Pearl Harbor sacrifice: Ex-Long Islander leads team seeking to exhume, ID, USS Arizona crew remains buried in Hawaii cemetery

A former Long Islander is part of a team of advocates who say they have helped collect enough DNA to exhume the remains of unidentified American servicemen killed aboard the battleship Arizona, sunk at Pearl Harbor, so they can be identified and reburied with military honors.

John Hardy, an insurance executive formerly from Port Washington who now lives in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, serves as chief research analyst for advocacy group Operation 85. Since 2023, the group’s volunteers say they have contacted and helped obtain DNA samples from 1,400 potential relatives of the 85 or more unidentified crew members of the USS Arizona. The remains, some of which the group says are commingled, were buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii, after they were found near or in the battleship after the Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese attack.

Hardy said many of the descendants he spoke to on the phone asked for more information about the project but eventually agreed to provide DNA to the Navy. "There were a substantial number of people crying on the phone," he said. "They’d had conversations about [the missing man] at Thanksgiving dinner, or there was a photo of the sailor on the wall at home."

Many of the descendants Hardy spoke to had been named for the lost service member, he said. Some recounted strikingly similar stories of loss, passed down as family lore: younger brothers and sisters of the lost service members never forgot "waiting for them to come home," and passed those stories on to their own children.

"We were driven to get this done," Hardy said in a phone interview.

To gain approval to disinter unknown remains interred as a group, Pentagon policy requires family reference samples of DNA or other means of identification for at least 60% of the unidentified service members. For the Arizona, that is equivalent to 643 servicemen, according to Operation 85. By Friday, according to the group, it had facilitated the return of samples from family members of 615 service members to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, with enough kits awaiting processing to meet the 643 threshold.

In late November, according to the group, it got confirmation from Kelly McKeague, director of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the Pentagon agency charged with finding and identifying missing service members, that DPAA’s disinterment request was ready to go to the Assistant Secretary of War for approval as soon as the 643 threshold had been met.

DPAA researchers may develop multiple lines of evidence when identifying remains, but now use DNA in almost all the identifications they make. Analyzing the genetic sequence of even very small quantities of remains allows them to compare and match — or rule out a match — with a pool of DNA reference samples from family members and descendants. Relatives can often give samples just by swabbing their own cheeks and mailing a DNA donor kit to the identification laboratory.

DPAA and the Pentagon did not comment about the agency’s work. Megan Smolenyak, a genealogist who has for years assisted the Army in finding potential relatives of missing soldiers, said the task of identification was critical. "That expression, ‘No man left behind’ — I’m so glad that’s not just an expression ... We have to keep our commitments." But, she said, given the stakes for families, the work of identification needed to be done carefully. "This is delicate," she said.

According to DPAA, since the renewal of U.S. POW/MIA recovery efforts in the 1970s, the remains of 1,862 Americans killed in World War II have been returned to their families. There are still 71,823 unaccounted for. World War II has far more lost service members than other conflicts because of the scale of mobilization and the war’s sprawling geography, Smolenyak said.

The Arizona was among the most grievous losses on the "day of infamy" that pushed the United States into war against Japan and the other Axis powers, with 1,177 of its 1,512 sailors and Marines killed. At least four massive bombs are believed to have hit the vessel, including one that hit a powder magazine, setting off a massive explosion. The Arizona sank within minutes.

Divers recovered about 200 sets of remains from or near the ship. But "back in the 40s, they didn’t have the capability of using DNA," said Hardy. "The only way of recognizing remains would have been identifying someone by clothing or dog tags."

The U.S. military identified 105 sets of remains as individual casualties and buried the rest at the National Memorial Cemetery as unknowns. Most of the Arizona’s crew is still entombed on the ship, which was dedicated as a national memorial in 1962. The disinterment request would not cover them, according to Operation 85.

 At least six Long Islanders were among the Arizona’s missing, according to DPAA records, though it is unclear if their remains lie with the ship or were buried at the cemetery. They are Edward Munroe Bates Jr., of Great Neck, Oran Merrill Brabbzson, of East Meadow, Francis Lloyd Carey, of Roosevelt, Harry Gregory Chernucha, of North Merrick, Michael Peleschak, of New Hyde Park and Arthur Severin Rasmussen, of Huntington.

Operation 85 volunteers said they had made significant progress since the group’s 2023 founding, spending a fraction of the Navy’s cost estimate, using commercial databases and the military’s own personnel records to find the missing service members’ descendants.

Often he reached nieces and nephews of the men, or grandnieces and -nephews, or cousins, Hardy said. Many of the men who were aboard the Arizona were in their teens and early 20s, killed before they had children themselves, and many of the dead men’s siblings had also died.

Kevin Kline, Operation 85’s executive director, a Virginia real estate investor, said he hoped the organization’s work could serve as a model for cheaper, more efficient identification of service members from other conflicts. "I don’t think any American service member should be buried as an ‘unknown,’" he said.

Kline said almost all of the families his group had spoken with said, if the remains of their loved ones were identified, they wanted them returned to the Arizona. The protocol some of the families envision is a burial with full honors at the Arizona memorial, after which Navy divers would place an urn containing the servicemember's remains into the ship, where they would "live through perpetuity with their shipmates," Hardy said. 

Kline said he hoped for some version of that too. His grand-uncle, Gunner's Mate Second Class Robert Edwin Kline, was one of the Arizona’s lost sailors. "He joined the Navy when he was 17 ... He died when he was 22. He spent his whole adult life on that ship. It just makes sense."