Grayslake sailor killed at Pearl Harbor to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery

A moment more than eight decades in the making finally will happen for the family of a Grayslake sailor killed during the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.

On Sept. 13, the remains of Herbert Jacobson, a U.S. Navy Fireman 3rd Class stationed aboard the battleship USS Oklahoma, will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

“After 81 years, we’re finally laying our uncle to rest,” said Brad McDonald of North Carolina, a nephew of Jacobson and one of about a dozen family members planning to attend the burial in Virginia. The ceremony will include a horse-drawn carriage, gun salute and official flag presentation.

Jacobson’s remains weren’t identified until late 2019 after years of efforts by both the family and military DNA experts. A burial originally scheduled for spring 2020 was delayed because of the pandemic.

In the meantime, more of Jacobson’s remains were identified so the family will have more of him to bury.

“I just wish my mother and especially my grandmother could be around to see this,” McDonald said. “My grandmother would still be sad that she lost her oldest boy, but at least there would be a means of closure.”

McDonald’s late mother, Norma, was Jacobson’s sister. Their parents, George and Mabel Jacobson, met during World War I. Like Herbert Jacobson, known to the family as “Bert,” George Jacobson was a sailor in the U.S. Navy. Mabel worked as a barmaid when they met.

The two were married on Dec. 7, 1919, and Mabel named her firstborn son after her beloved brother, Herbert, who died at a young age.

“My grandmother [Mabel], who lived to be 84 years old, never really could get a handle on her son being identified as MIA and presumed dead,” Brad McDonald said.

“It was really hard on her. … The day, Dec. 7, and the name Bert were kind of lost to her forever. It was like a double whammy for her. The final irony is we are burying [Bert] on Sept. 13, which is my grandmother’s birthday.”

Brad McDonald’s mother, Norma, was very close to her brother Bert. In fact, it was Bert who introduced Norma to her husband and Brad’s father, Orville “Mac” McDonald, also a member of the U.S. Navy. The two sailors had met while training together at Naval Station Great Lakes, and Bert brought Orville home for a visit.

“Without Bert, I wouldn’t be here,” Brad McDonald said. “He played Cupid.”

Bert Jacobson arrived at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, at the age of 21, only 57 days after finishing his training at Great Lakes. He was on duty the night before the attack and believed to be sleeping aboard the ship when the attack took place.

“He may have died before he even knew there was a war going on,” Brad McDonald said. “Of course, there’s no way to know that.”

During the attack, the Japanese hit the USS Oklahoma with numerous torpedoes, and the ship rapidly rolled over and sank to the harbor bottom. Many of the men trapped in the upturned hull were cut free through the intense efforts of sailors and civilian Navy Yard employees.

But the attack resulted in the deaths of 429 crewman, including Bert Jacobson. In all, 2,402 Americans were killed that day, when Japanese forces attacked much of the U.S. Navy Pacific fleet.

It took several years for the remains of the 429 deceased Oklahoma sailors entombed in the ship to be recovered by the Navy. Many of the remains were commingled because so little was left of the bodies.

Bert Jacobson’s name was recorded on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, along with other military personnel listed as missing from World War II. A rosette later was placed next to his name to indicate his remains were identified.

The identification process began in 2015 when the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency exhumed the remains of those unidentified Oklahoma crew members for additional analysis.

“It’s been a long, long process,” Brad McDonald said. “My mother, she kind of took up the torch for the whole family to figure out what’s going on. … I have stacks and stacks of documents of all the agencies she contacted.”

Brad McDonald and several relatives met with experts a couple of times through the years and donated DNA samples to help with the investigation.

In 2018, he was told, “We’re going to do our best, but chances are we aren’t going to be able to identify them [the remains] in your time and maybe into your children’s time.”

“Less than a year later, I got a phone call saying, ‘We got ’em,’ " Brad McDonald remembered. “I was just blown away. I really was. We are just extremely grateful to the Navy and all the agencies working on this. … They did this painstaking process, and it was really amazing.”

He has a half-inch-thick booklet containing the massive amount of technology and analysis used to identify his uncle and others.

Of the 429 crewmen killed, the remains of 22 are unidentified, likely because DNA samples from relatives weren’t available, Brad McDonald said. He and other family members traveling from Wisconsin for the burial simply feel fortunate to have their closure.

“It’s a solemn occasion, but there’s a sense of joy involved because we’ve been waiting a long time for this,” he said. “For me, it’s nothing short of a miracle that they can identify someone who died 81 years ago.”