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thedrifter
12-16-05, 05:36 AM
Pentagon identifies Navy sailor missing in action from 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor
By: ROBERT BURNS - Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- One week after the 64th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Pentagon announced on Thursday that the remains of a Navy sailor missing in action from the historic attack have been identified by forensic experts and will be returned to his family for burial.

He is Seaman 2nd Class Warren P. Hickok of Kalamazoo, Mich.

It marks the second time this week that the Pentagon has announced an identification of remains of a Navy serviceman lost in World War II.

On Wednesday it was Seaman 2nd Class Dee Hall, one of seven crewmen aboard a Navy PBY-5 Catalina aircraft that crashed on the Japanese-held island of Kiska after having flown from Kodiak Island, Alaska, on June 14, 1942, to attack Japanese targets on Kiska.

In Thursday's announcement, the Pentagon said Hickok was assigned to the USS Sicard, a mine-laying ship, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. He and other crewmen of the Sicard were sent to help the crew of another ship, the USS Cummings, a Navy destroyer docked near the Sicard. The Cummings managed to get underway and clear the harbor, with no casualties reported.

During an investigation to determine who was still unaccounted for after the attack, it was surmised that Hickok may have been killed aboard the battleship USS Pennsylvania; it was known that some of the Sicard's crew had been dispatched to the Pennsylvania during the attack.

In the days following the attack, many of the dead who could not be identified were buried in Nuuanu Cemetery on the island of Oaho. Among them was an unknown sailor identified only as "X-2."

After the war, the Army Graves Registration Service oversaw the disinterment of unknown remains, including those of X-2. They could not be identified, however, and were reburied in Grave 731 at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, on June 9, 1949.

In 2004, an amateur historian, whom the Pentagon did not identify by name in its announcement Thursday, contacted the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii and suggested that the remains in Grave 731 may include those of Hickok. The grave was exhumed in June 2005, and forensic anthropologists of the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command were able to match those remains, including dental remains, with detailed information found in Hickok's World War II medical and dental records.

Ellie
Rest In Peace