The remains of a sailor killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor were buried this Tuesday, more than 80 years after his death, in Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington, a spokeswoman for this place confirmed to AFP where they rest. military heroes.
Herbert Jacobson, nicknamed Bert by those close to him, was 21 years old when he perished in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the largest US military base in the Pacific.
Attempts to identify his corpse have failed several times over the decades, each time causing disappointment among his descendants, before finally succeeding in a final campaign launched in 2015.
Identification campaigns launched in 2003 and 2015
Bert Jacobson was aboard the USS Oklahoma when this battleship was sunk by five Japanese torpedoes on December 7, 1941. More than 400 men on board were killed.
The warship was refloated two years later, the bodies recovered and buried in Hawaii.
A few years later, after an initial exhumation, attempts to identify the bodies by their dental impressions were largely unsuccessful. We had to wait for a new campaign launched in 2003, then the next in 2015, to obtain convincing results thanks to advances in scientific medicine.
Identified in 2019
Since 2003, 361 individual remains from the battleship Oklahoma have been identified, including that of Bert Jacobson, according to the US Department of Defense agency responsible for listing and identifying the bodies of military prisoners of war or missing in action since World War II. World War. .
The sailor’s funeral, formally identified in 2019, had to be postponed for the last time due to the Covid epidemic.
Source: BFM TV
