Brother Seeks Answers to Pearl Harbor Mystery

Somewhere amid the disastrous tableau of Pearl Harbor that gorgeous Sunday morning was Joe Campbell’s kid brother, Bill.

Somewhere inside a battleship billowing smoke and burning fuel oil, Bill died. The boy Joe had been orphaned with years before was gone--the young man who had followed him into the Navy, whose snapshot he has kept ever since.

Exactly where or how he died, Joe never learned.

Long after Campbell learned his brother was killed on the Arizona, salvage crews lifting the ship’s No. 4 gun turret said they had found another body.

They’d already found dozens, and hundreds more were entombed below in the 7 1/2 fathoms of water. But few had died around this part of the ship. Years later, an aging sailor told Campbell that is where his brother had been.

With Hollywood reliving the attack on film, and scientists increasingly worried about the soundness of the giant sunken Arizona shrine, a much smaller Pearl Harbor drama is unfolding in a military laboratory in Rockville, Md.

Experts are working to extract DNA from a bone fragment from Turret No. 4, hoping that 60 years later they can tell Campbell what became of his brother.

It would be a glorious and historic connection--none of the unknowns recovered from the Arizona has ever been identified, officials say. So far the work has been fruitless, and researchers say an answer may prove elusive.

But the effort, a result of years of digging by Campbell, friends and amateur Pearl Harbor historians, also recalls the story of what has become one of the mystical icons of American history.

Like Ford’s Theatre, the Alamo, Dealey Plaza and Gettysburg, the Arizona has become “a place” that floats in the national psyche, forever broken by Japanese bombers and gushing smoke on a sparkling Sunday in December.

Watching the seven seconds of eerie black-and-white National Archives footage of the battleship blowing up is like watching the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Both wounds are sudden, ghastly and mortal.

The sailors aboard the Arizona were different from those who flooded into the service later, historians say. They were men who, in many cases, had fled the depths of the Depression, youngsters from small towns in Nebraska and cotton farms in Texas for whom the Navy was a refuge.

For Campbell and his brother, the Navy, and the Arizona, promised a family they’d never known.

Their father placed them in a Denver orphan asylum in 1923 after their mother was hospitalized with tuberculosis. She died two years later.

Their father visited once and died four years after his wife, also of TB.

Bill kept their father’s surname, Goodwin; Joe changed his to his maternal grandmother’s, Campbell.

At 18, Bill was in a camp run by the federal Civilian Conservation Corps in Colorado Springs. Joe, 20, was in the Navy. When he was ordered to destroyer duty in San Diego, he visited Bill en route. Bill was taken with his Navy uniform.

“He was pretty impressed,” Joe said. “He was thinking of joining too.”

Joe pulled out his camera and took a few shots of Bill, standing in the sun with his big smile and wavy hair.

Then they parted, Joe to San Diego, Bill back to camp. He joined the Navy and was assigned to the Arizona.

Joe never saw him again.

In December 1941, the Arizona was about to head to the West Coast for Christmas after four months at Pearl Harbor.

On Friday, Dec. 5, it moored at Berth F-7, to be refueled for the trip home Dec. 13.

The Arizona’s death 48 hours later has been the subject of mystery. It was first believed to have been torpedoed by an enemy plane and/or to have been hit by as many as eight bombs.

Historians now believe it may have been hit by only two bombs. The fatal blow came from one that struck beside the two forward turrets, passed through the deck and set off a cache of gunpowder stored below.

In the 16mm film from the archives, a jet of black smoke shoots out the smokestack an instant before the entire bow erupts in a giant explosion.

Of the vessel’s 1,514 men, only 337 survived.

Joe Campbell was on a minesweeper in New Jersey that morning. He cried in the ship’s engine room after hearing about his brother.

In 1991, with Pearl Harbor’s 50th anniversary approaching, he joined the USS Arizona Reunion Assn., attending meetings and showing the old snapshot.

At the association’s anniversary reunion at Pearl Harbor, he stepped to the podium, held up the snapshot, and asked whether anyone knew his brother. A man named John Harris said he had known Bill well. Now 80, the retired U.S. Army civilian worker from Linden, Texas, said Bill had been assigned to the ship’s 4th Division.

That clue, lost along with most of the ship’s records, placed Bill toward the Arizona’s stern, where the 4th Division’s quarters were, and near Turret No. 4, the battle station for most of the division’s sailors.

Campbell said he, Harris and other amateur Pearl Harbor historians then uncovered an officer’s account indicating that an unidentified sailor had been sent below to flood a rear gunpowder magazine to prevent further explosions as the ship was being abandoned. He had not survived. Their research showed only two from the 4th Division had died in the attack, and Bill was the only one unaccounted for.

It seemed a good bet the body in Turret No. 4 was Bill’s, he said.

Two years ago Campbell took his case to the U.S. Army’s Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu. The lab did some research and, although not endorsing Campbell’s theory, found the case compelling.

The remains from Turret No. 4 were buried in Honolulu’s National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific--also known as the Punchbowl--where the identification lab and the Defense Department’s DNA lab were already working on IDs for Korean War unknowns.

Workers exhumed the remains, sending a bone specimen to Rockville, where Campbell had sent blood. But because of a chemical used to treat remains during the 1940s and ‘50s, the Rockville experts had been having difficulty extracting DNA from Punchbowl specimens. To the lab’s frustration, the Turret 4 remains were no exception.

The scientists haven’t given up. One solution may be to test bone from a different part of the remains.

After a decade of work, Campbell hasn’t given up either. Should the lab problem be overcome and the DNA matched, he will have found his brother.

He will have the remains reburied in the Punchbowl, with his brother’s name etched on the headstone. “It’ll close it all up for us,” he said. “It’ll be wonderful.”

If the DNA doesn’t match, Campbell said, he will still have some closure. “We don’t have to worry about that one anymore,” he said. “Someone else will.”

Campbell is flying out to Pearl Harbor with his wife, Ruth, their youngest son and his son’s wife for Memorial Day.

There’ll be a ceremony at the USS Arizona Memorial. He’ll place a wreath there on behalf of the Reunion Assn. and drop a lei into the water in honor of his brother.

Then they’ll play taps, he said, and the quiet water will be stained with that oil, as it has been for almost 60 years, and it’ll all get to him pretty good.