Coming Home: Remains of Sailor Lost at Pearl Harbor Returning to Kentucky

The remains of a sailor killed during the attack on Pearl Harbor have been exhumed, identified, and are on the way home to Kentucky, the POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced Tuesday.

Navy Fireman 2nd Class Hal J. Allison, 21, was one of the 2,403 Americans who were killed in the surprise attack from Imperial Japan, and until 14th of October 2021, his remains were left unidentified in a National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu where they were buried in 1949.

The sailor will now be repatriated and buried in his hometown of Paducah, Kentucky, on the 8th of April 2022.

Allison served on the USS Oklahoma when he died, alongside another 428 crewmen, on the 7th of December, 1941, when the vessel capsized after sustaining multiple torpedo hits from Japanese aircraft, as part of the Pearl Harbor attacks.

U.S. naval authorities attempted to recover the remains of the crew between 1941-1944 and those they found were interred in the Halawa and Nu’uanu Cemeteries before they were identified.

In 1947 when the remains were first exhumed and inspected, only 35 men from the USS Oklahoma at the time could be identified with the rest being buried by the American Graves Registration Service in 46 plots at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, which were – including Allison – initially determined to be non-recoverable.

After an attempt to identify the sailors was relaunched in 2015, scientists from the POW/MIA Accounting Agency were able to identify Allison’s body by using dental and anthropological analysis, alongside, scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System who also used mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y chromosome DNA (Y-STR) analysis to determine the remains belonged to Allison on the 14th of October.

A rosette will now be placed next to Allison’s name at the Courts of the Missing World War Two monument at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific to show that his remains have now been found.

Allison will soon be joined by two of his fellow sailors from the USS Oklahoma.

Navy Water Tender 1st Class Milo E. Phillips, 26, of Pierce, Colorado, will be reburied on the 4th of August at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, and Navy Coxswain Paul L. Boemer, 21, from Missouri will be repatriated and buried in his home town of St. Louis on the 3rd of May.