The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency has identified the remains of a Navy sailor who was killed during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor more than 84 years ago.
DPAA announced on March 13 that Seaman 1st Class Clyde Clifton McMeans was officially 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 along Ford Island.
The attack killed 103 of the California's crewmen, according to the agency.
A South Texas Sailor
McMeans was born April 30, 1915, in Karnes City, Texas. His family moved to the Coastal Bend region the following decade, and he attended school in Agua Dulce before completing his education at Banquete High School in 1935. He enlisted in the Navy and drew an assignment aboard the California, a Tennessee-class battleship that had spent 20 years as the Pacific Fleet's flagship.
On the morning of the attack, the California sat at Berth F-3 at the southern end of Battleship Row. Japanese aircraft slammed two torpedoes into the ship's port side within minutes of the opening assault, rupturing compartments below the waterline and triggering severe flooding. A bomb then punched through the main deck and detonated inside the vessel, setting off an ammunition magazine explosion that killed dozens of sailors.
Burning oil spreading across the harbor from nearby stricken ships forced the crew to temporarily abandon the California before they returned with firefighting gear from Ford Island. The battleship gradually took on water and settled into the harbor mud over the next three days.
McMeans was not aboard the California when it went down. Contemporary accounts indicate he had climbed into a motorboat to help ferry fellow crewmen to shore when a Japanese bomb scored a direct hit on the small craft, killing him. The Navy listed him as missing in January 1942 and declared him dead shortly afterward.
In October 1949, a military review board classified his remains as non-recoverable.
Decades of Waiting
Recovery crews worked the wreckage of the California from December 1941 through April 1942, pulling remains from the flooded compartments as salvage teams pumped the ship dry. Those remains were buried at the Halawa and Nu'uanu cemeteries on Oahu. Forty-two crewmen were identified in the immediate aftermath of the attack.
After the war, the American Graves Registration Service took responsibility for resolving the remaining unknowns across the Pacific. In the late summer of 1947, AGRS teams exhumed the California's dead from both cemeteries and brought them to the Central Identification Laboratory at Schofield Barracks for analysis.
Investigators there matched 39 more sailors to their names but hit a wall with the rest. The unresolved remains went to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu.
In the early 2000s, the Navy reached out to McMeans' surviving siblings and collected cheek swabs for DNA reference. The family waited years without any word. Then in 2018, DPAA exhumed 20 sets of unidentified remains tied to the California from the Punchbowl and sent them to its laboratories in Hawaii and Nebraska for modern forensic testing.
Analysts narrowed one set of remains to a white male in his mid-20s, between 5 feet 5 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall. McMeans fit that profile at 26 years old and roughly 5 feet 8. A DNA sample developed from bone tissue produced a match against the reference material his siblings had provided. Dental comparisons and wartime records reinforced the finding.
Forensic examiners also documented blast-related trauma to the chest, injuries consistent with the bomb strike that destroyed McMeans' boat.
Coming Home to Texas
Navy officials informed McMeans' family of the positive identification on March 11 during a meeting at a funeral home in Corpus Christi.
Kathy Herrmann, McMeans' niece, told KRIS-TV in Corpus Christi that the news ended a wait spanning her entire life. Her father, Edward McMeans, was Clyde's brother and had served as an Army medic in the European theater, fighting through Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. Edward survived the war, but his older brother never came home.
"We've loved him forever, without ever knowing him," Herrmann told KRIS-TV.
McMeans will receive a funeral with full military honors at 11 a.m. May 1 at River Hills Baptist Church in Corpus Christi. He will be laid to rest that afternoon at the Coastal Bend State Veterans Cemetery, the same grounds where another of the California's fallen was buried just months ago.
In October 2025, Storekeeper 3rd Class Robert S. Garcia, 23, another Coastal Bend native who served aboard the California and died in the same attack, was interred at the same cemetery following his own DPAA identification. The two families had no prior connection until Herrmann learned about Garcia's burial and called his great-grandniece, Nickie Valdez.
The two women now describe their bond as unbreakable, linked by two young sailors from the same corner of Texas who went to war on the same ship and never returned.
A Broader Effort
McMeans is part of a surge of identifications from the California. Of the 20 unknowns DPAA exhumed from the Punchbowl in 2018, at least 11 had been publicly accounted for as of last October.
The agency credited a record-breaking fiscal year 2025 to advances in DNA sequencing, higher funding levels and the maturation of long-running laboratory projects.
DPAA also announced in early March that it intends to begin exhuming 88 sets of unidentified remains associated with the USS Arizona, the ship whose destruction on Dec. 7, 1941, killed 1,177 sailors and Marines. The project could begin by late 2026.
A rosette will be placed beside McMeans' name on the Court of the Missing at the Punchbowl, marking the end of an 84-year absence.
