This article was posted on Omaha World Herald
Navy Seaman 2nd Class George A. Thompson of Omaha spent decades buried with the USS Oklahoma shipmates who died with him at Pearl Harbor, their bones mixed together beneath headstones marked “Unknown,” in the volcanic soil of Hawaii.
This week, more than 80 years after the Japanese attack, Thompson is being returned to the same Honolulu cemetery — with full military honors, in a grave bearing his name.
Thompson’s living relatives will say goodbye to him Wednesday in a private ceremony at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. A flag will adorn the casket of the Nebraska sailor, who was 20 when he died in the Dec. 7, 1941, raid that brought the United States into World War II. He’ll be saluted by a rifle team, and a bugler will render taps.
Thompson is one of 362 USS Oklahoma crew members identified by anthropologists at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency during a six-year project housed at an Offutt Air Force Base laboratory to give names to the 394 unidentified sailors and Marines who died aboard the battleship.
‘They treat me swell’
In his last year, George Thompson found a level of happiness and stability with the Navy that had eluded him during his hardscrabble youth in Omaha.
“I never felt better in my life,” Thompson wrote in a letter to his uncle’s family dated Oct. 22, 1941. “I like it fine aboard ship, sure is a good bunch of fellows, and they treat me swell.”
As a boy, he lived in Omaha with his divorced mother, Esther Thompson, and attended what is now Monroe Middle School, in Benson.
He was 12 when she brought him to Boys Town during the depths of the Great Depression. She told the Rev. Edward Flanagan, Boys Town’s founder and patriarch, that she had no money to feed him or heat their house, according to “Letters from the Front,” a 1995 book about Boys Town alumni who served in the military during wartime.
George Thompson spent just four months at Boys Town in 1934, returning home after his mother found work. But his time there left an impression.
“I will never forget Boys Town or the friends I made there,” he wrote later in a letter to Flanagan.
During his high school years, moved to Washington state to live with his father, a Navy veteran of World War I. He enlisted in the Navy in January 1941 and was assigned to the Oklahoma, which was commissioned in 1916 and had been homeported in Pearl Harbor since 1937.
As the Japanese commenced their surprise attack at 7:50 a.m. the morning of Dec. 7, the Oklahoma was moored off of Ford Island, outboard of the battleship USS Maryland.
By 7:53 a.m., the Oklahoma absorbed three torpedo hits on its exposed port side. Water surged below the decks while the crew scrambled to close watertight bulkheads— their only hope of saving the ship.
It was no use.
Within minutes, at least four more torpedoes tore into the ship. By 8:09 a.m., the old battleship slumped over and rolled to port until its masts settled into the muddy bottom of the bay.
About 1,000 crew members escaped by jumping up to 50 feet into the oily water or crawling across mooring lines to the Maryland.
But more than 400 — including George Thompson — remained trapped below decks. Yard workers mounted a heroic rescue effort over the next two days that freed 32sailors from the ship’s hull. The rest died and remained entombed in the ship until it was refloated for salvage in 1943.
‘He made the supreme sacrifice’
Soon after the attack, his mother received a package from Hawaii. It was a new purse, a Christmas present her son had picked out for her and mailed before the attack.
For months George’s fate was unknown. The Navy listed him as “missing.”
On March 3, his mother received a letter from Navy Secretary Frank Knox, informing her that George had died in the attack.
“It is hoped that you may find comfort in the thought that he made the supreme sacrifice upholding the highest traditions of the Navy, in the defense of his country,” Knox wrote.
Two days later, Flanagan sent her his own note of condolence.
“It is mothers like you, dear Mrs. Thompson, who are the real patriots of our country,” he wrote. “(W)e all admire that patriotism and that courage — and we are buoyed up with still greater enthusiasm to carry on in order that our country may continue to enjoy the freedom which the blood of our forefathers made possible for us.”
Elsie Thompson told The World-Herald at the time her only regret was that her younger son, Dean, 15, a student at Benson High School, was too young to follow George into the Navy.
His father, Fred Thompson — a Naval reservist who was 44 when Pearl Harbor was attacked — did serve in World War II, according to an inscription on his tombstone at Omaha’s Hillcrest Cemetery. Thompson died in 1959.
His mother left her job as an operator at the Omaha Grain Exchange at 19th and Harney Streets about a year later and moved with her surviving son to California.
It’s not clear what happened to them. George Thompson’s closest living relative is a niece in New Mexico, according to the Navy’s casualty assistance office. A spokesman for that office said that surviving family members declined to speak with the media and asked that his services remain private.
Giving names to the unknown Pearl Harbor dead
All together, 429 Oklahoma crew members died in the Dec. 7 attack, and only 35 were identified. The rest of the remains recovered from the ship were buried as unknowns in Honolulu, then disinterred in 1947 in a fruitless two-year attempt to identify them.
They were reburied at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific — known widely as the Punchbowl because of its shape in the crater of an extinct volcano — then exhumed again in 2015 for a second attempt at identification at the accounting agency’s Offutt lab.
At the beginning of the project, forensic anthropologists hoped to identify 80% of the394 unidentified. Working with the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab in Delaware, by 2021, they had identified 92% — all but 32 of the missing.
To date 343 have been buried in individual graves. More than two-thirds have been buried in or near their hometowns. But 61 families so far have chosen to return their loved ones to the Punchbowl.
George Thompson will be the 62nd.
Though his remains will stay in Hawaii, there is a monument to him in his home state.
In a display case in its Hall of History, Boys Town has preserved a photo of Thompson, along with the condolence letter Father Flanagan wrote to his mother.
Tom Lynch, the organization’s historian, noted that he is one of the first two Boys Town alumni to give his life in World War II. The other, Donald Monroe, died on the battleship USS Arizona.
“In his service to America, [Thompson] exemplified the core values Father Flanagan taught all the Boys Town boys: to love their fellow man and to help serve their nation in the hour of need,” Lynch said in a statement. “Father Flanagan would be pleased to know one of his former boys had now found his final peace.”