SOUTH JERSEY

SJ man's uncle ID'd from Pearl Harbor remains

Carol Comegno
@CarolComegno
Sailor Edwin Hopkins was killed on the battleship USS Oklahoma in the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was declared missing but his remains are now identified


RUNNEMEDE - The word the Hopkins family had been waiting for since World War II came when the telephone rang this week.

It arrived Wednesday in a call to the Runnemede home of 71-year-old retired electrician Edwin Hopkins.

Nearly 75 years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a U.S. Navy officer called to tell Hopkins the remains of his namesake uncle, Edwin Hopkins, had finally been identified through forensics and DNA as one of the missing sailor casualties from the torpedo bombing of the USS Oklahoma on Dec. 7, 1941.

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The first thing Hopkins did after thanking the caller from the U.S. Navy Personnel Command Casualty Assistance Center in Millington, Tennessee, was to phone his sister in Florida.

"He could not get the words out," recalled his sister, Faye Hopkins Boore, who at first thought her brother must be calling about a family emergency or other bad news.

"Finally he was able to blurt out, 'Uncle Ed has been identified.'"

Edwin Hopkins of Runnemede, nephew of Pearl Harbor attack casualty with same name

Hopkins, a Navy veteran like his uncle, had never met the elder Hopkins. A farm boy who quit high school and enlisted, Hopkins died in the attack at age 19 before his niece and nephews were born.

Boore understands the emotion behind the confirmation.

"This has been such an emotional journey for our family, so it was overwhelming," said Boore, who was raised in Runnemede with her brothers and graduated from Triton Regional High School.

And her brother Edwin acknowledged on Thursday it was "a little overwhelming" because the call "came out of the blue."

"I thought they would call my sister first but the officer said he called me because I was the oldest," he said.

Torpedoes capsized the Oklahoma, with a crew of nearly 1,300, including 77 Marines. There were 429 casualties, but most were declared missing.

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Hopkins' battleship had been docked with many other ships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor at the time of the sneak attack and was the first to be torpedoed on Battleship Row. The Oklahoma was built at the former New York Shipbuilding Co. in Camden, launched in 1914 and commissioned for World War I in 1916.

After the military decided last year to unearth and attempt to identify the co-mingled remains of the unidentified 388 sailors, Boore said the family was hopeful the call would one day come. Boore said she was told by the military Hopkins' remains apparently had been interred in 1950 in a grave marked “unknown” in the National Cemetery of the Pacific, commonly called the Punchbowl.

Army Staff Sgt. Kristen Duus of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Office (DPAA) in Washington, D.C., confirmed Thursday the remains of Fireman Third Class Edwin Hopkins were identified. He and more than a half-dozen other Oklahoma sailors have been identified so far this year. His name was first listed as identified on the DPAA website Thursday after his family was notified of the development.

Duus said Hopkins' remains and those of his shipmates were co-mingled and buried as "unknowns" in 61 different caskets in 45 graves in the Punchbowl in Hawaii during and shortly after the war. Only 42 of the 429 fatalities from the Oklahoma had been identified by that time.

She said the unknown remains were disinterred between September and November with "full military honors" to attempt identification.

"Because the remains are co-mingled and there was no DNA on file for service members until the 1990s, our goal is to identify 80 percent of the unidentified in the next three to five years with the help of DNA of family members," she said, "Some (of the casualties) either have no family members left or we are unable to locate any."

Duus said skull remains were sent to the Central Identification Laboratory at Schofield Barracks, an Army facility the Japanese also attacked the same day as the nearby harbor and Hickham Field. Other bone remains were sent to a laboratory in Nebraska.

As of this week, she said less than two dozen of the 388 have been identified and that it could take three to five years to exhaust identifications.

Hopkins and his sister, who has been active with the Oklahoma Survivors Association and has visited Hawaii numerous times, had already scheduled a trip to Pearl Harbor in December to mark the 75th anniversary of the bombing.

Boore said her family expects to meet with the military next month to be briefed on the identification process and to decide where to have her uncle's remains reburied — returned to the Punchbowl or laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery or in New Hampshire, where he was raised.

She said her grandmother, who moved to Runnemede in her later years, never got over the fact she could not bury her son and died never knowing his remains existed.

"I don't believe my grandparents would want to leave him in Hawaii," she said.

Carol Comegno: (856) 486-2473; ccomegno@gannettnj.com