Day that still lives in infamy

Ray Emory, a survivor of the Dec. 7 attack on Pearl Harbor, is on a roll, just a few degrees from a rant.

As much as he honors the memory of those killed aboard the USS Arizona, it rankles him that to much of the public, and even to some of the government employees entrusted with preserving the history of that brutal and momentous morning, the story seems to begin and end with the battleship that exploded and sank with more than 1,100 sailors and Marines aboard.

“What about the other ships at Pearl Harbor that morning?” he says. “Don’t they count?”

Without waiting for an answer, he begins to list the other ships that were at ease in the tranquil waters of the U.S. naval base or in dry dock nearby when Japanese warplanes appeared out of the tropical sky and began bombing and strafing.

Nevada, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, California, Maryland, West Virginia, Honolulu, St. Louis....

Emory, 82, was a Navy seaman first class on Dec. 7, 1941, assigned to the light-cruiser Honolulu. When the explosions started, he rushed topside and began firing a .50-caliber machine gun at the Japanese planes, taking the fight directly to the new enemy without waiting for orders.

He declines to speculate on whether it was his fire that hit any of the 29 Japanese planes that were downed. Lots of guys were firing, he notes. When it comes to Dec. 7, Emory cannot abide sloppy talk, imprecision or ill-informed speculation. That only dishonors the memory of the men who died that day, he says. “They deserve better than that.”

His nearly 20-year demand that the history of Dec. 7 be preserved with fidelity to detail has put Emory in conflict with officials of the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, the Army’s Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu, and the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, where many of those killed at Pearl Harbor are buried.

He has successfully campaigned to have changes made in the version of the Dec. 7 story told to visitors at the Arizona Memorial and to have more information put on the grave markers of men killed in the attack. And now he is pushing the government to do more to identify the remains of the 600-plus Dec. 7 victims listed as “unknown.”

To get his way, Emory is not above being brusque and, if it serves his purpose, a bit intimidating. He is a formidable adversary. He marshals his facts; he is a favorite of the local press; and he has an unassailable credential in a city where military service is revered: He was at Pearl Harbor when the bombs fell and then served in 10 other naval engagements during World War II, mustering out as a chief.

“He’s very passionate about what he’s doing,” said Michelle Bradley, assistant historian at the Arizona Memorial, which is run by the U.S. Park Service. “He’s rough around the edges. People expect this little grandfather character, and instead he walks in, throws down his research and starts asking blunt questions.”

As a volunteer historian of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn., Emory has had a running feud with the Park Service over what he feels are factual mistakes in its presentation of the Dec. 7 story and over its emphasis on the USS Arizona to the apparent exclusion of other ships. (Although, like much involving Dec. 7, there are disputes about how many service personnel were killed in the attack, a generally accepted number is 1,117 from the Arizona, 2,341 overall.)

Emory has also complained that the memorial’s presentation seems to be value-neutral and seeks somehow to rationalize the Japanese attack as a response to the U.S. freezing its assets. Emory’s passion for the subject led to a dust-up with the now-departed director of the memorial on the eve of the 50th anniversary commemoration in 1991, making front-page news in Honolulu and the mainland. (Changes were made in the presentation after the incident.)

He uses the Freedom of Information Act to request information from the military and has accumulated files thick with long-forgotten documents retrieved from its archives. He shows off one of his favorite pieces of correspondence: a starchy letter sent to him three years ago by a lieutenant colonel in the Army’s mortuary affairs and casualty support division:

” ... We have expended more than enough manpower and hours in researching and responding to your many inquiries. This will be our final response to you regarding this issue.”

Emory laughs: “He’s gone now, but I’m still here.”

One of Emory’s longest-running campaigns was to persuade officials at the national cemetery to add “Dec. 7, 1941” and other information to the flat gravestones containing the remains of sailors, soldiers and Marines who were never identified and are listed only as unknown. Officials thought such additions were unneeded because the names of those presumed dead are already inscribed in a place of honor at the cemetery.

Victory and frustration

For 11 years, Emory petitioned cemetery officials in vain. Finally, in 2000, he found an important ally -- the now-late Rep. Patsy Mink (D-Hawaii). The Mink initiative passed as part of a military appropriation bill and was signed into law by President Clinton. The measure requires that 252 markers over graves containing the remains of several hundred sailors be inscribed with the date and, when known, the name of their ships.

Cemetery director Gene Castagnetti, a retired Marine Corps colonel, says he admires Emory’s gumption but not his desire to add information to the grave markers. He finds a simple dignity in the word “Unknown” and notes that nobody is trying to add to the graves of unknown Marines and sailors killed in other World War II battles.

“All I’m saying is that I have a different mission and that is to maintain this cemetery as a national shrine ... and not to show a preference for one veteran group over another,” Castagnetti said.

Emory’s latest mission has proved to be his most difficult: to prod the Army’s Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu -- the agency responsible for finding and identifying American war dead -- into opening the books on the estimated 640 sailors, soldiers and Marines killed on Dec. 7 who are buried as unknown.

