Scientists Continue to Work on Identifying the Victims of Pearl Harbor
After more than 70 years, Americans have not forgotten about the lives lost at Pearl Harbor and now during the anniversary of the attack that took place on Dec. 7, 1941, scientists continue to be determined in their task of identifying the soldiers.
Over the past few months, the bones of the men killed in the surprise air attack carried out by Japanese forces during World War II have been exhumed and brought to a Nebraska Air Force base lab for examination. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), a newly created group, is in charge of testing the bones and using advance methods to identify the victims.
"It's important for the families," said Carrie A. Brown, an anthropologist with the DPAA, reported by The Washington Post. "For a lot of people, it's an event that happened in their family history. A lot of people say: 'World War II. Who's even alive? Who even remembers?' We need to get these guys home. They've been not home for too long."
Officials had tried to identify the victims a few years after the attack. The 27 identifications that the team made were all rejected by the authorities, who stated that the tests were incomplete. By 1949, the remains were officially declared to be unidentifiable. They were buried in 1950 at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii.
With better technology, the Pentagon announced last spring that the unidentified remains, which total to about 388 people, will be exhumed for identification. The last of the remains were exhumed on Nov. 9.
"It is a very large task," Debra Prince Zinni, a forensic anthropologist and a manager at DPAA in Hawaii, said. "But we definitely have the techniques and the personnel and the capacity to take this project on. And that's why we're doing it now."
