Fifteen Medals of Honor: Courage, Rescue and the Men Inside the Oklahoma

Fifteen Navy men earned the Medal of Honor at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, ten of them at the cost of their lives. Others saved lives without any medal, among them the Navy Yard workers who spent two days cutting into the overturned hull of USS Oklahoma.

Why it mattered

The earlier chapters describe Pearl Harbor as an operation: carriers, flight paths, torpedo runs and berths. This one looks at the same two hours through the people in them. The Navy’s decorations are one way into that record, though never a complete one. A citation reduces a man’s morning to a few sentences, and a board of officers in early 1942 chose whose mornings would be written down.

Read closely, the citations are mostly not about attacking the enemy. They are about staying: in a turret with a flashlight, at an air compressor in a flooding compartment, in a dynamo room full of steam, in a boiler room as the ship rolled over. The Navy’s Medal of Honor could then still recognize “distinguished conduct in the line of his profession,” the phrase in Thomas Reeves’s citation (CMOHS, Thomas J. Reeves), and the Pearl Harbor awards honor men who kept their ships alive as much as men who fought back.

The day’s other stories carry no medals. Julio DeCastro, a civilian caulker and chipper, organized the team that cut 32 sailors out of the capsized Oklahoma (NHHC, DANFS, “Oklahoma”). Nurses and corpsmen treated a flood of burned men with too few instruments and too little light. And aboard Arizona, the National Park Service counts 23 sets of brothers lost with the ship (NPS, “Brothers Assigned to the USS Arizona”). Those stories belong beside the citations.

How the medals were decided

The Naval History and Heritage Command states that “Fifteen Medals of Honor were awarded to U.S. Navy personnel” for the attack, ten of them posthumously, and puts the Navy Crosses at a “reasonably solid” 51 (NHHC, H-Gram 001-3). The list was not fixed at once. NHHC records that the original Fleet Awards Board recommended twelve men, a list that included 1st Lt. George H. Cannon of the Marine Corps, killed on Midway that night. John Finn of Kaneohe was added months later. RAdm. Isaac Kidd and Capt. Franklin Van Valkenburgh were left off at first, because their conduct on Arizona‘s bridge was considered their duty; Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox ordered them added. Gunner Jackson Pharris of California received the Navy Cross, raised to the Medal of Honor in 1948 (NHHC, H-Gram 001-3).

The roll is weighted toward the battleships: four medals to California, three to Arizona, two each to Nevada and Oklahoma, and one each to West Virginia, Utah, the repair ship Vestal and NAS Kaneohe Bay. No soldier or airman received the medal for 7 December.

Arizona: an admiral, a captain and the man who stayed

Arizona‘s destruction is told in Chapter 4: a bomb struck forward near No. 2 turret, penetrated the deck and set off the forward magazines (HyperWar, DANFS, “Arizona”). Three of the fifteen medals went to her officers, two of them to men who died on her bridge.

Medal of Honor · Posthumous

RAdm. Isaac C. Kidd, Battleship Division One, in USS Arizona

Kidd went to Arizona‘s bridge when the attack began and carried out his duties as senior officer present afloat until magazine explosions and a direct bomb hit on the bridge destroyed the ship and killed him. The citation honors his “conspicuous devotion to duty, extraordinary courage and complete disregard of his own life.” He was 57, the first U.S. Navy flag officer killed in the Second World War. His remains were never recovered.

Citation →

Medal of Honor · Posthumous

Capt. Franklin Van Valkenburgh, commanding officer, USS Arizona

The citation records that Van Valkenburgh “gallantly fought his ship until the U.S.S. Arizona blew up” from magazine explosions and a direct bomb hit on the bridge, which killed him. Born in Minneapolis in 1888, he is, like Kidd, named on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

Citation →

The National WWII Museum repeats the story that divers later found Kidd’s Naval Academy ring “fused to the bulkhead” of the conning tower; the Navy’s summaries say only that he was not recovered (National WWII Museum, “Valor at Pearl Harbor”; CMOHS, Isaac C. Kidd). Lt. Cmdr. Samuel G. Fuqua, the damage control officer, became by NHHC’s account the senior surviving officer aboard and stayed with the wreck (NHHC, H-Gram 001-3).

Medal of Honor

Lt. Cmdr. Samuel G. Fuqua, USS Arizona

After a bomb struck the quarterdeck, Fuqua helped direct firefighting and the rescue of wounded and burned men. Seeing that the ship could not be saved, he ordered it abandoned, but continued to “direct the fighting of the fires in order to check them” and left only when all who could be saved were off. The citation calls him “an outstanding leader of men.” He retired as a rear admiral and died in 1987.

