USS Oklahoma Remains Preservation Project

At the onset of World War II when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 the battleship USS Oklahoma (BB 37) was birthed outboard of the USS Maryland (BB 46) in battleship row. The first torpedo hit the ship just before 8 o'clock in the morning. Within minutes the ship sustained damage from multiple torpedoes and capsized. Some of the sailors were able to evacuate and swam to the M

aryland or the shore of Ford Island while other personnel manned smaller boats to begin to pull the wounded from the water. In the hours after the attack, crew members still trapped inside were rescued by cutting holes in the hall. 32 men were saved in this manner, 429 sailors and Marines were not so lucky. One of those sailors was Stanley F Drwall, pattern maker first-class, our Co-Founder's Mary Ann Ryther's Uncle. His remains were entombed in the ship until it was righted and the bodies removed. This first disinterment of those men started in July 1942 and ended in 1944. Some of the remains were immediately identified but there remain 393 buried among the unknowns at the national Memorial Cemetery, thus making the unknowns from the USS Oklahoma the single largest group of buried unidentified servicemen from the Pearl Harbor attack. Since then it has been determined that there are an additional 198 sailors from the Arizona, West Virginia, California, Nevada, Pennsylvania and the aircraft carrier Enterprise. Through the Navy's program approximately 100 of these sailors were disinterred and the program started to identify the remains and return them to their families. In a cemetery in Thomas, Tucker County, West Virginia there is a grave site with the marker Stanley F Drwall, pattern maker first-class USS Oklahoma, December 7, 1941. This grave is empty. We have been cooperating with the Navy for several years including DNA samples and a personal meeting with the Deputy Secretary of Defense in Chicago and anxiously awaiting the results of the government's DNA testing procedure. Within the last several months, the families of these missing in action (MIA) men were told the Secretary of the Navy is planning on ceasing this operation and burying the remains as unknowns in a mass grave on December 7, 2016. This is the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. We cannot let this happen.