The Protection POW/MIA Accounting Company has recognized the stays of a Navy sailor who was killed throughout the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor greater than 84 years in the past.
DPAA introduced on March 13 that Seaman 1st Class Clyde Clifton McMeans was formally accounted for on Nov. 25, 2025. McMeans, 26, was assigned to the battleship USS California (BB-44) on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese torpedo bombers and dive bombers struck the vessel at its berth alongside Ford Island.
The assault killed 103 of the California’s crewmen, based on the company.
A South Texas Sailor
McMeans was born April 30, 1915, in Karnes Metropolis, Texas. His household moved to the Coastal Bend area the next decade, and he attended faculty in Agua Dulce earlier than finishing his training at Banquete Excessive College in 1935. He enlisted within the Navy and drew an task aboard the California, a Tennessee-class battleship that had spent 20 years because the Pacific Fleet’s flagship.
On the morning of the assault, the California sat at Berth F-3 on the southern finish of Battleship Row. Japanese plane slammed two torpedoes into the ship’s port aspect inside minutes of the opening assault, rupturing compartments beneath the waterline and triggering extreme flooding. A bomb then punched by the principle deck and detonated contained in the vessel, setting off an ammunition journal explosion that killed dozens of sailors.
Burning oil spreading throughout the harbor from close by stricken ships pressured the crew to briefly abandon the California earlier than they returned with firefighting gear from Ford Island. The battleship step by step took on water and settled into the harbor mud over the subsequent three days.
McMeans was not aboard the California when it went down. Up to date accounts point out he had climbed right into a motorboat to assist ferry fellow crewmen to shore when a Japanese bomb scored a direct hit on the small craft, killing him. The Navy listed him as lacking in January 1942 and declared him lifeless shortly afterward.
In October 1949, a army overview board categorised his stays as non-recoverable.
A long time of Ready
Restoration crews labored the wreckage of the California from December 1941 by April 1942, pulling stays from the flooded compartments as salvage groups pumped the ship dry. These stays had been buried on the Halawa and Nu’uanu cemeteries on Oahu. Forty-two crewmen had been recognized within the instant aftermath of the assault.
After the battle, the American Graves Registration Service took duty for resolving the remaining unknowns throughout the Pacific. Within the late summer season of 1947, AGRS groups exhumed the California‘s lifeless from each cemeteries and introduced them to the Central Identification Laboratory at Schofield Barracks for evaluation.
Investigators there matched 39 extra sailors to their names however hit a wall with the remaining. The unresolved stays went to the Nationwide Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, often called the Punchbowl, in Honolulu.
Within the early 2000s, the Navy reached out to McMeans’ surviving siblings and picked up cheek swabs for DNA reference. The household waited years with none phrase. Then in 2018, DPAA exhumed 20 units of unidentified stays tied to the California from the Punchbowl and despatched them to its laboratories in Hawaii and Nebraska for contemporary forensic testing.
Analysts narrowed one set of stays to a white male in his mid-20s, between 5 ft 5 inches and 5 ft 10 inches tall. McMeans match that profile at 26 years previous and roughly 5 ft 8. A DNA pattern developed from bone tissue produced a match towards the reference materials his siblings had supplied. Dental comparisons and wartime data strengthened the discovering.
Forensic examiners additionally documented blast-related trauma to the chest, accidents according to the bomb strike that destroyed McMeans’ boat.
Coming Residence to Texas
Navy officers knowledgeable McMeans’ household of the constructive identification on March 11 throughout a gathering at a funeral residence in Corpus Christi.
Kathy Herrmann, McMeans’ niece, informed KRIS-TV in Corpus Christi that the information ended a wait spanning her total life. Her father, Edward McMeans, was Clyde’s brother and had served as an Army medic within the European theater, preventing by Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. Edward survived the battle, however his older brother by no means got here residence.
“We have liked him ceaselessly, with out ever realizing him,” Herrmann informed KRIS-TV.
McMeans will obtain a funeral with full army honors at 11 a.m. Could 1 at River Hills Baptist Church in Corpus Christi. He might be laid to relaxation that afternoon on the Coastal Bend State Veterans Cemetery, the identical grounds the place one other of the California‘s fallen was buried simply months in the past.
In October 2025, Storekeeper third Class Robert S. Garcia, 23, one other Coastal Bend native who served aboard the California and died within the identical assault, was interred on the identical cemetery following his personal DPAA identification. The 2 households had no prior connection till Herrmann discovered about Garcia’s burial and referred to as his great-grandniece, Nickie Valdez.
The 2 ladies now describe their bond as unbreakable, linked by two younger sailors from the identical nook of Texas who went to battle on the identical ship and by no means returned.
A Broader Effort
McMeans is a part of a surge of identifications from the California. Of the 20 unknowns DPAA exhumed from the Punchbowl in 2018, at the least 11 had been publicly accounted for as of final October.
The company credited a record-breaking fiscal 12 months 2025 to advances in DNA sequencing, greater funding ranges and the maturation of long-running laboratory tasks.
DPAA additionally introduced in early March that it intends to start exhuming 88 units of unidentified stays related to the USS Arizona, the ship whose destruction on Dec. 7, 1941, killed 1,177 sailors and Marines. The undertaking might start by late 2026.
A rosette might be positioned beside McMeans’ title on the Courtroom of the Lacking on the Punchbowl, marking the top of an 84-year absence.