Citation →

The National WWII Museum puts the number who got off Arizona alive at about 330 to 350. The figure of 1,177 dead used by the Park Service and NHHC is roughly three of every four men aboard.

Vestal: blown overboard and back again

Moored outboard of Arizona, the repair ship Vestal went to general quarters at 0755. Two bombs hit her: one went through three decks and started fires that forced the crew to flood the forward magazines, the other left a hole about five feet across in her bottom. When Arizona exploded, the blast swept men off Vestal‘s deck, among them her captain, Cmdr. Cassin Young. Young swam back, countermanded an abandon-ship order given in his absence, and at about 0845 got her underway, a tug pulling her bow clear of the burning battleship. She anchored off McGrew’s Point at 0910, then, still settling, moved again at 0950 and grounded on Aiea Shoal, where she could not sink (HyperWar, DANFS, “Vestal”).

Medal of Honor

Cmdr. Cassin Young, commanding officer, USS Vestal

Blown overboard by Arizona‘s forward magazine explosion, Young swam back to his ship and, under bombing and strafing, moved Vestal clear “with extreme coolness and calmness,” then beached her to save her. Nimitz presented the medal aboard Vestal on 18 April 1942. Young was killed on 13 November 1942 commanding the cruiser San Francisco off Guadalcanal, earning a posthumous Navy Cross.

Citation →

Oklahoma: two flashlights in a turret

Oklahoma, outboard of Maryland, was struck by “as many as nine torpedoes” and capsized at 0808, twelve minutes into the attack, until her masts rested on the bottom and her starboard side and part of her keel were above water (NPS, “USS Oklahoma”; NHHC, DANFS, “Oklahoma”). She lost 429 men. Two in her turrets were Ens. Francis C. Flaherty, 21, a University of Michigan graduate, and Seaman First Class James Richard Ward, 20 (NHHC, DANFS, “Oklahoma”). Their citations describe the same act.

Medal of Honor · Posthumous

Ens. Francis C. Flaherty, USNR, USS Oklahoma

When it was clear that Oklahoma would capsize and the order to abandon ship was given, Flaherty, by his citation, stayed in a turret holding a flashlight so the rest of the turret crew could see to escape, “thereby sacrificing his own life.” Born in Charlotte, Michigan, in 1919, he is buried there after reinterment from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

Citation →

Medal of Honor · Posthumous

Seaman First Class James R. Ward, USS Oklahoma

Ward’s citation records the same act: as the ship began to capsize he stayed in a turret holding a flashlight so his shipmates could see to escape, and died. The medal was mailed to his parents in Springfield, Ohio, in March 1942. Buried as an unknown, he was identified by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in 2021 and reinterred at Arlington in 2023.

Citation →

Survivors kept fighting. Almost 60 climbed aboard Maryland to help serve her antiaircraft guns; Marine Sgt. Thomas E. Hailey manned a 5-inch gun there in his underwear (NHHC, DANFS, “Oklahoma”). The ship’s Catholic chaplain, Lt. (jg) Aloysius H. Schmitt, trapped in a compartment as she rolled, helped men out through a small porthole and then, his citation records, “insisted he be pushed back into the ship so the others might escape.” First given the noncombat Navy and Marine Corps Medal, he was awarded the Silver Star on 6 October 2017, a year after his remains were identified (NHHC, “Silver Star: Lt. (jg) Aloysius H. Schmitt”).

The men inside the Oklahoma

When Oklahoma rolled over, hundreds of men were below decks. Some drowned at once. Others found themselves in compartments where air had been trapped as the ship turned, standing in the dark in rising water on what had been the overhead. Three escaped from compartment D-57 by swimming nearly 90 feet through flooded spaces (NPS, “USS Oklahoma”). The rest could only make noise and wait. Seaman Stephen Bower Young, one of them, later described men tapping out SOS in Morse code with a wrench; outside, rescuers listened along the hull and marked where the sounds came from (Smithsonian, “The Civilian Worker Who Spearheaded Pearl Harbor’s Most Successful Rescue Mission”). He told the story in his memoir, Trapped at Pearl Harbor.

