USS Arizona Crew Identification Effort
The U.S. military is exhuming and identifying remains of 88 sailors and Marines killed at Pearl Harbor in 1941, previously buried as unknowns in a Honolulu cemetery. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency will use DNA analysis and historical research to match remains to surviving relatives. The multi-year project represents both historical justice and enduring commitment to WWII remembrance.
Of the 1,177 sailors and Marines killed on the USS Arizona, more than 900 remain entombed within the sunken battleship, which serves as their final resting place at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The remains being identified are not from the wreck itself, but from crew members whose bodies were recovered shortly after the attack but could not be identified at the time. These 88 individuals were buried as "unknowns" in 76 different graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu. For decades, many families believed all the unrecovered crew went down with the ship and were unaware that some remains were buried separately. This effort follows the highly successful USS Oklahoma Identification Project. The DPAA identified 396 of the 429 crew members from the Oklahoma who were previously unidentified, achieving a 92.3% success rate through similar DNA analysis and historical evidence. The push to identify the Arizona crew gained significant momentum from "Operation 85," a civilian-led initiative started by family members of the missing. This group has been instrumental in locating relatives and encouraging them to submit Family Reference Samples for DNA comparison, a key requirement for the project to proceed. The identification process will involve transporting the remains to a DPAA lab at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. DNA samples will then be sent to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for comparison against the database of samples provided by surviving relatives.
