His funeral took place more than 80 years after his death. The remains of a sailor killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor were buried on Tuesday at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington (United States), said a spokeswoman for this place where rest the military heroes.
Herbert Jacobson, nicknamed Bert by those close to him, was 21 when he perished in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the largest American 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.
361 remains identified
Bert Jacobson was on board 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 on site in Hawaii. A few years later, after an initial exhumation, attempts to identify the bodies by their dental impressions proved largely unsuccessful. We had to wait for a new campaign launched in 2003, then a following one in 2015, to obtain convincing results thanks to the progress of scientific medicine.
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. The funeral of the sailor, formally identified in 2019, had to be postponed one last time due to the Covid epidemic.
