Military forensic investigators have begun exhuming graves of the unknown in Hawaii in hopes of identifying USS Arizona crewmen killed in the Pearl Harbor attack 85 years ago.
The Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced the disinterment of the first eight servicemen at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific on Monday, as part of an investigation made possible by a civilian group with a Tucson connection.
Soldiers salute over the casket of an unknown USS Arizona crew member disinterred on Monday at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.
Agency officials have previously said they plan to recover 86 sets of unidentified remains associated with the battleship and another 55 sets of remains with no known ship affiliation, all of them buried as unknowns in the military cemetery also known as the Punchbowl.
Those men will be matched against a database of genetic samples from the blood relatives of at least 750 Arizona crew members. Nearly all of those samples were collected through the efforts of Operation 85, a nonprofit launched in 2023 by Virginia real estate agent Kevin Kline, whose great-uncle, Robert, died on the battleship.
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Kline called Monday’s disinterment “a historic moment.”
It took his group about three years to track down more than 1,400 living family members and get them to submit enough DNA samples to prompt the government to reexamine the unidentified servicemen buried in Hawaii.
The remains of eight unknown USS Arizona crew members were disinterred on Monday from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu as part of an effort to indentify the men using DNA samples from family members.
The effort got a huge head start from former Arizona Daily Star Editor Bobbie Jo Buel, who spent more than five years compiling profiles of every sailor and Marine who died on the Arizona. She shared her research and her contacts with Operation 85, and the website now serves as the online home for her profiles.
The DPAA’s identification effort is expected to take at least a year.
The investigation only involves servicemen buried as unknowns at the military cemetery in Honolulu. No remains will be taken from the sunken battleship itself, which is maintained by the National Park Service as a national memorial.
More than 900 of the 1,177 USS Arizona crew members killed at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, are thought to be entombed inside the wreckage. Approximately 200 bodies from the ship were recovered after the attack, and those that could not be identified were buried as unknowns, some mixed together in mass graves.
DPAA photos from Monday’s disinterment show soldiers in white gloves saluting over one of the unearthed caskets after covering it with an American flag.
Soldiers place an American flag on the casket of an unknown USS Arizona crew member disinterred on Monday at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.
According to Kline, the remains just exhumed from the Punchbowl were moved to the agency’s forensic laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, where they will be removed from their aging steel caskets, carefully prepared and preserved, then placed in clean, modern transfer cases.
Kline said the servicemen inside those cases will be the guests of honor on Dec. 7, when DPAA holds a ceremony at the joint base to commemorate the disinterment project.
“These men have waited more than eight decades. Their care must guide every decision we make,” he wrote in an email to USS Arizona families, friends and supporters. “They will arrive under military escort with full honors and depart with full military honors as one of the last segments of our ceremony. The scientific work of extracting DNA and comparing it with family reference samples will follow.”
Kline said nearly 700 family members, himself included, plan to attend the ceremony in Hawaii to honor the fallen men and “mark this extraordinary step toward restoring their names.”
