A Rushford veteran who was among the first sailors killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, is finally returning home for burial. Thanks to advances in DNA testing and a two-year-old government agency, the remains of Joe Johnson of Rushford are finally heading back to Minnesota. Dennis Rislove, a Rushford native who lives in Minneapolis, said he never got to know his uncle Joe personally but is glad he’s finally returning home once and for all.
“I’m absolutely amazed at the science that allowed this to happen,” Rislove said. “It’s almost unbelievable that they’re able to do something like this.
“The fact is, I’m 74 years old and he died two-and-a-half years before I was born,” he recalled. “I never had any personal contact and never knew him. It’s kind of a distant relationship but it is still a family member. The government is returning him to me because I’m the oldest living direct relative.”
Rislove, a former Rushford-Peterson school superintendent, first found out about the possible return of Johnson to Rushford two years ago. The government agency, known as the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which reached out to him was just created in 2016. They tracked Rislove down and asked him for a DNA sample, which he submitted at a meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin. That’s where agency officials gave Rislove a rundown of the project they were undertaking to identify the remains of every veteran killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“In November of 2017, I got a call from the Navy that said they’d identified him (Johnson) and they’d eventually be returning the remains to me,” he said. “They sent a team from the Navy after that and they gave me a ton of information in a book of about 120 pages, and it’s all about uncle Joe. It included everything statistic from the battle, what happened, where the remains were temporarily buried, and how they were disinterred.”
The remains of the Rushford veteran were positively identified at a laboratory in Nebraska and the book walked Rislove through the process. The account in the book detailed the fact that the U.S.S. Oklahoma, which Johnson was serving on, was the first ship hit in the attack. It was hit by a total of six torpedoes, sinking the ship very quickly, which then rolled over and trapped 429 men.
“Some were killed in the explosions and fires,” he said, “and some of them drowned, of course. At the time, they didn’t have any way of identifying them. They ended up burying the dead in what amounted to mass graves. When the DNA science finally came along, they decided to try and identify and return the remains to each sailors’ family.
“In fact, they opened up the first casket and inside were the remains of 95 individuals,’ he said, “and that shows you the kind of challenge they faced in doing this project. The agency disinterred all the co-mingled caskets and separated the remains, such as the skulls in one place, the femurs in another, and so forth. They cleaned all the bones and began to DNA test every single one of them, with the goal of identifying every veteran possible.”
The agency informed each family’s of every veteran that they would help set up the burials, which would include full military honors. Joe Johnson’s remains will be back in Minnesota on Friday, July 6th, in Minneapolis, where the Navy will host a military ceremony. The remains will then be escorted down to Rushford for a memorial service on Saturday, July 7th, at 1:00 p.m. The remains will be buried in the Rushford Lutheran Cemetery with full military honors, in a plot that’s located next to his mother and father’s graves.
“While there’s not a great deal of emotional attachment for me just because I never got to know my uncle Joe,” he said, “it’s emotional because it certainly makes you more appreciate all the Joe’s.”
There is some regret that Joe Johnson had plenty of family members that never had closure after his death because most of those relatives have passed away. Johnson had two younger sisters and a younger brother that are deceased. In fact, there’s just one living family member that new Joe Johnson personally, and his name is Norm Ebner.
“He’s another uncle of mine,” Rislove said. “He actually married one of Joe’s sisters. Norm (Ebner) was in the same class as uncle Joe and they both graduated in 1939. Norm is now 99 years old and in an assisted living home. He’s the only living family member that ever knew Joe.
“His mother and two sisters absolutely adored Joe,” Rislove said, “and they talked about him all the time after his death. They did get notified relatively quickly that he was missing in action. However, it took many months before Joe was finally declared killed in action. His family was told his body was unrecoverable, and that whatever remains they found would be put into mass graves because they simply couldn’t identify each and every veteran.”
One of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s employees is a historian who studied the battle at Pearl Harbor in incredible detail. Rislove said the historian knows exactly where the torpedoes hit the Oklahoma and the exact time that they hit the ship. Because the attack occurred on a Sunday morning, most of the sailors were actually off the ship. Joe Johnson was on duty in the radio room.
“They know exactly where he was when the torpedoes hit,” Rislove said. “The historian told me he’s very confident that, based on where the torpedoes hit, that Joe was killed almost instantly, very early in the battle. I think he was trying to comfort me and help me realize Joe wasn’t one of the sailors trapped underneath when the ship overturned, and those sailors were stuck there for 48 hours before they all died.“
Rislove added, “World War Two was very short for uncle Joe.
“He enlisted in the Navy a year after graduation, in April of 1940,” he recalled. “He did basic training around the Great Lakes Training Station in Illinois. His first assignment with the Navy was on the U.S.S. Oklahoma, in Hawaii. Joe died the following year on December 7th, 1941.”
The DNA science had come so far that they could now identify mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down through the females in every family tree. Because Rislove’s mother was Joe Johnson’s sister, they could take a sample from Dennis and use it to identify his uncle Joe’s remains.
“I have to admit that I was skeptical that this would really happen a couple years ago when I got the call,” Rislove recalled. “But I then read up on some of the things they can do with DNA. I also saw a story about the U.S.S. Oklahoma and how the government had decided to disinter the bodies, so I knew that part of the story. I do wish that his immediate family members could have gotten this kind of closure too.”