The very word infuriates Emory. “They were not unknown,” he says. “Their shipmates knew them, their families knew them, and the Navy and the Army still have records about who they are and how they died.”

In the chaos that followed Dec. 7 as the U.S. rapidly prepared for war, records about unidentifiable remains were kept in various offices at Pearl Harbor. Many of the remains were buried and reburied as many as four times before being sent to the national cemetery, known as Punchbowl when it opened in 1949.

Emory insists that by cross-indexing various governmental files, it is possible in many cases to determine what ship the “unknown” remains in specific caskets came from. Once that is done, a comparison of personnel records and dental records of the remains can provide a match, he says.

That’s what happened two years ago, when, at Emory’s insistence, the Army removed the remains from a grave at Punchbowl. Tests confirmed Emory’s view that the remains were those of Thomas Hembree, an apprentice seaman aboard the USS Curtiss, a seaplane tender. It marked the first time since World War II that the military had identified one of the unknowns from Dec. 7.

Officials at Punchbowl, where 33,000 veterans are buried, had turned to Emory and the records in his “war room” when a relative of Hembree’s raised questions about his death. Using records from the Curtiss, Emory felt sure he knew where the body had been buried; he was right.

Last month, the Army removed two other sets of remains from Punchbowl after Emory presented his evidence that they were those of sailor Payton Vanderpool Jr., assigned to the battleship Pennsylvania, and Ensign Eldon Wyman, assigned to the battleship Oklahoma. Tests are pending, and laboratory officials hope to have their findings by this December’s anniversary of the attack.

Emory began this search after receiving a plaintive letter in 1997 from Vanderpool’s sister, Thelma Blanton, of Kansas City. “I have tried several people to find out what happened to him, always a dead-end,” she wrote. “Would you please see if you can find out?”

In a telephone interview, Kathleen Wyman of Portland, Ore., said she appreciates “the dedication and huge amount of work” that Emory has done on behalf of her lost brother. “It would be awfully nice to have a grave with my brother’s name on it,” she said in a voice close to breaking. “I was so proud of him in his uniform.”

Army officials note that, among other difficulties, a powdery substance used to cover the remains makes DNA testing almost impossible. “Ray is a great American, but he takes a very simplistic view of a very complex problem,” said Johnie E. Webb Jr., deputy commander of the identification laboratory, located at Hickam Air Force Base.

Emory does not buy the explanation that determining the identity of the unknowns is too difficult. He believes he is on the verge of his biggest find to date: the location of 26 sailors from the Oklahoma.

“I’m one of these guys ... don’t tell me I can’t do something,” Emory says gruffly. “That’s when I get my dander up. Having been a chief in the Navy, I know there’s a way to get something done, one way or another.”

So many ships ... Cassin, Shaw, Utah, Raleigh, Curtiss, Cachalot, Phoenix, Breese....

Emory never figured he would spend his sunset years fighting bureaucratic battles connected to Dec. 7. After leaving the Navy at the close of World War II, he moved to Seattle. A graduate of the University of Washington, he worked for decades as a mechanical engineer and retired in 1985 and moved to Hawaii.

Knowledge is power

In Hawaii, he reunited with his high-school sweetheart from Peoria, Ill., who had sent him a Dear John letter soon after he enlisted. He was divorced; she had been twice-widowed. They were married just months after Emory retired and moved into her spacious home near Diamond Head Crater.

With time on his hands, he became involved with the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn. He was shocked at the lack of communication between the association and officials at the Navy, Arizona Memorial and identification laboratory. “It just seemed like a stonewall,” he says.

Soon Emory joined forces with other Pearl Harbor survivors and military veterans with grievances about how the military has treated the issue of missing or unidentified service personnel.

With the idea that information is power, Emory and Ted Darcy, a retired Marine gunnery sergeant who served in Vietnam and now works for WFI Research Group in Fall River, Mass., set out to assemble comprehensive databases on World War II fatalities. So complete is their work that they are sometimes asked to consult by military officials stumped about where, when and how a service member died, officials said.

“I love him to death,” Darcy said. “He’s crusty around the edges, but that’s how Navy chiefs are. They drink their coffee black and are deadly serious when they get involved in something.”

While other retirees might take up golf or a hobby, Emory pores over military records and keeps up correspondence, occasionally traveling to the mainland to visit family. He has been active in an association of Navy chiefs and has a well-stocked library of military books. He was among those veterans courted by the makers of the 2001 movie “Pearl Harbor.”

Virginia Emory says she has learned to accommodate her husband’s obsession. “He’s a bulldog when he gets on one of these cases,” she said. “He sticks with things.”

Officials who routinely interact with Emory sense that part of his no-nonsense approach stems from a realization that his years are limited.

“You get the sense that he knows he can’t go on forever,” said Bradley, assistant historian at the Arizona Memorial. “He acts like he doesn’t have time to have three or four cups of coffee with you before deciding whether you can help him. If you can’t help, he’s out the door.”

He has too much to do.

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