Ill-prepared response failed family of Lincoln man killed at Pearl Harbor

[Omaha Steve]

X post from GD.




Leo and Rudolph Blitz of Lincoln were killed aboard the USS Oklahoma during the Pearl Harbor attack. Although both officially are missing, it now appears that Rudolph Blitz’s body was recovered soon after the attack, but he was mistakenly buried as “unidentified” in a Honolulu cemetery.


http://www.omaha.com/news/military/ill-prepared-response-failed-family-of-lincoln-man-killed-at/article_481cc72b-5cf2-593a-bf0f-a34c1729003e.html

POSTED: MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 2016 12:15 AM
By Steve Liewer / World-Herald staff writer

One of the missing Blitz twins from Lincoln who perished aboard the battleship USS Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, may actually have been identified after the attack — before being lost again through an apparent clerical error.

“With war breaking out, you have to wonder about the amount of consistency” in the burial records, said Kris Blitz Porto of Omaha, a niece of the men. “The chaos going on — it would have been so difficult.”

The latest twist in the Blitz story comes from Ray Emory, a 94-year-old Pearl Harbor survivor who has spent decades poring through records in an attempt to sort out the identities of those who died that day. He contacted The World-Herald after reading a Pearl Harbor Day story on the twins last month.

Read that story here: http://www.omaha.com/news/military/after-pearl-harbor-family-faced-twice-the-grief-and-are/article_d5f31cff-b67b-512d-818a-6b74cddeea7e.html

“You should tell (the family) how it all happened,” said Emory, who lives in Hawaii. “This stuff is kind of a story by itself.”

FULL story at link.