85 Years After Pearl Harbor Attack, Officials To Identify Unknown USS Arizona Crew Members

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October 14, 2026

By Staff Reporter |

On the 85th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, federal officials will initiate the identification and return of remains belonging to World War II service members killed aboard the USS Arizona.

The Department of Defense (DOD) will begin exhuming 277 of the sailors and Marines who lost their lives during the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. As part of the disinterment, the DOD will undertake forensic efforts to identify 86 of the service members whose identities remain unknown to this day.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) will use DNA analysis to match the remains to family members. DPAA will disinter eight caskets to start, then proceed at a pace of around eight caskets every two to three weeks until all the remains of the 86 unknown service members are disinterred.

More than 700 family members of the USS Arizona’s fallen are anticipated to be present for a ceremony at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam following the first disinterment on December 7 at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii, per reporting from the Stars and Stripes.

The disinterment almost didn’t happen. A report by the Navy submitted to Congress in 2022 advised that it would take about a decade and $2.7 million to obtain familial DNA for identification efforts. The federal government determined such an undertaking would be too costly and require too much manpower.

DPAA needed a 60% threshold of DNA Family Reference Samples — family representation for 643 crew members — to proceed with the disinterment and identification process.

Kevin Kline, whose great-uncle Robert Edward Kline was among the service members killed aboard the USS Arizona, launched Operation 85 in 2023 to collect those samples. Kline reportedly spent nearly $150,000 of his own money to fund the costs to obtain them, and successfully made the organization an official partner of DPAA.

In April, DPAA announced that Kline and Operation 85 successfully reached the required 60% threshold, having obtained 653 DNA kits.

The 277 buried in Hawaii outside the ship represent nearly a quarter of the lives lost on the ship that day.

Just before 8 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, Japan attacked the Pearl Harbor naval base. More than 350 Japanese aircraft bombed U.S. vessels, the USS Arizona among them. The battleship exploded and sank, then burned for more than two days. The USS Arizona had 334 survivors: 319 from the Navy, and 15 from the Marines.

1,177 from the USS Arizona perished, representing nearly half of the 2,403 service members killed at Pearl Harbor. More than 900 of the 1,177 have the sunken battleship at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial as their final resting place.

DPAA recently reached a record milestone of 250 identifications of unaccounted-for service members. The 250th service member to be identified was U.S. Army Captain Albert Wilcox, a prisoner of war killed aboard a Japanese troop and prisoner transport ship that was sunk by Allied aircraft in the final months of World War II.