Sailor killed at Pearl Harbor to be returned home to Iowa this week

An Iowa mother wrote that "somewhere back of the sunset," her sailor son — her "Navy lad" who was killed at Pearl Harbor — was living in the land of glory.

William Kennedy, of Titonka, a fireman first class, died at age 24 in the Dec. 7, 1941, aerial attack by Japanese forces.

Elizabeth Kennedy and family wished him "farewell for a time" in a memorial printed May 30, 1943, in the Des Moines Sunday Register.

More than 75 years after his death, William Kennedy's remains will return to Iowa this week, the Naval Operational Support Center of Des Moines announced Tuesday. They were recently identified as part of a Department of Defense effort that began in 2015.

He will be buried next to his mother, his obituary states.

Service members will honor Kennedy plane-side on a tarmac Thursday when his remains arrive at the Des Moines International Airport.

The public can pay tribute from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday at Oakcrest Funeral Services at 58 NE 1st Ave. in Titonka and at a military funeral at 10 a.m. Friday at Titonka United Methodist Church, 348 Main St. North.

Patriot Guard Riders will escort the procession to Buffalo Cemetery.

Local veterans groups including the Titonka Veterans of Foreign Wars post, which bears Kennedy's namesake, will participate.

Born in 1917 in Swea City, Kennedy was a 1934 Titonka High School graduate who worked for a farmer, studied diesel engines in Des Moines and went to business college in Texas before joining the Navy on July 9, 1940, according to the obituary.

Kennedy was one of the USS Oklahoma's 429 sailor and Marine casualties. The battleship capsized in minutes after being hit by torpedoes. It suffered the second-most crew member deaths of any ship at Pearl Harbor.

His remains had been buried in an area for the unidentified at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which announced Kennedy's identification in February.

"Until we meet on that other shore," Elizabeth Kennedy wrote in the 1943 tribute, "Long we will remember you."

The remains of another Iowa sailor who was killed in the attack, the Rev. Aloysius Schmitt, were identified and returned last year to his hometown of St. Lucas and then interred in Loras College's Christ the King Chapel in Dubuque. The Roman Catholic priest was Navy chaplain of the battleship USS Oklahoma.

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