After nearly 84 years, the USS Arizona’s unknowns could be one step closer to being known again.
A civilian-led effort called Operation 85 has reached its goal of collecting enough DNA samples from the living relatives of the battleship’s crew to prompt the Defense Department to consider reexamining dozens of unidentified servicemen who were buried in Hawaii after the Pearl Harbor attack.
Most of the 1,177 sailors and Marines killed on the USS Arizona on Dec. 7, 1941, were entombed inside the ship when it sank. Only 105 bodies were recovered and identified. Those who could not be identified were buried as unknowns, some commingled in mass graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.
Virginia real estate agent Kevin Kline launched USS Arizona Operation 85 in April 2023 in honor of his great-uncle, Robert Edwin Kline, a gunner’s mate second class who died on the Arizona at the age of 22. The sole mission of the all-volunteer project: to identify as many of the unknowns as possible.
“To have ‘unknown’ on a grave when we have the technology to know — that just doesn’t sit right with me,” Kline said.
Like most of the 1,177 sailors and Marines who died on the battleship that day, Robert Kline’s remains were never recovered and identified.
Under Defense Department policy, DNA samples must be collected from the relatives of at least 60% of the ship’s unrecovered crew before the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency will consider disinterring remains for possible identification.
Kline and company officially hit that mark last month, when the number of Arizona crewmen represented by “family reference samples” surpassed 643.
As of Friday, that total stood at 661, thanks almost entirely to Operation 85’s campaign to track down nearly 1,400 descendants of the Arizona crew and talk them into submitting their DNA to the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System.
“WE HAVE had overwhelming interest. Of the 1,395 surviving family members we’ve connected with, only 12 said they had no interest in participating and providing a DNA sample,” Kline said.
Four others died before their sample kits could be returned, and about 125 descendants had to be turned away, either because they were too distantly related to be used for identification or their link to the crew member could not be confirmed by Operation 85’s genealogist.
The group adopted the number 85 as part of its name because that’s how many unidentified Arizona crew members were thought to be buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, which overlooks Honolulu from the volcanic heart of Punchbowl Crater.
Since then, Kline said, he has learned the true number could be well over 100 and that some of the men might not have been buried with their fellow Arizona crew members.
There is also a chance that the graves dedicated to the USS Arizona contain the remains of men from other ships as well.
“Who knows? We could find another sailor from the Oklahoma or somewhere else,” Kline said.
The effort is focused solely on the graves of the unknowns at Punchbowl. The sunken battleship itself is considered a national shrine and will not be disturbed.
Now that Operation 85 has surpassed the 643-man threshold, Kline said the next step is to schedule a meeting with top-ranking Navy officials to lobby for the identification process to begin.
“We were going to do it in October, but October came and went, he said. Now the group is hoping for a meeting this month.
It’s unclear when — or if — the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency might act on Operation 85’s achievement.
DPAA did not respond to a request for comment during the government shutdown. An agency spokesperson in Hawaii sent a reply Wednesday but could not answer questions or provide a statement by press time.
Kline’s team isn’t waiting around to see what happens next. They are still actively seeking out more surviving descendants of the Arizona crew so they can add to the number of DNA samples on file.
“The goal is to identify everybody,” Kline said.
Already, the group has dramatically exceeded expectations, accomplishing in less than three years a task that Defense Department officials predicted would take paid military staff members as much as a decade.
A 2022 report by the Department of the Navy estimated it would cost roughly $2.7 million just to locate, contact and collect DNA samples from surviving relatives of the ship’s crew. The document concluded that identifying the Arizona unknowns was feasible but would “require significant resources and an inordinate amount of time.”
Basically, Kline said, the Navy spent $83,000 to write a report detailing why the work couldn’t easily be done, then Operation 85 went out and did it for around $70,000.
Whatever the grassroots effort may have lacked in funding, it more than made up for through the sheer determination of its volunteer staff, which has grown to include a forensic genealogist, two research analysts and the ever-available Kline himself.
“I’ve picked up the phone on Christmas. I’ve picked up the phone while in line at Hersheypark (amusement park), waiting to ride a roller-coaster with my kids,” he said.
Along the way, Operation 85 has worked with the Navy to streamline its process for accepting genetic samples from the relatives of missing service members, Kline said. The Marine Corps already had a user-friendly process in place, so all it took to get the Navy on board was “basically me saying good things about the Marines over and over again,” he explained with a laugh.
Kline and his team have also helped track down the personnel files and dental records for hundreds of Arizona crew members to aid with the process of identifying any remains that might eventually be exhumed.
As word has gotten around about the success of the project, Kline said family members of the missing from other conflicts have contacted him to ask, “How are you doing this? How are you breaking through?”
The effort got a huge head start early on, thanks to Tucson, Ariz., journalist Bobbie Jo Buel. The former Arizona Daily Star editor spent more than five years of her own researching the crew by scouring newspaper archives and public records and collecting snapshots and personal letters from relatives of the men.
The profiles that Buel compiled for every sailor and Marine who died on the battleship are now housed on the Operation 85 website, and her notes proved instrumental as the team set out to find the crew’s blood relatives.
Robert Edwin Kline already has a memorial headstone at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, placed there at the request of surviving family members about 20 years ago in the absence of a marked grave anywhere else.
If the gunner’s mate is one of the unknowns who ends up being identified as a result of Operation 85, his great-nephew said his family has already chosen a final resting place for the young man’s remains. They want him to be entombed alongside his shipmates inside the sunken Arizona.
“He joined the Navy at 17 and died at 22,” Kline said. “The majority of his adult life was spent on that ship. Let him go back there.”
Source: The Garden Island