Pearl Harbor: Dead soldier identified 83 years after the attack

This article first appeared at Rtl.de.

A lifelong search finally comes to an end. After almost 84 years, the sailor Neil D. Frye has been identified and buried in North Carolina. Frye died in the attack on the US naval base Pearl Harbor in 1941 at the age of 20. But his family was not informed about it, hoped and searched for a lifetime.

In Japan’s surprise attack on the US fleet stationed in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, around 2400 US soldiers died. Frye was one of them.

Of his nine siblings, only Frye’s youngest sister, Mary Frye Mccrimmon. At the age of 87 she took part in North Carolina last Thursday at the funeral of her brother. “I could have had him buried in Arlington or wherever I wanted him, but I preferred that he was brought home,” she says.

In 1940, Frye contacted the marine, his sister Mary was only three years old at the time. But even though she was still young, she remembers her big brother well. He built her a sled, gave her a tricycle.

At the age of four, her parents and siblings told her about the death of her big brother, Mccrimmon recalls. However, since his body was never found, the family suspected that he may have never died. “My mother always said she loved people to watch. She went wherever she had the opportunity to go to a small town, and just watched the men who passed to see if she can discover Neil somewhere,” McCrimmon told the broadcaster Whro Norfolk in Virginia.

But Neil had been in a cemetery in Honolulu for the remains of unknown crew members of the USS West Virginia for the years. To identify the remains, the scientists used dental and anthropological analyzes, evidence of evidence and a DNA analysis. The result: The remains are Frye. “I was more happy than sad because I knew they had found him,” said Mccrimmon Whro. “I knew where he was. We didn’t have to ask ourselves.”

Frye’s name has been on the walls of the missing people in the punchbowl since the Second World War. In addition to its name, a rosette is now attached – as a sign that it was found. Although her parents no longer experienced her son’s return, McCrimmon believes that she too would be easier to return her brother. “I know that my mother and father somehow know about it, I know that they are happy,” said his sister Mary.

Transparency note: The star is part of RTL Germany.