HONOLULU — 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 71st 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.
“Some of the time, we suffered criticism from Ray, and sometimes it was personally directed at me. And I think it was all for the better,” said National Park Service historian Daniel Martinez. “It made us rethink things. It wasn’t viewed by me as personal but a reminder of how you need to sharpen your pencil when you recall these events and the people and what’s important.”
Emory learned of the unknown graves more than 20 years ago, when he visited the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific shortly before the 50th anniversary of the attack. The grounds foreman told him that the Pearl Harbor dead were scattered around the veterans’ graveyard in the Punchbowl volcanic crater.
Emory got a clipboard and walked along the flat granite markers, making notes of any listing death around Dec. 7, 1941. He got ahold of the Navy’s burial records from archives in Washington and determined which ships the dead in each grave were from.
He wrote to the government, asking why the markers didn’t note ship names and asked that the markers be changed.
“They politely told me to go you know where,” Emory said in an interview at his Honolulu home, where he keeps a “war room” packed with documents, charts and maps. Military and veterans policy called for changing grave markers only if remains are identified, an inscription is mistaken or a marker is damaged.
Emory appealed to the late Patsy T. Mink (D), a Hawaii congresswoman who inserted a provision in an appropriations bill requiring Veterans Affairs to include “USS Arizona” on gravestones of unknowns from that battleship.
Today, unknowns from other vessels such as the USS Oklahoma and USS West Virginia, also have new markers.
Some of the dead, such as those turned to ash, will probably never be identified. But Emory knew some could be.
The Navy’s 1941 burial records noted one body, burned and floating in the harbor, was found wearing shorts with the name “Livingston.” Only two men named Livingston were assigned to Pearl Harbor at the time, and one of the two was accounted for. Emory suspected the body was the other Livingston.
Government forensic scientists exhumed him. Dental records, a skeletal analysis and circumstantial evidence confirmed Emory’s suspicions. The remains belonged to Alfred Livingston, a 23-year-old firefighter first class assigned to the USS Oklahoma.
Livingston’s nephew, Ken Livingston, said his uncle and his father were raised together by their grandmother and attended the same one-room schoolhouse. They grew up working on farms in and around Worthington, Ind.
When family members learned that Alfred was found, they brought him home from Hawaii to be buried in the same cemetery where his grandmother and mother rest.
— Associated Press
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