Herbert “Bert” Jacobson will be laid to rest on Tuesday, more than eight years after he was killed in the attack that led to the United States entering World War II.
Family members of Jacobson have waited their entire lives to attend a memorial service for a young man they knew about but never met. Jacobson was among the almost 400 sailors and Marines killed aboard the USS Oklahoma during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. His remains will be placed at Arlington National Cemetery in a casket.
It brings us closure to finally know what happened to Bert, where he is, and that he is being laid to rest after being listed as a missing person for so long, as said by his nephew, Brad McDonald.
This photograph, which was provided by the U.S. AP photo of Navy sailor Herbert “Bert” Jacobson of Grayslake, Illinois
The service at Arlington will be the latest chapter in the story of a 21-year-old man from the small northern Illinois town of Grayslake, for the family that never had a body to bury when he was killed and the scientific quest to identify hundreds of personnel from the battleship who were buried anonymously for decades in a dormant volcanic crater near Pearl Harbor.
It is a tale of anticipation.
Two years passed before the sunken vessel was refloated and remains were found. A few years later, the graves of men aboard the Oklahoma were reopened in the expectation that dental data would lead to the identification of their identities. But 27 sets of unidentified bones had to be reinterred at the Punchbowl, also known as the crater at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.
In 2003, another attempt to identify approximately 100 sets of remains was unsuccessful.
In 2015, the Defense Department revealed preparations to exhume the remains once more.
Debra Prince Zinni, a forensic anthropologist and laboratory manager at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in Hawaii, told the Associated Press at the time, “We now have the capability to conduct forensic tests on these remains and generate the identifications.”
The members of the Jacobson family, who had been disheartened by each failure, gained new optimism as a result. They told the Associated Press that Jacobson’s mother grieved on December 7 since she never knew where he was.
“She always hoped Bert would answer the phone when it rang,” McDonald added.
The 2015 Project Oklahoma effort has resulted to the identification of 355 men, including Jacobson, whose ship was killed by at least nine torpedoes. This leaves 33 sets of skeletal remains unidentified. To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the attack, the unidentified remains were reinterred, according to Navy Personnel Command public affairs officer Gene Hughes. He has worked with the families of the Oklahoma victims, particularly the Jacobson family.
Any prospect Jacobson’s family had of discovering precisely what transpired on December 7, 1941 has long since vanished. From speaking with Jacobson’s shipmates, they only knew that he had just left duty after spending several hours ferrying troops to land.
McDonald stated that a close friend of his uncle’s from the Navy stated that Jacobson “was asleep in his bunk and died before he knew there was a war going on, but we don’t know for sure.”
Only one issue remained: what happened to Bert Jacobson’s body?
In 2019, according to McDonald, the family was informed that Jacobson’s remains had been identified. They hoped the burial could take place the following year, but were forced to wait because the COVID-19 pandemic delayed most gatherings, including funerals.
Now, they have the closure that Jacobson’s parents and other family members lacked.
McDonald remarked of his grandparents, parents, and others, “I wish they could have witnessed this.”
Seeing the uncle he never met take his place at Arlington is really meaningful to him.
“When Bert entered the Navy, he encountered a South Dakota orphan,” McDonald explained. “When they received a weekend pass, Bert took the orphan home, where he met Bert’s younger sister.”
Orville McDonald’s preferred conclusion to this story is that Orville McDonald and Norma Jacobson dated and eventually married.
He stated, “That orphan was my father, and Bert’s sister was my mother.” Therefore, I would not be present without Bert.