6-Year ID Project for Victims of USS Oklahoma Is Complete

A six-year project to identify the crew members killed on the USS Oklahoma when it sank during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor has ended with 33 people still unidentified, the military revealed this week. However, 355 sailors and Marines were identified from dental records or DNA samples supplied by relatives. That includes 25-year-old Louis Tushla, a fireman first class in the US Navy, who was stationed in the Oklahoma's main engine room. His remains, identified in 2020 thanks to a nephew's DNA sample, were released from a Defense Department laboratory in Nebraska in July, then buried alongside his parents in Atkinson, reports the New York Times.

More than 13,000 bones belonging to 388 unknown individuals were exhumed from Honolulu's National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, in 2015—some still smelling of oil, per the Washington Post. More than 5,000 DNA samples were collected at labs in Nebraska and Hawaii in an attempt to identify the remains. "We've sent them off to war" so "it's our responsibility as a nation to bring these sailors and Marines home to their families," Capt. Robert McMahon, the head of the Navy's casualty office, said at a Monday press conference, per the Times. Kelly McKeague, director of the Pentagon's Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), said "361 families now have answers," as six other individuals were identified from 2007 to 2010.

A total of 429 crew members were killed, including 35 who were identified soon after the attack, per the Post. The remains of roughly 100 identified crew members still need to be reinterred, per the Times. The remains of the 33 crew members who couldn't be identified will be reinterred Tuesday—the 80th anniversary of the Dec. 7, 1941 attack—at the Punchbowl, the Pentagon said. "It marks the end of the project, of all the work that we've been doing," lead DPAA forensic anthropologist Carrie B. LeGarde tells the Post, though she adds more identifications may be possible in the future. Efforts to identify crew members killed on the USS California and USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor are ongoing. (More Pearl Harbor stories.)