Solving the Mystery of USS Oklahoma’s Unidentified MIAs

By Guy J. Nasuti, Historian, NHHC

Oklahoma prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Just 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.

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

USS Oklahoma

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unknowns associated with Oklahoma. Exactly two months later, DPAA personnel began exhuming the remains of up to 338 unaccounted-for Sailors and Marines for analysis. Work pledged that he and the DPAA team would labor tirelessly to identify and return all remains as “expeditiously as possible.”

The personnel at DPAA (including those at another location at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, and its main office in Arlington, Virginia) began working methodically. The agency includes 600 highly skilled and motivated civilians and military personnel from each branch of the armed forces. Its team of historians, forensic anthropologists, scientists, and numerous additional support personnel perform painstaking research, investigations, and recovery efforts that help identify the recovered remains of American MIAs from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, and Iraq/ Afghanistan. The Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii is the largest and most scientifically diverse forensic skeletal laboratory in the world whose staff uses DNA provided by the relatives of missing service members to identify the remains of recovered unknowns.

One of the hundreds of cases relating to unidentifiable remains from Oklahoma was that of Fireman 3rd Class Glaydon Iverson of Emmons, Minnesota. Iverson was only 24 years old when he was killed aboard Oklahoma; Iverson’s parents, Edwin and Anna, received a telegram just before Christmas on December 20, 1941 informing them their son was missing in action. Notified they would receive his personal effects, but that his remains had been nonrecoverable, Glaydon’s family grieved his loss for decades.

On December 22, 2016, Glaydon’s nephew Gary Iverson unexpectedly received a phone call from DPAA, only a few short weeks after some family members attended several events commemorating the 75th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The caller was a representative of DPAA, informing Gary that, as the eldest living

next-of-kin, his uncle’s remains were finally identified. Gary said despite the nearly eight decades that had passed, the “closure for himself and the rest of the family was incredible.” By February 2017, only 30 of the Oklahoma unknowns had been identified using DNA analysis. Slightly less than four years later, on January 28, 2021, the team at the DPAA Laboratory, Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, reached a momentous milestone when they announced the 300th positive identification of an Oklahoma MIA—Marine Pfc John F. Middleswart. “When his identification came through, it was really exciting because I knew this was number 300,” said Carrie LeGarde, the USS Oklahoma Project lead. “It shows everyone’s hard work Oklahoma capsized due to the effective employment of torpedoes by and I knew everyone would attacking Japanese naval aircraft. be really excited about it, because this is a really huge milestone for the project.” This most recent push from the Department of Defense and DPAA to have the remains from Pearl Harbor’s mass graves identified is finally paying off for the families of those missing and unaccounted for from battleship Oklahoma. Despite the eight decades that have passed since the attack that drew the United States into World War II, many of those lost from that dark day finally have their identities and due honor fully restored. The views and conclusions expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Defense or the Department of the Navy. Guy J. Nasuti joined the Naval History and Heritage Command as a historian in 2014. The author of several Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships histories, Mr. Nasuti has published more than a dozen essays and short articles on naval and military topics about World War II. A veteran of the U.S. Navy, he served as a Photographer’s Mate during OIF/OEF. Source materials for this article available upon request.