Julio DeCastro and the Navy Yard crew

Julio DeCastro was a Honolulu-born civilian caulker and chipper at the Navy Yard, a tradesman who knew how ships’ steel went together and how to take it apart (NHHC, DANFS, “Oklahoma”; Smithsonian). He gathered yard workers and tools and went out onto the overturned hull. Tom Czekanski, senior curator of the National WWII Museum, told Smithsonian that DeCastro “acted on his own initiative” and that the men on the hull were risking their own lives.

They did not know what lay under the plates; a cut in the wrong place could open a fuel tank or a magazine. Cmdr. E. P. Kranzfelder, an officer from Maryland, found a booklet of Oklahoma‘s general plans that let the rescuers work out which compartments lay beneath the tapping. The first attempts with cutting torches set fire to cork insulation and oil-based paint below, so the crews switched to pneumatic chipping hammers, safe from fire but slow. Each opening also let out trapped air, and water rose inside while the men within plugged the holes. Yard worker Joe Bulgo needed about an hour to break into a storage hold called the “Lucky Bag,” warning the men inside to keep their hands clear before he finished with a sledgehammer. Young remembered DeCastro saying, “We’ll get ’em out” (Smithsonian).

The work went on through the night and all of the next day. The Park Service says that “over the next two days, 32 men were saved.” The Navy’s ship history credits DeCastro’s team with 32 and records that the last was pulled out about an hour into the midwatch on 9 December, around 0100 (NPS, “USS Oklahoma”; NHHC, DANFS, “Oklahoma”). An anniversary article from the shipyard, published by NAVSEA, gives the same 32. The count is consistent in every source consulted; the time of the last rescue is less certain, and some popular accounts end the work on the afternoon of 8 December.

DeCastro received a commendation from the commandant of the Fourteenth Naval District and died in 1984 (Smithsonian). No medal of the kind on this page went to a civilian with an air hammer, but by the measure of lives saved, his was the most successful rescue of the day.

The same work on the Utah

Across Ford Island, the old target ship Utah took a torpedo forward at 0801 and capsized at 0812 when her mooring lines parted. Cmdr. Solomon S. Isquith heard knocking inside the hull and called for volunteers. With a cutting torch from the cruiser Raleigh, Machinist S. A. Szymanski, Chief Machinist’s Mate Terrance MacSelwiney and two others cut in and brought out ten men, the last Fireman John B. Vaessen (HyperWar, DANFS, “Utah”). Below, before she went over, one man had made sure the others could leave.

Medal of Honor · Posthumous

Chief Watertender Peter Tomich, USS Utah

Knowing the ship was capsizing, Tomich, his citation records, “remained at his post in the engineering plant of the U.S.S. Utah until he saw that all boilers were secured and all fireroom personnel had left their stations,” and “lost his own life.” Born Petar Herceg in 1893 near Ljubuški, in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, he immigrated in 1913 and served in the Army in the First World War before joining the Navy. The medal was entrusted to the State of Utah in 1947 and presented to his relatives aboard USS Enterprise at Split, Croatia, in May 2006.

Citation →

California: four medals from one ship

California, at the southern end of Battleship Row, took torpedoes on her port side early and a bomb that started fires below, and settled over the next three days until she rested on the bottom. The National WWII Museum counts 103 of her crew dead. Four of her men received the Medal of Honor, more than any other crew, and three of the four died. With power failing and the mechanical ammunition hoists out of action, her antiaircraft guns could keep firing only if men carried shells by hand through smoke-filled passageways, and the guns needed compressed air to clear their barrels.

Medal of Honor · Posthumous

Ens. Herbert C. Jones, USNR, USS California

Jones organized and led a party carrying ammunition by hand to the antiaircraft battery after the hoists failed. He was “fatally wounded by a bomb explosion,” and when men tried to carry him away, the citation records, he refused: “Leave me alone! I am done for. Get out of here before the magazines go off.” Born in Los Angeles in 1918, he had enlisted in the Naval Reserve at 17 and was 23 when he died.

Citation →

Medal of Honor · Posthumous

Thomas J. Reeves, USS California

Reeves’s citation honors his “distinguished conduct in the line of his profession” and “extraordinary courage.” When the mechanized ammunition supply failed, he went into a burning passageway on his own and passed ammunition by hand until smoke and fire overcame and killed him. Born in Thomaston, Connecticut, on 9 December 1895, he died two days short of his 46th birthday. CMOHS lists him as a Radio Electrician, a warrant officer; NHHC lists call him a Chief Radioman.

Citation →

In their words

This is my station and I will stay and give them air as long as the guns are going.

