At 6 a.m. on Dec. 7, weather permitting, workers at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu will begin lifting eight caskets out of the ground. The graves are marked “Unknown.” The men inside served on the battleship Arizona, and they have been buried without names since the years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 85 years ago.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency plans to disinter all 86 Arizona unknowns buried at the cemetery known as the Punchbowl, eight at a time, and try to give each of them a name. A ceremony at Kilo Pier on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam will follow the first disinterment about five hours later. More than 700 family members are expected in Hawaii, Stars and Stripes reported.
It is happening largely because of a real estate agent from Virginia.
Kevin Kline’s great-uncle, Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class Robert Edwin Kline, died on the Arizona and was never identified. Identifying the ship’s unknowns, as the military had done for hundreds of men from the battleship Oklahoma, depended on matching the remains with DNA from relatives. The government had almost none.
A 2022 Navy report to Congress said the government had reference DNA on file from just 25 Arizona families. Collecting enough would take about 10 years and cost roughly $2.7 million, the report estimated. The Navy and the Defense Department said the project could not be done and would cost too much, Military Times reported.
Kline founded Operation 85 in 2023 and went looking for the families himself. His volunteers traced descendants of the dead, often several generations removed, and steered them to Navy and Marine Corps casualty offices to give cheek swabs. DPAA had said it would need samples from 643 families before it would ask to open the graves. In April, the agency announced Operation 85 had reached 60% of the reference samples it needed, enough to begin.
It took three years and about $150,000 of Kline’s own money, according to Stars and Stripes.
“I think this is a problem we can fix.”
Kevin Kline, founder of Operation 85, to Military Times
DPAA Director Kelly McKeague, a retired Air Force major general, credited the result “singularly” to Operation 85’s “determined initiative and extraordinary efforts.”
The Arizona lost 1,177 men on Dec. 7, 1941, nearly half of the 2,403 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor. More than 900 of them were never recovered and remain inside the sunken hull beneath the USS Arizona Memorial, which the Navy considers their grave. The 86 men at the Punchbowl are among those whose remains were recovered but could not be identified with the tools of the 1940s.
The work will look much like the Oklahoma project. DPAA disinterred 388 Oklahoma unknowns starting in 2015 and has since identified more than 300 of them, according to the agency. Anthropologists at DPAA’s laboratory in Hawaii will examine the Arizona remains, and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Delaware will run the DNA comparisons.
After Dec. 7, DPAA spokesman Sean Everette said, the agency plans to disinter more groups of eight every two to three weeks until all 86 are done. It is also finalizing a proposal to disinter 55 more Pearl Harbor unknowns who have no ship associated with them.
Families who believe they are related to a missing Arizona crew member can still give a DNA sample. DPAA says relatives should contact the Navy Casualty Office or the Marine Corps casualty office, and the agency has said it will keep encouraging anyone who may be related to come forward.
Kline told Military Times the exhumations do not mean the job is finished. “We’re still looking,” he said, to take “those words unknown off those graves.”
Sources and further reading
- Military Times: ‘Unknown’ sailors and Marines from the battleship Arizona to be disinterred Dec. 7
- Stars and Stripes: Pearl Harbor’s Arizona unknowns to be disinterred from Punchbowl
- Military Times: Remains of USS Arizona crew buried as unknowns to be identified (April 2026)
- DPAA: 300th USS Oklahoma service member identified
Featured image: PH3 Jayme Pastoric / U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons, public domain (cropped)
