December 7, 1941.
The Trapp brothers were assigned to the battleship USS Oklahoma.
The ship was attacked by Japanese aircraft, which caused it to quickly capsize.
Resulted in the loss of life for 429 crew members.
We were unable to identify these brothers.
I've always said that, as a nation, we had the will and the funding
to send those young men off to war.
Now we should have the will and provide the funding to bring those young men back home.
DPAA was established in 2015, having the mandate to search for,
recover and identify the unknowns from World War Two to present.
We like puzzles.
Sometimes there's a puzzle that sits on a table
and you get 98 of the pieces in place and then there's two pieces missing.
I don't think you put the puzzle away.
December 7 would come around, and it was really difficult for my mom to talk about it.
I mean, we knew she had brothers, but it wasn't a topic until I was older.
I think the story came to light when looking through pictures.
They were just playmates growing up.
She loved them dearly.
Harold, or Hal, was very studious and wanted to be an engineer.
William is the one who wanted to enlist, and because they were so close,
they enlisted together on the same day.
And it's been 80 years since they passed away.
The attack on Pearl Harbor occurred on December 7, 1941.
The USS Oklahoma capsized, trapping about 400 sailors and marines inside.
The Trapp brothers, I just felt for those families.
Getting the word that you've lost both of your sons.
I can't imagine the grief that they had to live with.
The Navy's policy is, the men that were on the ship,
that becomes their final resting place.
It's kind of like being buried at sea.
The difference with the Oklahoma was,
because they thought they could salvage the ship,
they had Navy divers going in, retrieving the remains of those that had died.
Right after the war, the U.S. Army Mortuary tried their best to identify these guys.
And for whatever reason, various reasons, they couldn't identify them.
And that's why they were transferred to Hawaii and buried as unknowns.
As a nation, like this is how we move on.
You know, because we didn't have the technology.
So you have to move on.
I don't think people understand what it means
to have somebody who has been unidentified for 75 years.
It affects the generations.
My grandmother, she died from her grief and my mother, it did affect her.
When the DPAA reached out to us it was just like a miracle.
Families will always tell me, "Just bring me something."
"My father, my brother, bring him back to us."
Once we had the possibility of utilizing DNA,
we realized that we could probably make some identifications
of those individuals that had been buried
as unknowns from the USS Oklahoma.
Our identification process begins well before anything comes into our laboratory,
so our historians and analysts are doing a lot of research.
We have a case file on each one of our unaccounted-for service members.
Their dental records, medical records, even just their age, stature,
that we would use for our identifications.
The USS Oklahoma was a long project.
There's 208 bones in the human body, and there were 429 individuals on that ship.
We were dealing with a highly-commingled set of remains.
About a quarter of the ship was represented in one casket.
We estimated that we'd probably do about 5,000 DNA samples.
The identification that we're making is based on mitochondrial DNA.
Mitochondrial DNA is something that's passed down through maternal lineage.
And so anybody in that maternal lineage would have the same mitochondrial DNA sequence.
They sent us the tests in the mail, we also got three tests for our children.
So they had a good DNA sample or mitochondrial DNA sample.
And then from there, we were able to use dental as well as
anthropological methods to then individuate the brothers.
So we knew dentally which skull belonged to which brother,
and then the stature really came into play.
So Harold is several inches taller than William.
So just from the length of the bones, we were able to determine which brother was which.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced today that brothers
Harold F. Trapp and William H. Trapp, who were killed during World War Two,
were accounted for on November 24 of 2020.
I simply want to recognize that there is grief, recognize that there is loss,
and recognize that because of the advance of technology,
we've now been able to correctly and fully identify.
So it's my honor today to be with you to bring honor to this family.
Carol, on behalf of the President of the United States,
a grateful nation, and the US Navy,
please accept this flag as a token of our appreciation
for your loved ones' honorable sacrifices.
Thank you
We anticipated that we were going to be able to identify about
80% of the unaccounted for from the USS Oklahoma.
And now that we're coming to a close, we've been able to identify over 340 individuals.
We're not gonna find them all.
But we're not gonna leave any stone unturned.
We will pursue it until, you know, there's nothing more that we can do.
That identification is really important.
You just have no idea what it means to have this closure.
They are home, they are home, and that's a good feeling.