Medal of Honor · Posthumous

Machinist’s Mate First Class Robert R. Scott, USS California

Scott’s battle station was an air compressor in a compartment that flooded after a torpedo hit. The others got out; Scott refused to leave, staying to keep air flowing to the guns. Born in Massillon, Ohio, in 1915, he was 26. His medal, presented to his mother in March 1942, is held by the Ohio Military Museum in Massillon.

Citation →

Medal of Honor

Gunner Jackson C. Pharris, USS California

In charge of an ordnance repair party on the third deck, Pharris set up a hand-supply ammunition train for the antiaircraft guns and ordered counterflooding. Hurt himself, he went back again and again into flooding compartments to drag out “unconscious shipmates who were gradually being submerged in oil.” The citation credits him with saving “many of his shipmates from death” and with being “largely responsible for keeping the California in action.” President Truman presented the medal in the White House Rose Garden on 25 June 1948.

Citation →

The National WWII Museum credits Pharris with saving 17 shipmates; he was commissioned in July 1942 and finished the war in the cruiser Saint Paul (National WWII Museum, “USS California Medal of Honor Recipients”).

West Virginia: the captain and the mess attendant

West Virginia, outboard of Tennessee, took a series of torpedo hits in the first minutes; counterflooding kept her upright as she settled. Capt. Mervyn S. Bennion went to the bridge, where a fragment, generally attributed to a bomb that hit the neighboring Tennessee, tore into his abdomen. The wound was mortal, and he knew it.

Medal of Honor · Posthumous

Capt. Mervyn S. Bennion, commanding officer, USS West Virginia

The citation records Bennion’s “conspicuous devotion to duty, extraordinary courage, and complete disregard of his own life.” Mortally wounded, he showed concern only for fighting and saving his ship and strongly protested being carried from the bridge. Born in Vernon, Utah, in 1887, he is buried in Salt Lake City; the destroyer Bennion (DD-662) bore his name.

Citation →

One of the men who came to Bennion’s side was Mess Attendant Second Class Doris Miller, 22, of Waco, Texas, who had enlisted at Dallas in September 1939 (NHHC, “Doris Miller”). The messman branch was then the only part of the Navy open to Black enlistees. His own battle station wrecked, Miller was ordered to the bridge to help with the captain. Afterward he manned a .50-caliber antiaircraft machine gun he had not been trained to use, firing “for about fifteen minutes,” in his words, until the ammunition ran out and the order came to abandon ship (NHHC, “Doris Miller”).

Navy Cross

Mess Attendant Second Class Doris Miller, USS West Virginia

“For distinguished devotion to duty, extraordinary courage and disregard for his own personal safety,” the citation begins. “While at the side of his Captain on the bridge, Miller, despite enemy strafing and bombing,” helped move the mortally wounded Bennion to safety in the face of a serious fire, and “later manned and operated a machine gun directed at enemy Japanese attacking aircraft until ordered to leave the bridge.” Nimitz pinned the medal on him aboard Enterprise on 27 May 1942, the first Navy Cross awarded to an African American.

Citation →

The award did not come by itself. At first the Navy did not name him. The NAACP asked President Roosevelt to decorate the unidentified Black sailor, and once Miller was identified in March 1942, bills were introduced in Congress to award him the Medal of Honor. Knox commended him on 1 April, and the Navy Cross followed (NHHC, “Doris Miller”). NHHC calls the award controversial and the product of outside political pressure, and cautions that the number of planes Miller shot down “has been embellished over time” and cannot be confirmed (NHHC, H-Gram 001-3). Miller said only that he thought he got one. He was lost on 24 November 1943 when a Japanese submarine sank the escort carrier Liscome Bay off the Gilberts. In 2020 the Navy named a future aircraft carrier, Doris Miller (CVN-81), for him.

Nevada: the dynamo rooms and the anchors

Nevada‘s run down the channel is told in Chapter 6. Her crew earned two of the fifteen Medals of Honor and, by NHHC’s count, 15 of the 51 Navy Crosses, possibly the most for any ship in a single action (NHHC, “USS Nevada (BB-36) Commemoration”). She could get underway partly because her engineers kept the power on.

Medal of Honor

Machinist Donald K. Ross, USS Nevada

When smoke, steam and heat made the forward dynamo room “almost untenable,” Ross sent his men out and ran the station alone until he was “blinded and unconscious.” Revived, he went back, secured it and moved to the after dynamo room, where exhaustion knocked him out again; he recovered and stayed at his post until ordered to leave. Nimitz presented the medal on 18 April 1942. Ross retired as a captain and was buried at sea over Nevada in 1992.

