Pearl Harbor survivor helps identify unknown dead

AUDREY McAVOY,Associated Press

HONOLULU (AP) — Ray Emory could not accept that more than one quar­ter of the 2,400 Amer­i­cans who died at Pearl Har­bor were buried, uniden­ti­fied, in a vol­canic crater.

And so he set out to restore names to the dead.

Emory, a sur­vivor of the attack, doggedly scoured decades-old doc­u­ments to piece together who was who. He pushed, and some­times bad­gered, the gov­ern­ment into rela­bel­ing more than 300 grave­stones with the ship names of the deceased. And he lob­bied for foren­sic sci­en­tists to exhume the skele­tons of those who might be identified.

On Fri­day, the 71-year anniver­sary of the Japan­ese attack, the Navy and National Park Ser­vice will honor the 91-year-old for­mer sailor for his deter­mi­na­tion to have Pearl Har­bor remem­bered, and remem­bered accurately.

Posted by AP News on Dec 6 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.