hobbyists do when they research their own family trees, but forensic genealogists focus on cases with legal implications.
Ed Guthrie, 101, is Nebraska's last eyewitness to the Dec. 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor raid that killed more than 2,400 Americans and brought the United States into World War II. He joined Gov. Pete Ricketts, along with veterans of several wars and their families, Friday to mark Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.
With a year to go and 152 Oklahoma men left to identify, the hardest work may still be ahead. The easiest matches, using mitochondrial DNA passed down through female relatives, have nearly all been made. That means doing additional types of DNA testing, such as finding a match through the father’s side of the family as well.
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