ID’d WWII remains
will be reburied

Forensic tests identified a Pearl Harbor
sailor buried as "Unknown"

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By Gregg K. Kakesako
gkakesako@starbulletin.com

The first and only "unknown" Pearl Harbor victim buried at the National Cemetery of the Pacific to be identified will be returned to Punchbowl today in a grave marked with his name.

For 61 years, Seaman Apprentice Thomas Hembree lay buried under a Punchbowl headstone that carried the inscription "Unknown."

Last year, his remains were exhumed by forensic specialists from the Army Central Identification Laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base.

Dental records and analysis of the skeletal remains produced a biological profile that was consistent with Hembree's age, race, sex and stature.

His identification was announced in December.

Hembree was one of 20 sailors killed on Dec. 7, 1941, while serving on the USS Curtiss, a seaplane tender. The Curtiss was moored in Pearl Harbor's Middle Loch when the Japanese attacked and a bomb pierced its deck.

Hembree's remains were buried in a grave site with those thought to be of Seaman 1st class Wilson Rice, who has not yet been positively identified.

Until December, Hembree was one of 467 unidentified Pearl Harbor casualties, many of them in mass graves with single markers that bear only the date of their deaths.

Now his headstone will bear his name, rank, birth date, ship, and date and place of death.

Seventeen family members from Washington and California are expected to be at Punchbowl when Hembree will be returned to the same grave and buried with full military honors, including a rifle-firing detail and the playing of taps.

The American flag will be presented to Marion Price, his niece.

Only 17 years old at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, Hembree had been in the Navy for only four months, enlisting from Kennewick, Wash.

Twenty-one Curtiss sailors were killed on Dec. 7. Nineteen were identified.

Army specialists also are trying to determine if another set of remains exhumed from Punchbowl belongs to Seaman 2nd class William Goodwin, who was one of 1,777 sailors killed 60 years ago on the battleship USS Arizona.

More than 13,900 World War II casualties are buried at Punchbowl. Out of those, 776 were victims of the Pearl Harbor attack.