Elmer Edwin Drefahl

Elmer Drefahl was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 5 December 1919. He was the youngest child of Edwin and Hilda Drefahl, and spent his childhood on Milwaukee’s 18th Street along with his older sisters Anita and Doris.

Elmer attended Rufus King high school, where he was known as a member of the Athletic Club and the wrestling team. He graduated in 1939 after taking summer classes, and was listed on the 1940 Census as a “new worker” with no known employment history.

Elmer enlisted in the Marine Corps at Chicago, Illinois on 22 May 1940, intending to serve at least four years as a Regular. He was soon on his way to the San Diego recruit depot for boot camp, where he earned his Marine emblem and the crossed rifle badge of an expert rifleman. This distinction, along with a high standing in his recruit platoon and his wrestler’s physique, led to additional training at Sea School. On 9 August 1940, Private Drefahl joined the Marine detachment aboard the battleship USS Oklahoma.

Drefahl quickly took to duty aboard the big ship. His primary battle station was at one of the Oklahoma’s defensive batteries, and his crew was one of the best on the ship. In January 1941, Drefahl shared a first-place prize in a gunnery contest; his reward was $10 and a promotion to private first class. In the summer of 1941, Drefahl attended Fleet Machine Gun School at Puuola Point, Hawaii, and soon after received the rank of corporal.

This was a fairly rapid rate of advancement for a young Marine on peacetime sea duty. Elmer Drefahl likely would have continued his promising career trajectory, but was interrupted by the attack on Pearl Harbor.

On 7 December 1941, the Oklahoma‘s crew was preparing for a routine Sunday in Pearl Harbor. Many were brushing off the effects of a Saturday spent ashore; dozens more began lining the rails to wait for the liberty launch. Corporal Drefahl might have been among them; he might have been below decks in the Marine quarters, on his way to the galley, or preparing for the morning color ceremony. Exactly where he was when the first torpedo hit the Oklahoma will likely never be known.

It took the Japanese pilots less than twelve minutes to transform Oklahoma from a powerful battleship to a smoking wreck, capsized in the muck of Pearl Harbor. In the chaos of the surprise attack, Elmer Drefahl disappeared. He was one of over 400 sailors and Marines to lose their lives in the sinking.

Following a painstaking engineering operation, the Oklahoma was righted and refloated in early 1944. While salvage crews cleaned and removed anything of possible military value – and Sergeant Don Lowery returned to collect several personal effects from his locker – other teams searched through years of accumulated muck for human remains. Navy diver Edward C. Raymer was tasked with taking a civilian reporter aboard the ship:

We reached the third deck, and Burns asked me about dead bodies: how many had been found, what was done with them, how they could be identified. I explained that the medics sorted through all the sludge and debris for bones. Then they placed approximately two hundred bones in a bag, which represented the number in a human body. The bag was sent to the army hospital, where a chaplain performed services for the remains.

According to the Oklahoma’s muster records, four hundred of the crew perished aboard her. I finished by saying I was glad it wasn’t my job to explain to the sailors’ families why their loved ones remained unidentified. The reasons could seem very offensive to them.

Slithering through the ankle-deep filth, Burns caught himself as his foot struck something on the deck. He cried out in revulsion when he found it was part of a human body. “My God, I’ve stumbled over a leg. It even has a shoe on what’s left of the foot.”

– Edward C. Raymer, Descent Into Darkness: Pearl Harbor, 1941, A Navy Diver’s Memoir

The remains recovered from the Oklahoma were buried in fifty-two mass graves in Halawa and Nuuanu Cemeteries on the island of Oahu. At the end of the war, the graves were exhumed with the intent of identifying as many of the dead as possible before reinterment in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. Dr. Mildred Trotter, one of the anthropologists in charge of the Central Identification Laboratory, was dismayed to note that “common graves consist[ed] of bones of a kind buried together (i.e. one casket was filled with skulls, another with femurs, another with hip bones and so on)” – a strange decision that “added greatly to the difficulty of the undertaking.” Although her technicians made “a very honest effort… to segregate all the remains from the Oklahoma,” Dr. Trotter admitted that it would take “a very long period (years)” and “different circumstances” to fully separate all the remains. Only 49 men could be identified by the end of 1949; the remainder were buried in 46 common graves in Honolulu.

In 2015, an official directive was passed to exhume the graves of the Oklahoma’s final crew. Modern science and DNA analysis provided the “different circumstances” Dr. Trotter’s note required and have identified hundreds of Oklahoma men.

Among them at last is Corporal Elmer E. Drefahl. His remains were officially accounted for on 29 September 2020.

CENOTAPHS
USS Oklahoma Memorial, Pearl Harbor
National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific

FINAL BURIAL
Pilgrim’s Rest Cemetery, Milwaukee, Wisconsin