The USS Arizona Memorial is seen at Pearl Harbor on Aug. 5, 2025. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency is moving forward with plans to disinter nearly 150 unidentified sailors from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, including some associated with the ship, which was sunk in the 1941 attack. (Thomas Frezza/U.S. Navy)
The federal agency tasked with identifying American war dead will formally request disinterment of nearly 150 unknown sailors from the USS Arizona and other ships sunk in the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
With the request by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency came the ultimate validation of years of work by an advocacy group to reach a threshold previously deemed impossible.
Pentagon policy requires a general threshold of family reference samples from 60% of the “potentially associated service members” before the agency will disinter a group of unknown service members for identification.
In the case of the sailors killed in the Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet on Dec. 7, 1941, the required number of samples was 643. DPAA gave notice in a statement Thursday that the target had been reached.
The agency began making plans last month to exhume the remains of 88 unknowns associated with the USS Arizona from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, along with 52 without a ship affiliation, pending the collection of enough DNA reference samples from surviving family members.
At the time, the agency was just 18 samples short. With that hurdle cleared, it will formally submit a request to the assistant secretary of defense for manpower and reserve affairs, the statement said.
But much of the work was carried out by Virginia-based real estate agent Kevin Kline, who founded the advocacy group Operation 85 in 2023. He is the grandnephew of Petty Officer 2nd Class Robert Kline, who was killed on the ship and remains missing.
Kline took up the mission in the wake of a Navy report to Congress in 2022 saying the U.S. government had DNA on file from just 25 families of USS Arizona personnel.
The USS Arizona burns after being struck by Japanese bombs during the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941. (U.S. Navy/National Archives)
The report estimated that it would take 10 years and cost approximately $2.7 million to collect the samples needed.
Kline built a team of research analysts and a forensic genealogist. Together, they located the vast majority of the 643 families at a cost of around $75,000, largely shouldered by Kline.
DPAA plans to disinter 141 commingled sets of remains starting in November or December, the agency said in Thursday’s statement. The number of potential sets of remains has increased by one since March.
The remains will be analyzed in DPAA’s Hawaii lab. DNA testing will be performed by the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Delaware.
Kline has turned his attention to the more than 400 other Arizona sailors’ families from whom DNA hasn’t been collected. Samples from them are needed to ensure the highest number of positive identifications.
“How could we all not feel proud?” Kline said. “We hit a major milestone, but there are still hundreds of families to find, disinterments ahead, and hopefully identifications to follow.”
burke.matt@stripes.com @MatthewMBurke1