Citation →

Medal of Honor · Posthumous

Chief Boatswain Edwin J. Hill, USS Nevada

Under strafing and bombing, Hill led his line handlers onto the quays to cast off Nevada‘s lines, then swam back to his ship. Later, on the forecastle as she was run aground, he was trying to let go the anchors when he “was blown overboard and killed by the explosion of several bombs.” Born in Philadelphia in 1895, he is buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

Citation →

With her captain ashore, two of Nevada‘s Navy Crosses went to the officers who handled her. Ens. Joseph K. Taussig Jr., the in-port officer of the deck, had ordered a second boiler lit before the attack, cutting the time to get underway from two hours to 35 minutes (NHHC, “USS Nevada (BB-36) Commemoration”).

Navy Cross

Ens. Joseph K. Taussig Jr., USS Nevada

Directing Nevada‘s antiaircraft battery, Taussig was badly wounded in the leg. His citation records that he “refused to leave his battle station” and “insisted on continuing the control of his battery’s fire,” showing “exceptional courage, presence of mind, and devotion to duty.” The wound later cost him the leg; he retired as a captain in 1954.

NHHC on Nevada’s awards →

Navy Cross

Lt. Cmdr. Francis J. Thomas, USNR, USS Nevada

The senior officer aboard, Thomas “took command” of Nevada, his citation records, and “handled it in an outstanding manner,” and when she was hit again and again in the channel “he ran her aground in order to save her.” NHHC notes that his focus that morning was keeping the ship from sinking.

Citation →

Kaneohe and Midway

Japanese aircraft struck Naval Air Station Kaneohe Bay, on the windward side of Oahu, minutes before the harbor (see Chapter 5). Chief Aviation Ordnanceman John W. Finn was at home when the firing started. He drove to the hangars, took a .50-caliber machine gun to an exposed spot on a parking ramp and began firing at the strafing fighters.

Medal of Honor

Chief Aviation Ordnanceman John W. Finn, NAS Kaneohe Bay

Finn’s citation records that he manned a machine gun in an exposed section of the ramp under heavy strafing and kept firing despite repeated wounds; NHHC counts 21. After first aid he returned to the squadron area and “actively supervised the rearming of returning planes.” Nimitz presented the medal aboard Enterprise in September 1942. Finn was commissioned that year, retired as a lieutenant in 1956 and died in 2010, aged 100, then the oldest living recipient.

Citation →

NHHC calls Finn “Pearl Harbor’s only Medal of Honor recipient for valor in combat,” drawing a line between his award and the others, most of which honor men who held their posts (NHHC, “The Warrior of Kāneʻohe”). The destroyer John Finn (DDG-113) entered service in 2017.

Pearl Harbor was not the only base attacked on 7 December, Hawaii time. That night two Japanese destroyers shelled Sand Island at Midway Atoll, far to the northwest, and hit the Marine command post there.

Medal of Honor · Posthumous · Midway

1st Lt. George H. Cannon, USMC, Battery H, 6th Defense Battalion

Mortally wounded by shellfire at his command post on Sand Island, Cannon refused to be evacuated “until after his men who had been wounded by the same shell were evacuated,” and directed the reorganization of the post until he was forcibly removed. He died from loss of blood. Born in Webster Groves, Missouri, in 1915, he is often described as the first Marine of the war to earn the medal. His award is counted with Midway, not Pearl Harbor.

Citation →

Caring for the wounded

Oahu’s medical services met the war as a flood of burned men. André B. Sobocinski, historian of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, estimates that sixty percent of all casualties were burn cases (BUMED, “Navy Medicine at Pearl Harbor”). Most men had been in white T-shirts and shorts.

In their words

The burns began where the pants ended.

Solace and the Naval Hospital

The hospital ship Solace (AH-5), commissioned that July and anchored off Ford Island, received her first patients at 0825, while the first wave was still attacking. She discharged 141 patients to duty to make room and admitted 132 casualties that day, more than 70 percent of them burn cases (BUMED). Her chief nurse was Lt. Grace B. Lally (MOAA, “Pearl Harbor: Paradise Under Attack”).

