HONOLULU, HI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Three local World War II servicemen have finally been accounted for, 80 years after their deaths during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The U.S. military announced on Wednesday that Navy Fireman 1st Class Malcolm J. Barber, 22, Navy Fireman 1st Class LeRoy K. Barber, 21, and Navy Fireman 2nd Class Randolph H. Barber, 19, all of New London, Wisconsin, were accounted for on June 10, 2020.
The brothers were assigned to the USS Oklahoma, which was moored at Ford Island during the Dec. 7, 1941, attack. The ship sustained multiple torpedo hits, causing it to capsize, killing 429 crewmen.
According to a Wisconsin Veterans Museum blog post, Malcolm and Randolph Barber joined the Navy after LeRoy wrote them from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station to urge them to join. In a break from Navy protocol, the brothers were assigned to the same ship. While the brothers were happy with the assignments, the museum says their father wrote the Navy a few weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack, asking that they be assigned to separate ships.
Between 1941 and 1944, Navy personnel recovered the crew members’ remains. Those remains were interred in the Halawa and Nu’uanu Cemeteries in Hawaii.
In 1947, the American Graves Registration Service disinterred the remains for identification efforts. The staff at the Central Identification Laboratory at Schofield Barracks could only confirm the identities of 35 men from the USS Oklahoma. Unidentified remains were then buried at the “Punchbowl,” the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.
In 2015, the USS Oklahoma unknowns were exhumed for analysis.
The Barber brothers’ names are recorded at the Courts of the Missing at the Punchbowl. The list will indicate that they have been accounted for.
The Navy ship USS Barber, launched in 1943, was named in the brothers’ honor.
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