After more than seven decades, U.S. Navy Petty Officer Second Class Walter Howard Backman will finally be coming home to Aurora .
The 22-year-old man was one of approximately 390 sailors aboard the USS Oklahoma whose remains were never identified after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
For years, according to official documents, the bodies were commingled, buried in a mass grave at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu in a plot marked as “the unknowns of the USS Oklahoma.”
But sometime this spring, possibly around Memorial Day, Backman’s remains, which were identified as recovered on Aug. 7, will be buried at River Hills Memorial Park in Batavia next to the memorial stone already there, said Jacob Zimmerman, superintendent for the Veterans Assistance Commission of Kane County.
According to Beacon-News archives, another Auroran, Leslie Delles, was also aboard the USS Oklahoma, and his body was never recovered.
The news about Backman’s remains came Friday afternoon via Zimmerman. At this point, little more is known about the young Aurora man who died more than 76 years ago in service to his country. But according to official documents and newspaper accounts, Backman was born in 1919 in Wilton, North Dakota, to a farming family who, tired of bad crops and dust storms, moved to Aurora shortly after his 1938 enlistment in the Navy.
He spent time with family here in the Fox Valley before shipping out, and served all three years as a radioman aboard the USS Oklahoma. It was moored at Ford Island, Pearl Harbor, when it was hit by Japanese torpedoes, quickly capsizing and killing 429 crewmen on board.
According to a news story from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, from December 1941 through June 1944, the Navy recovered the remains of those who died, interring them in two cemeteries in Hawaii. Then, in September of 1947, those remains were disinterred by the American Graves Registration Service and transferred to the Central Identification Laboratory at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii.
Only 35 men were identified out of the 429 killed, with the rest buried in 46 plots at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl.
In 2003, as a result of the research efforts of Pearl Harbor survivor Ray Emory, a single casket associated with the USS Oklahoma loss was disinterred from the Punchbowl, where it was discovered that the remains were “extremely commingled,” the story stated.
In 2015, as part of the USS Oklahoma Project, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency partnered with the Department of Veterans Affairs to exhume all of the unknown remains from the USS Oklahoma, and began the lengthy identification process that involved almost 13,000 skeletal elements.
According to the report, an anthropological inventory was taken of each casket, including taking measurements, collecting biological data and bones for DNA sampling. The group marked a milestone in December when it made its 100th identification from the ship’s casualties, including Backman’s.
While little else is known about him at this point, a short news story from June 14, 1943, in the Chicago Daily Tribune, noted that his mother, Mrs. August Backman, was awarded a Purple Heart citation at the annual convention of the Illinois Department of the Purple Heart and its auxiliary in Aurora. The mothers of two other Aurora sailors killed in action — Eugene Fitzsimmons, who was aboard the USS Arizona, and Logan Jeffrey Drury — were awarded citations on that day, as well.
That same report indicated two sisters were also living in Aurora at the time. On the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1991, one of those siblings, Mickie Griggs, wrote a guest column for the Abilene Reporter-News recalling the time she visited her brother’s unidentified remains in Honolulu.
She wrote that her father died a few years after her brother was killed, and her mother passed away in 1990. According to a 2011 Beacon-News story about Pearl Harbor victims from Aurora, for weeks after the attack, the Backman family heard nothing about Walter’s fate because the telegram had been sent to North Dakota.
Zimmerman has no knowledge if any of his relatives still live in this area. But as the time draws closer for his final trip home, hopefully the community will become more familiar with his short life and long journey.
It is truly worth remembering and honoring.
