The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced 16 December that the remains of a US Navy seaman missing in action from the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor have been identified and will soon be returned to his family for burial with full military honors.
He is Seaman 2C Warren P. Hickok of Kalamazoo, Michigan. The family has not set a date for his burial.
Hickok was assigned to the Light Mine Layer USS Sicard (DM-21) when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Many crew members from Sicard, including Hickok, were dispatched to assist the crew of USS Cummings (DD-365), a destroyer docked nearby. Cummings succeeded in getting underway and clearing Pearl Harbor with no casualties reported. However, an investigation into those still unaccounted-for after the attack surmised that Hickok may have been a casualty aboard the battleship USS Pennsylvania (BB-38), since some crewmen from Sicard had been dispatched to Pennsylvania during the attack. But records indicate that Hickok was not lost aboard that ship.
In the days following the attack, burial details interred many of the unknown dead in Nuuanu Cemetery on Oahu. Among those buried was an unknown sailor identified only as X-2. Following the war, the Army Graves Registration Service oversaw the disinterment of unknown remains, including the X-2 remains. They could not be identified and were reburied in Section E, Grave 73 at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, on 9 June 1949.
In 2004, an avocational historian contacted the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) in Hawaii and suggested that the remains in Grave 73 may be those of Hickok. Based on available records, JPAC exhumed the grave in June 2005. Forensic anthropologists at JPAC were able to match those remains, including dental remains, with detailed information found in Hickok's WWII medical and dental records.
Of the 88,000 unaccounted-for Americans from all conflicts, 78,000 are from WWII.
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Source: Sea Classics
