Family members of Herbert “Bert” Jacobson have waited their entire lives to attend a memorial service for the young man they knew but never met. Jacobson was among more than 400 sailors and Marines killed on the USS Oklahoma during the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The casket containing his remains will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery. “This has been kind of an unsolved mystery and it gives us closure to finally know what happened to Bert, where he is and that he is finally at rest after being listed as unknown for so long,” said Brad McDonald, a nephew. . The service at Arlington will be the final chapter in the story of the man from the small town of Grayslake in northern Illinois, the family who never had a body to bury when he was killed, and the scientific quest to name the remains of hundreds of personnel from the battleship where he was. buried anonymously for decades in a dormant volcanic crater near Pearl Harbor. It’s a story of waiting. The battleship remained submerged for two years before being refloated and bodies recovered. A few years later, the men’s graves in Oklahoma were reopened in hopes that dental records might lead to their names. However, 27 sets of remains were not located and had to be reinterred in the crater, the National Memorial of the Pacific in Honolulu, commonly known as the Punchbowl. Another attempt to locate about 100 sets of remains was unsuccessful in 2003. In 2015, the Ministry of Defense announced plans to exhume the remains again. “We now have the ability to forensically test these remains and produce the identification,” Debra Prince Zinni, a forensic anthropologist and lab manager at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in Hawaii, told The Associated Press at the time. This gave new hope to members of the Jacobson family, who had been disheartened by every failed attempt. They told the AP that Jacobson’s mother cried every Dec. 7, at least in part because she never knew where he was. “He always had the hope that the phone would ring and it would be Bert,” McDonald said. The 2015 effort, Project Oklahoma, led to the identification of 355 men — including Jacobson — who were killed when their ship was hit by at least nine torpedoes. This leaves 33 sets of residues yet to be identified. To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the attack, those unidentified remains were reinterred, said Gene Hughes, a public affairs officer at the Naval Personnel Command. He has worked with the families of those killed in Oklahoma, including Jacobson’s relatives. For Jacobson’s family, any hope of knowing exactly what happened on December 7, 1941, had long since faded. All they knew from talking to Jacobson’s mates was that he had just gotten off duty after spending several hours ferrying men ashore. MacDonald said a good friend of his uncle’s in the Navy said he was pretty sure Jacobson was “sleeping in his bunk and died before he even knew there was a war. But we don’t really know.” That left one final question: What happened to Bert Jacobson’s body? The answer came in 2019, when McDonald said the family was told Jacobson’s remains had been identified. Hoping the burial could take place next year, they have been forced to wait, in large part because the COVID-19 pandemic has delayed most gatherings, including funerals. Now, they’re getting the closure that Jacobson’s parents and other family members never had. “I wish they had seen this,” McDonald said of his grandparents, parents and others. For him, it’s especially important to see the uncle he never met take his place in Arlington. “When Burt joined the Navy, he ran into a guy from South Dakota who was an orphan,” MacDonald said. “When they got a weekend pass, Bert took him home and the orphan met his (Bert’s) younger sister. Orville McDonald and Norma Jacobson dated and later married, giving McDonald a favorite ending to this story. “That orphan was my dad and Bert’s sister was my mom,” he said. “Well, I wouldn’t be here without Bert.”
Find previous coverage of Pearl Harbor and efforts to locate remains
