75 years after Pearl Harbor
By BARBARA DEMICK
Edwin Chester Hopkins casket was draped with an American flag that had hung above the State Capitol. Boy Scouts saluted as the motorcade wove around the colonial town square to the cemetery, where a military bugler readied to play taps in the dappled sunlight of a cool autumn day.
It was a grand funeral, one of the most memorable this New England town had witnessed, for a young man who had perished just past his 19th birthday. All that was lacking were the copious tears one would expect for someone whose death was so tragic and premature.
None of the several hundred mourners had met Hopkins. He was truly an unknown soldier, but the sense of loss, of what might have been, was still palpable. Hopkins was one of 2,403 Americans killed during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec 7, 1941.
His ship, the Oklahoma, suffered five torpedo hits, capsized and rolled over with its mast touching the bottom. By the time crews salvaged it two years later, the nation was in the thick of World War II, and nobody had the time, inclination or technical means to sort out the entangled remains of the 429 dead crewmen.
Hopkins funeral in October this year was the result of decades of lobbying by family members and POW advocates, as well as leaps in forensic science. As the nation prepares to mark the 75th anniversary of the surprise attack, more and more of those who died that day are finally returning home.
This year, the remains of more than 20 sailors from the Oklahoma have been identified and reburied with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery and in their hometowns.
Eddie Hopkins was 18 in 1940 when he dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Navy. His older brother, Frank, had joined six months earlier. After three months of training, he earned the rank of fireman third class.
His last communication, dated Sept. 9, 1941, as he was about to board a train to San Francisco harbor, was a postcard of the Oklahoma. Dear Folks. Here is the picture of the ship I am going to be on. We are all ready to leave tonight at nine oclock, Love Eddie.
Hopkins brother, Frank, had three children, and they knew little about the uncle killed at Pearl Harbor. It was a topic their father and grandparents were reluctant to discuss.
Nobody talked about it, said Edwin Hopkins Jr, 72, a retired Navy yard worker named after the uncle he never knew. My grandparents were New Englanders who hid everything inside and covered it with a smile, said Faye Hopkins-Boore, 70, his sister, who lives in Lewes, Del.
It was not that Hopkins death was forgotten. Dillant-Hopkins Airport, adjacent to Keene, had been named for Hopkins and another local son killed in World War II. But the man was something of a cipher.
An energetic, take-charge type, Hopkins-Boore had time on her hands after she retired as an operating room nurse, and decided to make it her mission to find out more about this uncle.
Each time her grandparents had moved, first from the farmhouse to downtown Keene, and then to Florida, she rummaged through drawers and suitcases looking for old letters. She found nothing only that last postcard.
But as her father aged, slipping into dementia in his final years, it was like opening a time capsule of the past. The brothers had been extremely close, sharing a bedroom under the eaves of their farmhouse, camping out on the screened front porch on summer nights. They had hoped to be assigned to the same ship.
The most surprising story the family heard concerned their grandmother, Alice Sanderson Hopkins, whose lineage could be traced to the Mayflower. The year after Pearl Harbor, she hired a psychic to hold a seance to communicate with her son.
Somebody is in the room, all wet with his hair standing up, the psychic told the grieving mother.
Alice Hopkins died in 1987 at age 93. She had ordered a family gravestone that listed the names of her parents, her husband, and at the very bottom: Edwin Chester, their son, F 3/C U.S. Navy, killed Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.
Aside from the Arizona, the Oklahoma suffered the most damage and highest casualties in the attack. When the ship was turned upright and drained of water in 1943, the salvage crew literally just shoveled the remains out, said Natasha Waggoner of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
Then workers did something that modern forensic scientists find inexplicable. They sorted the skeletons by like body parts. They had been underwater for two years so there was no flesh left. They put skulls with skulls, arm bones with arm bones, Waggoner said. The various body parts were buried as unknowns in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
Hopkins-Boore had started going regularly to Hawaii, strolling through the graves of about 2,760 unknown soldiers from Pearl Harbor and other conflicts. In 2008, just a few months after her father died, she learned something shocking.
A Pearl Harbor survivor, Ray Emory, had been combing through mortuary documents and found that the Navy knew all along where some of the casualties were buried. Hopkins was among 22 Oklahoma victims who had been tentatively identified through dental records in 1943 but buried with unknowns because there was no second source of identification.
At first, the families encountered stiff resistance from the Navy. But after a bureaucratic fight that dragged on for years, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work in 2015 issued an order allowing the Oklahoma remains to be disinterred.
On Oct 15, Hopkins was buried next to the family tombstone. Naval officials flew in from around the country and veterans of war roared in on motorcycles.
Delivering the final eulogy, Hopkins-Boore struggled to evoke memories of the unknown sailor. Id like to tell you what he looked like, how he carried himself. Did he like to whistle like my dad? Did he jingle his keys in his pocket when it was time to go home? she said.
All unanswerable questions. Despite that, or maybe because of it, a few tears came from the crowd of strangers. Then she addressed her uncle directly. Most of all Id just like to say, welcome home, Uncle Ed. Welcome home.
Source: Los Angeles Times
