A sailor killed at Pearl Harbor will be laid to rest finally

• Herbert “Bert” Jacobson was killed on the USS Oklahoma during World War II.
• His remains will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery.
• Hundreds of personnel from the battleship lay buried for decades in a volcanic crater near Pearl Harbor.

Herbert “Bert” Jacobson, who was killed in the attack that sent the United States into World War II, will be laid to rest on Tuesday. Members of Jacobson’s family have been waiting their entire lives to attend a memorial service for the young guy they knew but never met.

Jacobson was one of almost 400 sailors and Marines killed on the USS Oklahoma during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. His remains will be placed in a casket at Arlington National Cemetery.

“This has been an unsolved mystery for a long time, and it brings us closure to finally know what happened to Bert, where he is, and that he’s finally laid to rest after being listed as an unknown for so long,” said Brad McDonald, Bert’s nephew.

The service at Arlington will be the latest chapter in the story of a 21-year-old man from the small northern Illinois town of Grayslake, for the family who never had a body to bury when he was killed, and the scientific quest to put names to the remains of hundreds of battleship personnel who lay buried anonymously in a dormant volcanic crater near Pearl Harbor for decades. It’s a narrative about waiting.

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The battleship was submerged for two years before being refloated and the bodies recovered. A few years later, the Oklahoma men’s graves were reopened in the expectation that dental records would lead to their identities. However, 27 sets of bones were unidentified and had to be reburied at the crater, the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, also known as the Punchbowl.

In 2003, another effort to identify around 100 sets of remains yielded no results.

The Department of Defense revealed plans to exhume the remains again in 2015.

Debra Prince Zinni, a forensic anthropologist and laboratory manager at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in Hawaii, told The Associated Press at the time, “We now have the ability to forensically analyse these bones and produce the identifications.”

This gave Jacobson family members new hope after being saddened by each failed attempt. They told the Associated Press that Jacobson’s mother sobbed every December 7 because she didn’t know where he was.

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