‘We never forget’: Navy to bury sailor killed at Pearl Harbor after decades-long identity quest

Michael Schmidt was just 13 months old when his father, Gunner’s Mate 3rd Class Herman Schmidt, died aboard the USS Oklahoma during the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

More than 80 years would pass before advances in DNA technology enabled the military to identify the fallen sailor and bring his remains to his final resting place in Arlington National Cemetery. He is set to be buried with full military honors on Thursday.

Mr. Schmidt, now 82, said he can’t make the trip to Arlington for the service but credited the Navy for never giving up on his father.

“I have mixed emotions,” Mr. Schmidt said as he contemplated the father he never knew. “I thought it was fantastic that they did it.”

Lt. Cmdr. Robert Price, the Navy chaplain overseeing the funeral, said bringing those once unknown sailors to their final resting place is a point of pride for the Navy.

“For us, we never forget,” he said. “We never forget the sacrifice that people gave for us. This is personal for us because this is a sailor. This is one of ours.”

Mr. Schmidt spent a lifetime with little to remember his father by. Of the 429 crew members killed on board after the torpedo-damaged ship capsized, only 35 were initially identified.

His father was among the nearly 400 who were buried as Unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

He recalled that as a boy, he visited his grandparents at their farm in Sheridan, Wyoming, where his father was raised, but few details about his father’s life emerged from those visits.

“My mother didn’t talk about it at all,” Mr. Schmidt told The Washington Times. “She grew up in an era where they didn’t talk about things like that.”

His mother eventually remarried, and the family moved to California. With each passing year, Mr. Schmidt said, his connection to his father faded.

In January 2021, nearly 80 years after his death, Schmidt’s remains were identified. It was his only son who served as the link to bring him from a grave of the unknowns to his final resting place at Arlington National Cemetery.

Michael Schmidt provided the military researchers with the DNA sample that made the identification possible.

Efforts to identify the remains of those killed in Pearl Harbor and throughout the Pacific date to 1947, when the American Graves Registration Service disinterred the remains of U.S. service members from two cemeteries and transferred them to the Central Identification Laboratory at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii.

That effort led to the identification of the remains of 35 crew members from the USS Oklahoma and the burials of unidentified remains across 46 plots at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

In 1949, those who had not been identified, including Schmidt, were classified by a military board as non-recoverable.

No further efforts to identify the unknown were made until the early 2000s when advancements in DNA testing led researchers to believe they could positively identify those who remained unknown.

In 2003, a Pentagon task force established to account for prisoners of war and missing in action disinterred the analysis of one of the caskets thought to hold the remains of five unknown sailors from the USS Oklahoma. Further analysis determined that the casket contained the remains of nearly 100 crew members.

The remaining caskets stayed buried until 2015 when the deputy secretary of defense authorized the disinterment of all unknown remains from the ship.

That kicked off a painstaking process of identifying next of kin for each crew member who remained unidentified, gathering DNA samples from their family members and matching those samples to the remains.

That effort, which concluded in 2021, led to the identification of 396 crew members from the USS Oklahoma to be positively identified. 

“Many of the family members that we ended up dealing with are, you know, getting up there in years themselves,” said Lt. Cmdr. Jory Morr, who served as the branch head for the Navy’s POW/MIA command during the USS Oklahoma project.

“It’s interesting to see the variety of reactions from them because some families, they’re not that tight-knit. Maybe they don’t really know the history behind some of their past family members,” he said. “In those cases, some of these families are surprised to even hear that they lost somebody in the attack at Pearl Harbor.”

Still, most of the families are grateful that the U.S. has gone to such lengths to identify the fallen.

“It says that a sailor lost 80 years ago is no less important than a sailor that we lose today,” Cmdr. Morr said.

Mr. Schmidt was among those to be contacted to provide a DNA sample. Years earlier, he said, he visited Pearl Harbor with his wife and two children and was overcome by an eerie feeling.

“I don’t know how else to express it, how sad it was,” he said. “War is a terrible, terrible thing, and I’ve been very fortunate not to have to experience any war.”

Cmdr. Price, the chaplain, said the burial service at Arlington, even if nearly a century later, serves as a reminder of the true sacrifices those sailors and their families gave.

“When you talk to Mr. Schmidt or you see another child whose whole life has been without their parents, for me, that’s a humbling moment,” he said. “When we have moments like this, we really see the human impact of what serving in the Navy or the other armed services can do to a family. And I think there’s no way to repay that.”