- On the morning of December 7th, 1941, Ruth Erickson was having
a leisurely breakfast on her Sunday off. Ruth was a nurse, and had been
working at the Naval Hospital at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii for
about a year and a half. It was a good gig, shorter
shifts, fresh pineapple. But this morning, the roar of airplanes interrupted her meal. At first Ruth assumed it was just flyboy training exercises at Ford Island. She didn't think much of it
until she heard the bombs hit. Running to a window, Ruth looked
up and saw a Japanese plane flying so low she could
see the rising sun painted under its wing and the
goggles of its pilot. Braving a rain of shrapnel,
Ruth and her fellow nurses ran to their posts at the hospital, where, within 30 minutes, they
were met with the very first casualties of the assault on Pearl Harbor. We now know this attack as the-- - Date which will live in infamy. - Where over 2,400 Americans
died, with the majority of those people dying as a
result of the Japanese bombings on the battleships USS
Arizona and USS Oklahoma. 15 minutes into the attack,
the USS Arizona was hit with a 1,700 pound naval projectile that ignited 1 million
pounds of explosives in the ship's magazine, where
the artillery is stored. The explosion was so
catastrophic that the 33,000 ton battleship was momentarily
lifted into the air, before it hit the water again and sank. The ship burned for two and a half days, Out of a crew of 1,511, only 334 people survived, which means 1,177 people lost their lives. On a single ship. What happened in the days
following the attack, and what has happened in
the 77 years since then to retrieve and identify
the dead of Pearl Harbor? As we were working on this
video I remembered all the times I went to the the Arizona
Memorial as a child, because when you're a kid in Hawaii that's where you go on field trips, it's like Mount Rushmore or something. I remember looking down into the water, where you can still see the
eerie outline of the ship and wondering, "Are they still down there? Anyone else interested in this?" Turns out, young Caitlin, the answer is, yes, they
are still down there. Because of the intense fire,
the maze of twisted metal under the water, and the inaccessibility of certain parts of the ship, at the time of the attack, identification or retrieval of the bodies
was nearly impossible. At the USS Arizona, only
107 people were positively identified leaving 1,070 people to fall into one of three categories: One, bodies that were never found. Two, bodies, or parts of
bodies, removed from the ship when they were still trying to salvage it. These remains were usually
severely dismembered or partially cremated. Identifying them was impossible, remember there was no DNA testing in 1941. These bodies were buried
in temporary mass graves, and then declared unknowns and reburied at the National Memorial
Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as Punchbowl, in 1949. And finally three, the remains
that could not be recovered because they were in the
rear portion of the ship. When it was determined
that the USS Arizona could not be salvaged, the
Navy decided it would be quote "too difficult to remove the
dead in a respectful manner." So 1,102 people remain
entombed in the USS Arizona, considered buried at sea. Despite having been under
the water for over 70 years, the National Park Service,
after studying the ship, predicts that the Arizona will still have structural integrity for at least another 150 years. Many of the surviving crew
members of the Arizona have opted to have their cremated remains interred in the sunken battleship. And one might find a sense
of closure at being able to go out to the Arizona
memorial to visit the dead. But for the families of
those who died on ships like the USS Oklahoma,
there is no closure, as no wreck remains of the battleship and there is confusion regarding
the remains of the crew. On the morning of the
attack, the 1,300 people on the Oklahoma, including
their 24-piece band, had assembled on the deck of the ship for the morning colors ceremony. Shortly after 7:45am,
the crew heard explosions and a voice over the PA system
cry, "Air raid! Air raid!" The Oklahoma was hit by several torpedoes that caused the ship to roll to its side where it floated in 50 feet of water. As it rolled, some of the
crew jumped from the ship in desperation, while others
became trapped below decks. Some of those trapped were
rescued by crew members who heard them banging
against the hull for help, trying desperately to stop the
water with rags and clothes. Others tried to swim their way out. The ships's captain and ship's dentist gave up their own lives to push crew mates through narrow portholes before
getting trapped themselves. That freaks me out so much. It's like an underwater
cave, except man-made. 429 of the Oklahoma's crew
lost their lives that day, with the majority of them
caught in the submerged ship. In the years long salvage operation, that included the Oklahoma
being pulled upright in 1943, the gathering and identification
of the bodies was fraught. As the bodies had been
underwater for some time, they had decomposed to nothing
but bones and those bones had become intermingled with
the wreckage of the ship. Disentangling the bones, metal, and oil was nearly impossible with
the technology of the time which mainly relied on dental records. Pieces of skeletons were brought to a lab where 27 identifications
were tentatively made, but later scrapped as incomplete. The thought was that the
bones would simply be buried in a mass grave, so the
remains were not arranged as complete person skeletons but rather by skulls, leg
bones, arm bones, et cetera. The military then reversed
course and demanded that the skeletons be
assembled as whole sets. The lab did the best they could, and each set was buried
in Punchbowl in 1950 as unidentifiable. But in 2003 a Pearl Harbor
survivor named Ray Emory got officials to exhume
what he believed to be the casket of Eldon Wyman. While some of Wyman's
remains were identified, the remains of four others were found to be in the casket as well. And with further DNA
testing, it was revealed that there were in fact the remains of 90 other people in that casket. After another exhumation
in 2007, where more remains were returned to the families of the dead, the Pentagon decided in 2015 that they would attempt to identify all of the USS Oklahoma's
unidentifiable remains. The government hopes to identify 80% of the Oklahoma's 388
unidentified crew by 2020. That's sending some 5,000
DNA samples to a military lab and opening 46 burial plots. As of December 2017, 100 of the dead from the USS Oklahoma
have been identified. But, again Arizona and
Oklahoma are just two ships that were impacted by the
attack on Pearl Harbor. Many of the crew of ships
like the USS West Virginia where three men trapped in
the submerged forward hull of the ship banged for help
for 16 days before dying, because there was no way to rescue them, remain unknowns. 38 crew members are buried
in Punchbowl, unidentified. And while the USS Arizona is
the most well-known wreckage of Pearl Harbor, the
wreck of the USS Utah, an unarmed target ship moored
off the northwest shore of Ford Island remains
crumbling in the waters where she capsized, 54 people
still entombed in the ship. I think we might not have
these high expectations of identifying everyone if
American soldiers had died in far off lands in battle, but this was an attack on our own shores. The ship is right there. You can see it. So be like young Caitlin, the more inquisitive,
better version of Caitlin, and ask questions, consider the dead, and keep pushing to have
those bodies identified. As we worked on this video we realized there are so many fascinating stories related to World War II, the
deadliest conflict in history. Pearl Harbor made sense
as a starting point since I grew up in Hawaii,
but what about the bodies of Hiroshima, the dead from
the Japanese interment camps, the trenches of Europe. If you're interested we will continue this as
a series through the year. This video was made
with generous donations from death enthusiasts, just like you. That freaks me out so much.
I like her channel. I like that she talks about death. Aside the technicalities, it is a topic that does not get talked about enough. We should not be completly obtuse about the one thing we will all have in common, eventually.