Staff Reports
On Monday, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA, said that they had located the remains of an American sailor who had perished in the attack on Pearl Harbor. On December 7, 1941, the battleship USS Oklahoma was home to Navy Fireman 1st Class Everett C. Titterington, the sailor who was attacked.
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Titterington was among the 429 crew men that perished in the USS Oklahoma attack by Japan, and the battleship was completely destroyed. Following the attack, the navy located the dead and interred them in cemeteries. Regretfully, DPAA claims that some dead were not identified and were interred in 46 plots at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
A military board made the decision back in October 1949 to designate as non-recoverable any dead that were not able to be identified, such as Titterington at the time. Following that, between June and November of 2015, DPAA began excavating and examining the crew of the USS Oklahoma's unidentified remains. On March 23, 2021, Titterington's body was finally identified through DNA testing.
According to DPAA, on September 5, Titterington will be remembered at a funeral service in Bloomington, California. The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of the Navy were praised by the agency for their assistance with this assignment. Iowan-born Titterington was a member of the USS Oklahoma crew that was built in 1916, sunk at Pearl Harbor, repaired in 1943, decommissioned in 1944, and sold for scrap in 1946, according to US Navy archives.
The DPAA's commitment to providing closure to the families of our lost heroes is touching. After all these years, the identification of Navy Fireman 1st Class Everett C. Titterington is proof of the organization's dedication to remembering and commemorating those who gave their lives in defense of our country. We must make sure that the bravery and patriotism of people like Titterington are remembered forever, and we can do this by making efforts such as these.
