Solving the Mystery of USS Oklahoma’s Unidentified MIAs By Guy J. Nasuti, Historian, NHHC
J
ust before the call to colors aboard USS Oklahoma (BB-37) on 7 December 1941, two Navy officers belowdecks engaged in a seemingly banal debate over whether they should go swimming before or after breakfast, when the sound of roaring aircraft and loud explosions topside brought their deliberations to an abrupt halt. Realizing they were under attack, Ensigns Edward E. Vezey, Jr., and his good friend, Francis C. Flaherty, immediately ran to their battle stations, located at separate gun turrets aboard ship. Moored in the now infamous “Battleship Row,” Oklahoma, a prime target of the Japanese torpedo bomber pilots, shook violently as she took three torpedoes in just the first few minutes of the attack. Twenty minutes after the attack began, six more torpedoes struck “Okie,” which lurched over until her masts touched the bottom of the harbor. Trapped sailors inside the ship, disoriented when their world literally turned upside down, were unable to escape the already chaotic situation. Ensign Flaherty, who would later receive the Medal of Honor posthumously for his heroism that day, held a flashlight to illuminate an escape route for the men trapped in his gun turret. Ensign Vezey escaped the overturned Oklahoma relatively uninjured before swimming through flaming, oil-thick water to the inboard battleship Maryland (BB 46). After the attack ended, several men trapped beneath the waterline banged away on the hull for three more days until eventually all went silent. The sounds made by his trapped shipmates haunted Edward Vezey, who returned two days later to assist rescue efforts, said the sounds made by his trapped shipmates haunted him for the rest of his life. 14
Naval Historical Foundation
Underscoring the obvious ferocity of the torpedo blasts and the destruction they caused, only 35 of the 429 men killed aboard Oklahoma were initially identified. Amongst the 1,100 crew members aboard, approximately 40 were Marines, and of those, 13 died during the attack. The unidentified remains were all buried in mass graves in the Nu’uanu and Halawa cemeteries in Honolulu with markers listing the number of bodies placed within each grave and topped with a headstone bearing the word “Unknown” to mark their final resting place. In 1947, all unknown remains were disinterred in an attempt to identify them, but the technology to do so had not advanced at all beyond what officials had available during the war, and these attempts failed. By 1950, all of the unidentified remains were reburied in 61 caskets that were then reinterred in 45 graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as the “Punchbowl.” At Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam, Honolulu, Hawaii, not far from the USS Arizona Memorial, stands the Senator Daniel K. Inouye laboratory and office building that houses the talented team of the Hawaiian contingent for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). Formerly known as Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command ( JPAC), DPAA is a continuation of that agency and the Life Sciences Equipment Laboratory. DPAA’s mission is to “provide the fullest possible accounting for our missing personnel from our nation’s past conflicts to their families and our nation.” In April 2015, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work issued a policy memorandum directing the disinterment of
NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND
Oklahoma prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
