A Mercer County native who died at Pearl Harbor will be buried with full military honors in Hawaii.
Howard Adkins was born in Nemours, West Virginia and lived in Goodwill, West Virginia when he shipped out for the Navy in September of 1940. Adkins was a Fireman First Class Aboard the USS California which was stationed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
According to U.S. Navy accounts, during the attack a bomb penetrated the ship’s deck, ricocheted off the second deck and detonated at the third level below deck causing massive damage and casualties within the ship. Naval officials said the ship was prepared for an inspection the morning of the attack and the below deck air-tight hatches were all open, which allowed the fire to spread rapidly and for water to quickly overtake the ship which sank in three days.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, service personnel buried approximately 55 sets of remains from USS California in one of two temporary naval cemeteries, Halawa and Nu‘uanu, established on the island of Oahu to accommodate U.S. Navy casualties from attack. The majority of these were interred as named casualties; the balance was simply buried as “Unknowns.” Officials believed, however, that almost half of the dead remained with the ship, most likely in the flooded compartments below deck. Salvage operations were conducted on the California during March and April 1942.
During the salvage process, divers and shipyard personnel working below decks encountered “…a number of human bodies…” that were floated into large canvas bags and transported to a naval hospital on shore for processing and identification.
Since the war there have been various efforts and missions to identify as many sets of remains as possible, but it wasn’t until the development of modern DNA testing the process saw great success, especially with victims aboard the USS Oklahoma.
In 2015, the Deputy Secretary of Defense issued a memorandum directing the disinterment of Unknowns associated with USS Oklahoma, and policy was issued establishing thresholds for the disinterment of other Unknowns, from both World War II and the Korean War, currently buried in national cemeteries. Due to the success identifying Oklahoma unknowns, the DPAA recommended the disinterment of the 25 Unknowns associated with California as a group.
In 2018, DPAA personnel exhumed the California Unknowns and transferred the remains to the DPAA Laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii; since their disinterment, DPAA scientific staff have individually identified 13 California Sailors. Adkins was among the group. The elements of the 25 Unknowns that could not be included in these 13 individual IDs have been segregated into two groups of remains: those of unidentified individuals with DNA sequences that do not match any Family Reference Samples on file for California casualties and remains that could not be linked to any individual set of remains, either based on a lack of DNA evidence or the inability to articulate the elements with other remains. The latter group represents the seven recovered but still unresolved California crew members whose losses DPAA has not been able to identify individually.
Adkins will be buried Thursday with full military honors in a marked grave at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (NMCP) in Honolulu, Hawaii,