![]() So, I see them every day The Blitz twins, these little boys.” “They gave me some family photos that I put up in my cubicle and it's right above my computer. “I think about that a lot,” saod LeGarde. Carrie LeGarde was in Lincoln too where she met the Blitz relatives who told her they considered her to be a part of their family. In 2019, Leo and Rudy Blitz came home to Lincoln be reunited and buried with full military honors surrounded by friends and families. The project scientists efforts has resulted in a steady stream of hundreds of positive identifications that finally confirmed the identities of most of the Oklahoma’s unknown sailors and Marines after more than seven decades. “That we have all these remains and we need to sort them and figure out, piece together, which ones represent a single individual.” “You know it’s a big puzzle,” said anthropologist Dr. Every one of the crew remains’ puzzle pieces were used by scientists to confirm positive identifications for the U.S.S. They were analyzed by scientists at the Armed Forces Medical Examiner’s lab. “We do look at every single fragment.”Īnother 5,000 DNA samples from the unknown Oklahoma crew’s remains were compared to living relatives’ DNA. Oklahoma, sometimes we have full bones, sometimes we have fragments,” said East. These past several years scientists have inventoried and cross checked the remains with dental and medical records, ages and heights of the battleship’s dead. It stretches one-third the length of a football field and the massive lab is where dozens of anthropologists like East have painstakingly categorized more than 13,000 bone fragments recovered from the capsized Oklahoma. Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska is home to the Oklahoma Project’s forensic lab. Katie East, a forensic anthropologist on the project. “The mission is to provide the fullest possible accounting of currently missing service members and we want to return these service members to their families and of course to the nation,” said Dr. So began the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s U.S.S. In 2015, the co-mingled remains of Tushla, the Blitz twins and hundreds of others who perished on the Oklahoma were exhumed from 46 graves marked “unknown” at Honolulu's National Military Cemetery of the Pacific. “He was 23 in 1939,” said Gerard Keating, a second cousin of Tushla’s. Before enlisting in the Navy, he worked during the Great Depression on the Tushla family farm near Atkinson, Nebraska. Sailor Louis Tushla was 25 when he died in the engine room of the torpedoed Oklahoma. “And they'd take turns dating the girl,” added Guenzel. “One of them had a girlfriend but we didn't know if the girlfriend knew there were two of them,” said niece Sandra Rebensdorf. One particular Blitz brothers’ prank is family lore. “They liked to play pranks,” said Guenzel. Navy on the same day in 1938 and were described as “jokesters” by niece Sally Guenzel. Leo, a Navy machinist, was down in the battleship’s generator room. ![]() When the Oklahoma was attacked, Rudy was patrolling the deck. Leo and Rudy Blitz were identical twins from Lincoln who served and died on the Oklahoma. Several Nebraskans were among those unknowns. ![]() For more than seven decades, those sailors and Marines were the “unknowns” who went down with their ship. Oklahoma crew remains have been made over the past six years during the U.S.S. Oklahoma.Īccording to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, 355 positive identifications of previously unknown U.S.S. It signaled the wind down for a team of forensic anthropologists at Offutt Air Force Base whose work has helped positively identify more than 90-percent of the previously unknown crew who died on the U.S.S. The reburial memorial marked another milestone. At the time, only a few of the Oklahoma’s crew remains could be identified. when Japanese torpedo bombers sank the battleship within minutes. Those men were among 429 sailors and Marines who died aboard the U.S.S. service members were reinterred today in a solemn military ceremony in Honolulu, Hawaii. On the 80th anniversary of the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the unidentified remains of 33 U.S.
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