Seaman 2nd Class John C. Auld was buried on Friday, Dec. 6, nearly 83 years to the day after he was killed during the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II.
The Navy sailor was one of the last sailors killed on the USS Oklahoma who had not been accounted for. On Thursday, Dec. 5, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the military office responsible for recovering and identifying the remains of servicemembers killed in past conflicts, announced that Auld had been identified. This week the agency also confirmed that all of the 415 sailors and 14 Marines killed on the ship were accounted for, after years of work.
Auld was born on June 15, 1918 in Newcastle, England. He eventually settled in Detroit and enlisted in the Navy in 1940. He was assigned to the Nevada-class battleship the USS Oklahoma. The morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Imperial Japan launched a major attack at the American military base at Pearl Harbor. The USS Oklahoma was hit by nine torpedoes in less than 15 minutes, quickly sinking. 429 crewmembers died, Auld among them. He was 23. Only 32 crewmembers from the USS Oklahoma would survive the attack.
Auld was buried in Albuquerque on Friday, Dec. 6, with full military honors. He never lived in the city himself, but it is where his brother and mother are buried. The DPAA said that his remains were actually identified in 2018, but the agency only announced the confirmation on Dec. 5. The Auld family intended to bury his remains in 2020, a plan that was stalled in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Albuquerque Journal.
“One day shy of the 83rd anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, one of the sailors lost on the date that will live in infamy will finally have his name marking his final resting place,” a funeral notice for Auld said.
Auld’s awards, many given posthumously, include the World War II Victory Medal, American Campaign Medal and the Purple Heart, among others.
The 429 killed aboard the USS Oklahoma were among the 2,403 people killed in the Japanese attack. Their bodies were recovered during the war and buried in Oahu. Eventually the remains were reburied in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as the Punchbowl, after an earlier attempt to determine who they were. They were listed as non-recoverable and their names put on the Courts of the Missing at the Punchbowl
In 2015, the DPAA launched the USS Oklahoma project, with the goal of identifying the hundreds of missing crewmembers. The DPAA used a variety of evidence to help identify the bodies, partially circumstantial and partially using DNA analysis, something the agency noted it was not previously able to do. In Auld’s case, his nephew Richard provided a DNA sample after the U.S. Navy got in touch. That sample helped the DPAA confirm John C. Auld’s remains.
The DPAA confirmed the identity of the last USS Oklahoma crewmember in October 2021, the agency said, but only announced it had wrapped the project on Dec. 3, 2024.
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