OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE, Neb. – Inside an old aircraft factory here, behind the glass windows of a pristine laboratory, the lost crew of the USS Oklahoma rests on special tables covered in black foam.
Their bones are brown with age after 50 years in the ground and, before that, months entombed in their sunken battleship beneath the oily waters of Pearl Harbor.
Legs, arms, ribs, vertebrae. Some have blue tags tied with string, identifying the type of bone. Some have beige tags, indicating that experts also want samples for DNA testing.
They are the unidentified remains of hundreds of sailors and Marines who perished 74 years ago Monday, when Japan launched a surprise air attack on Hawaii and plunged the United States into World War II.
Now, seven decades later, the government is trying to put names to the old salts and teenage sailors who died when their ship was sunk by enemy torpedoes Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941.
Over the past six months, with a fresh mandate from the Defense Department, the bones were exhumed from a cemetery in Hawaii and most were brought to a new lab here, where scientists have begun the task.
The goal is to send the men home.
“It’s important for the families,” said Carrie Brown, an anthropologist with the newly created Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), which is doing the work.
“For a lot of people, it’s an event that happened in their family history,” she said, and that story “has been carried down sometimes (for) generations.”
“A lot of people say, ‘World War II. Who’s even alive? Who even remembers?’” she said. “We need to get these guys home. They’ve been not home for too long.”
At 7:45 a.m., on Dec. 7, the USS Oklahoma’s 24-member band, like the bands of other ships in the harbor that day, had assembled on deck for the morning colors ceremony.
The ship had a compliment of about 1,300, including 77 Marines.
Almost certainly present on deck were Musician First Class Henri Clay Mason, whose wife, Mary May, lived on Park Road, in Washington’s Columbia Heights neighborhood; the band’s leader James Booe, of Flagler County, Florida; and bugler Lionel Lescault, of Worcester, Massachusetts.
As they prepared to play, another band member saw strange planes approaching. Then he heard explosions, and then over the PA system the alarm: “Air Raid!” according to a history of the ship by author Jeff Phister.
Some musicians ran for cover and survived.
Mason, Booe, Lescault and nine other band members were killed, according to Phister and records in the National Archives. Their bodies were never identified.
The Oklahoma’s loss of life at Pearl Harbor – a total of 429 sailors and Marines – was second only to the 1,100 lost on the USS Arizona, whose wreck remains a hallowed Pearl Harbor historic site.
Many Oklahoma sailors jumped overboard as the crippled battleship rolled over in about 50 feet of water. But hundreds were trapped below decks.
Thirty-two were rescued by intrepid crews who heard them banging for help, cut into the hull and made their way through a maze of darkened, flooded compartments to reach them.
Others managed to escape by swimming underwater to find their way out. Some trapped sailors tried to stem the in-rushing water with rags and even the board from a board game. One man tried to drown himself.
A few managed to escape through tiny port holes – pushed by brave comrades who couldn’t fit or were determined to let others go first.
Two who made that sacrifice were a Catholic priest, Lt. Aloysius Schmitt, the ship’s chaplain, and the ship’s dentist, Lt. Com. Hugh Alexander, who had been in the Navy 20 years. Father Schmitt’s corroded chalice and water-stained Latin prayer book were found in the wreckage. The book was still marked with a page ribbon for Dec. 8 prayers.
Neither Father Schmitt’s nor Alexander’s body was ever identified. There were dozens like them.
Mess attendant Octavius Mabine, who had been in the Navy two years and whose mother, Essie, lived in Portsmouth, Virginia; Marine 2nd Lt. Harry Gaver Jr., who was born in Annapolis and whose father had taught at the Naval Academy; and Machinist Mate Eugene Eberhardt, of Newark, New Jersey.
Eberhardt has never been forgotten, said his niece, Joan Roberts, 78, of Rockport, Massachusetts.
“For years on Memorial Day we bring out his picture and toast him,” she said in a telephone interview last week. “Everybody loves him, and we have loved him forever.”
