A 21-year-old sailor will be laid to rest on Tuesday after a decades-long effort to identify remains removed from Pearl Harbor, more than 80 years after he was killed in the attack that brought the United States into World War II.
Members of Herbert “Bert” Jacobson’s family have waited their entire lives to attend a funeral for the young man they knew about but never met. Jacobson was among the more than 400 sailors and Marines killed in the USS Oklahoma during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The casket containing his remains will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
“This has been something of an unsolved mystery and it gives us closure to finally know what happened to Bert, where he is and that he will finally be buried after being listed as missing for so long,” said Brad McDonald, a nephew.
The service in Arlington will be the latest chapter in the story of the man from the small town of Grayslake, northern Illinois, the family who never had a body to bury when he was killed and the scientific quest to name the remains of hundreds of battleship personnel who were buried anonymously for decades in a dormant volcanic crater near Pearl Harbor.
It’s a waiting story
The battleship remained submerged for two years before it was refloated and the bodies recovered. A few years later, the graves of the Oklahoma men were reopened in the hope that dental records might lead to their names. But 27 sets of remains went unidentified and had to be reburied in the crater, the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, commonly known as Punchbowl.
Another effort to identify around 100 sets of remains was unsuccessful in 2003.
In 2015, the Department of Defense announced plans to re-exhume the remains.
“We now have the ability to forensically test these remains and produce the identifications,” he told Associated Press Debra Prince Zinni, a forensic anthropologist and lab manager for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in Hawaii, at the time.
That gave new hope to members of the Jacobson family, who had been disappointed by each failed effort. they told AP that Jacobson’s mother cried every December 7, at least in part because she never knew where she was.
“She was always hoping that the phone would ring and it would be Bert,” McDonald said.
The 2015 effort, Project Oklahoma, has led to the identification of 355 men, including Jacobson, who were killed when their ship was hit by at least nine torpedoes. That leaves 33 sets of remains yet to be identified. To mark the 80th anniversary of the attack, those unidentified remains were reburied, said Gene Hughes, public affairs officer for Navy Personnel Command. He has worked with the families of those killed in the Oklahoma, including relatives of Jacobson.
For Jacobson’s family, any hope of knowing exactly what happened on December 7, 1941, is long gone. All they knew from talking to Jacobson’s shipmates was that he had just finished his service after spending several hours ferrying men to shore.
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