Brothers killed at Pearl Harbor ID'd seven decades after deaths

March 25 (UPI) -- Scientists have identified the remains of two brothers who died more than seven decades ago during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as well as a Marine captured in the Philippines, the Department of Defense announced Monday.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency named Seaman 2nd Class Calvin H. Palmer, Seaman 2nd Class Wilferd D. Palmer and Marine Corps Capt. Lester A. Schade after disinterring their remains.

The Palmer brothers died Dec. 7, 1941, aboard the USS Oklahoma, which capsized after multiple torpedo hits at Pearl Harbor.

They was identified as part of a renewed effort to identify hundreds of sailors and Marines killed at Pearl Harbor and buried in unnamed graves. The DPAA began exhuming the remains in 2015 from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as the Punchbowl.

The Palmer brothers' names appear on the Courts of the Missing at the Punchbowl, where rosettes will be etched next to their names to indicate their identification.

More than 2,400 people were killed in the Pearl Harbor attack that brought the United States into World War II.

Schade, a member of Company I, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, was captured in April 1942 and was held as a prisoner of war in the Philippine Islands. On Dec. 14, 1944, he and some 1,600 other Allied prisoners were aboard a Japanese transport ship when U.S. carrier planes attacked, killing some of the prisoners.

Schade survived and was later loaded aboard another transport ship in Taiwan, the Enoura Maru. That ship also was attacked on Jan. 9, 1945, and he was listed among the missing and presumed dead.

U.S. officials were originally told all bodies recovered from the Enoura Maru were cremated and buried at Takao Harbor, but a survivor later said some bodies were buried in graves. The American Graves Registration Service recovered the bodies in 1946 and reburied them in the Punchbowl.

The DPAA disinterred Schade's remains and used dental and anthropological analysis, and historical and material evidence to identify him.

Schade's name is listed on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery, an American Battle Monuments Commission site in the Philippines, where a rosette will be put next to his name to indicate his identification.