Nov. 24 (UPI) -- A federal agency wants to exhume unknown servicemembers who died in the Pearl Harbor attack in Honolulu, Hawai, including on the battleship Arizona, 84 years ago.
The Defense Department's Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Agency announced it "will seek exhumation of dozens of unknowns from the Pearl Harbor attack once an advocacy group is confirmed to have reached the required mark in its genealogy work," Stars & Stripes reported last week. The agency has a searchable list of missing military personnel dating to World War II.
They want to remove 86 sets of commingled remains buried as unknowns from the Arizona in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and 55 sets of remains with no known ship affiliation, DPAA director Kelly McKeague told Stars & Stripes.
Since the surprise attack on Dec. 7, 1941, the Arizona has been underwater as a gravesite for more than 900 entombed.
The Pearl Harbor National Memorial straddles the sunken battleship with an oil sheen. The names of all 1,177 casualties are engraved on a marble wall in the Shrine Room of the memorial.
