Another Pearl 'unknown' may be ID'd
By Mike Gordon
Advertiser Staff Writer
It sounds impossible, something with longer odds than a Vegas jackpot, but World War II historian Ray Emory believes he can identify a second casualty buried as an "unknown" after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
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Emory, an 80-year-old survivor of the attack, did the early historical research that led to the identification last year of Thomas Hembree, the first Pearl Harbor "unknown" identified in 60 years.
World War II historian Ray Emory compared records.
Now Emory thinks he knows where the remains of Fireman 2nd Class Payton L. Vanderpool Jr. are buried: Grave Q-179 in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.
Working at his Kahala home in a cramped room stuffed with military documents, Emory compared dental records for one of the attack's 647 unidentified casualties with the records in Vanderpool's Navy personnel file.
They were a perfect match. So perfect, in fact, that the U.S. Army's Central Identification Laboratory-Hawai'i is looking into the possibility of disinterring the remains.
"We're looking at it very seriously," said Johnie Webb Jr., deputy director of the lab at Hickam Air Force Base. "If it is as good as it looks on first appearance, we will probably have another one to disinter."
Although Webb said he needs more information on the Vanderpool case, especially documents from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., he might be able to decide by year's end on whether to disinter the remains in grave Q-179.
"I've only looked at it very preliminarily, but it looks pretty good," Webb said.
Another identification would further solidify Emory's reputation as a champion of the men killed during the Dec. 7, 1941, attack. In the past decade, his desire to learn more about the Pearl Harbor casualties buried at Punchbowl has become a quest to give the "unknown" as much dignity as he can find for them.
Last November, a few weeks before the Army announced it had identified Hembree, Punchbowl officials unveiled 70 new headstones for "unknown" Pearl Harbor casualties. Emory doesn't know who they were, but he was able to persuade Congress to order inscriptions that told the visitors each man died aboard the most famous battleship in the world: the USS Arizona.
The Vanderpool discovery involved as much luck as work, Emory said.
In March, the former mechanical engineer found himself looking at a set of files a friend had sent nearly a year earlier. They're called "X files" because each one contains everything but the name of a Pearl Harbor casualty.
"I was just looking at them off the cuff," he said. "It was as if they fell out of the sky. It was just chance I was doing it."
One of the X files contained dental records, so he thought he would compare it with the 40-something personnel files he has collected over the years.
"I looked at the dental record and wondered if I had anything around here that looked like that," he said. "Sure enough, when I was pulling out some of these personnel deceased files I had, I came across Vanderpool.
"And the damn thing matched!"
Vanderpool was assigned to the battleship USS Pennsylvania, which was in drydock. The young sailor from Lawson, Mo., was on the pier during the attack and was killed either by an exploding bomb or machine gun fire, Emory said.
His personnel file said he was conscious when an ambulance took him away. That was the last anyone ever saw of him.
Emory called Vanderpool's sister, Flora Mae Young, at her home just south of Leavenworth, Kan., and told her of his discovery.
"It was a shock," said the 80-year-old Young. "We thought it was all settled, and he was just missing in action. We had accepted that. I just never did think that maybe his body could be out there in the Punchbowl."
