This undated image provided by the U.S. Navy shows sailor Herbert “Bert” Jacobson, from Grayslake, Ill. The 21-year-old is to be laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022 — more than 80 years after he was killed in the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor. Scientific testing that was started a few years ago on remains of men whose bodies were pulled from the USS Oklahoma after the attack has led to the identification of Jacobson and nearly 400 others. (U.S. Navy via AP)

By DON BABWIN,

Associated Press

CHICAGO — A 21-year-old sailor will be laid to rest on Tuesday following a decades-long effort to identify remains pulled from Pearl Harbor, more than 80 years after he was killed in the attack that propelled the United States into World War II.

Members of Herbert “Bert” Jacobson’s family have waited all their lives to attend a memorial for the young man they knew about but never met. Jacobson was among the more than 400 sailors and Marines killed on the USS Oklahoma during the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The casket containing his remains will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery.

“This has kind of been an unsolved mystery and it gives us closure to finally know what happened to Bert, where he is and that he’s being finally laid to rest after being listed as an unknown for so long,” said Brad McDonald, a nephew.

The service at Arlington will be the latest chapter in the story of the man from the small northern Illinois town of Grayslake, for the family that never had a body to bury when he was killed and the scientific quest to put names to the remains of hundreds of personnel from the battleship who lay buried anonymously for decades in a dormant volcanic crater near Pearl Harbor.

It is a story of waiting.

The battleship remained submerged for two years before it was refloated and bodies were recovered. A few years later, the graves of men on the Oklahoma were reopened in the hopes that dental records might lead to their names. But 27 sets of remains were not identified and had to be reinterred at the crater, the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, commonly known as the Punchbowl.

Another effort to identify about 100 sets of remains came up empty in 2003.

In 2015, the Department of Defense announced plans to exhume the remains again.

“We now have the ability to forensically test these remains and produce the identifications,” Debra Prince Zinni, a forensic anthropologist and laboratory manager at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in Hawaii, told The Associated Press at the time.

That gave new hope to Jacobson family members, who had been disappointed by each failed effort. They told the AP that Jacobson’s mother cried every Dec. 7, at least in part because she never knew where he was.

“She always had the hope the phone would ring and it would be Bert,” McDonald said.

The 2015 effort, Project Oklahoma, has led to the identification of 355 men — including Jacobson — who were killed when their ship was hit by at least nine torpedoes. That leaves 33 sets of remains still to be identified.