Posted on: Monday, May 30, 2005
Lost seaman may be at Punchbowl
By Mike Gordon
Advertiser Staff Writer
Sixty-three years ago, the Navy sent a telegram to the parents of Seaman 2nd Class Warren P. Hickok informing them that their 18-year-old son was missing in action after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
But amateur historian Ray Emory, also a survivor of the Dec. 7, 1941 attack, believes he has found the young man from Kalamazoo, Mich., buried as an unidentified casualty of war at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
If he's right — and the 84-year-old Emory was right about two other Pearl Harbor unknowns buried at Punchbowl — then the remains scheduled for disinterment Thursday will be those of Hickok.
A team of recovery specialists from the Hawai'i-based Joint Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command will supervise the disinterment and then take the remains to their lab at Hickam Air Force Base.
The accounting command would say little about the case, which is standard practice, and would not speculate on whether they believe they have found Hickok, said Army Maj. Rumi Nielson-Green. It could take months, even years to complete their investigation, she said.
Emory will bear witness Thursday, not far from grave E-731, just as he did for the previous sets of remains he helped identify: Those of Payton L. Vanderpool Jr., a 22-year-old fireman second class, and of Thomas Hembree, a 17-year-old apprentice seaman.
Both sailors were buried as unknowns since the cemetery opened in 1949 and would have remained so if not for Emory's obsession with collecting official World War II documents and connecting the dots between them.
Hickok was assigned to the destroyer USS Sicard, which was in dry dock when the attack occurred. He was among a group of sailors living in nearby barracks who were sent to help defend the battleship USS Pennsylvania.
Hickok is thought to have died instantly when a bomb was dropped onto the battleship.
Emory has been researching the handful of sailors from the Pennsylvania explosion whose remains were never identified. Because the Navy knew the names of the sailors, Emory was able to request their personnel deceased files.
With this in hand, he sought to compare them with the military's so-called "unknown files" from the attack. He has about 160 of those files.
Emory found a match with Hickok's file and gave the information to the Hickam command in November 2003. Among the details that boosted his confidence: dental records that appeared to match, identical height and weight and a healed fracture in the right leg that Hickok was said to have.
Military officials plan to commend Emory when the remains are disinterred.
"Mr. Emory has been a valued friend to this command and has helped make significant contributions to the completion of the mission to account for all our nation's fallen heroes, said Marine Col. Claude Davis, deputy commanding officer for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command.
Emory shrugs off such compliments.
The retired mechanical engineer has long championed the cause of the unknowns, working out of a document-filled office in his Kahala home.
Emory thinks he can identify at least 100 more unknowns. He said he does it for the families.
"These people were told the bodies were never recovered," Emory said. "That's the sad part. They were not missing. They're just not identified."
Reach Mike Gordon at mgordon@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8012.