Naval Hospital Pearl Harbor, 250 beds on the point at the harbor entrance, was in Sobocinski’s words “one of the best equipped and staffed of the 21 Navy hospitals in operation in 1941.” It had 30 Navy nurses, up from eight a year earlier (Erickson oral history). BUMED dates its first patients from 0900; Erickson remembered the first reaching the dressing room at 0825 and dying within the hour. Within three hours the hospital had received 546 casualties and 313 dead; its census that night was 960 (BUMED). A Japanese plane crashed on the grounds beside the laboratory, and after dark the staff blacked out the windows and worked by flashlight. Burns were sprayed with tannic acid from “flit guns,” hand sprayers meant for insecticide (Erickson oral history). Surgeons came from the unfinished Mobile Hospital No. 2, which improvised a ward for 110 casualties; 114 more nurses came through the Red Cross; and at 1030 a field hospital opened in the Navy Yard officers’ club (BUMED).

Medical men died with their ships: 26 hospital corpsmen, two dentists and two physicians, among them Arizona‘s medical officer, dentist and 15 corpsmen. Two Navy physicians and two corpsmen received the Navy Cross (BUMED).

Hickam, Tripler and the Army nurses

Eighty-two Army nurses were on Oahu that morning, at Tripler General Hospital at Fort Shafter, the Schofield Barracks hospital and the hospital at Hickam Field (Bellafaire, The Army Nurse Corps, “Early Operations in the Pacific”). Hickam’s was a three-story concrete building with 40 beds, about seven medical officers, seven nurses and forty enlisted men. A delayed-action bomb landed 60 to 70 feet from it; its mess, built for about 100, fed well over 1,000 that day (Arakaki and Kuborn, “Medical memories from Dec. 7, 1941”). Serious cases went on to Tripler, “overwhelmed with hundreds of casualties,” where doctors passed scissors from table to table and operated without gloves (Bellafaire).

Hickam’s chief nurse, 1st Lt. Annie G. Fox, was the first of many Army nurses to receive the Purple Heart, then also given for meritorious service; she was not wounded. Her citation praised “her fine example of calmness, courage, and leadership” (Bellafaire). By late December the worst cases were going home: the liner President Coolidge carried 125 patients and reached San Francisco on Christmas Day (Erickson oral history).

Timeline

Courage, rescue and care, 7–9 December 1941

1. 7 Dec, 0755Attack begins; Vestal goes to general quarters.
2. 7 Dec, 0801Utah torpedoed forward.
3. 7 Dec, about 0806–0810Arizona’s magazines explode; Kidd and Van Valkenburgh killed; Young blown off Vestal.
4. 7 Dec, 0808Oklahoma capsized; Flaherty and Ward lost in a turret.
5. 7 Dec, 0812Utah rolls over; Tomich lost in the fireroom.
6. 7 Dec, 0825Solace takes her first patients.
7. 7 Dec, about 0845Vestal gets underway; Ens. Jones fatally wounded in California.
8. 7 Dec, 0950Vestal grounds on Aiea Shoal.
9. 7 Dec, about 1000Attack ends.
10. 7 Dec, dayTen men cut out of Utah; DeCastro’s team starts on Oklahoma.
11. 7 Dec, nightMidway shelled; Cannon mortally wounded.
12. 9 Dec, about 0100Last of 32 men freed from Oklahoma.

Brothers on the Arizona

Before the war the Navy allowed brothers to serve in the same ship, and many did. The National Park Service counts 38 sets of brothers assigned to Arizona, 79 men, plus a father and son, Thomas Augusta Free and William Thomas Free. Of the 79 brothers, 63 died, and the Park Service counts 23 sets of brothers, and the Frees, lost with the ship (NPS, “Brothers Assigned to the USS Arizona”).

Three families had three sons aboard, the Beckers, Dohertys and Murdocks; in each, one survived. Only the Warriners came through intact: Kenneth was away at training in San Diego, and Russell was badly burned but lived. John Anderson survived; he never found his twin, Delbert. Of the 63 brothers killed, only four were recovered and identified (NPS). The figure of 23 is sometimes misread as the number of sets aboard. It is the number lost, and the arithmetic holds: 23 pairs killed entire account for 46 of the 63 dead, and the other 17 deaths fell among families that kept at least one son.

People

Julio DeCastro. Honolulu-born caulker and chipper who organized the civilian crew that cut 32 men out of Oklahoma, working almost without a break for two days. He received a district commendation and died in 1984 (Smithsonian).

Stephen Bower Young. Oklahoma seaman trapped in the hull and freed by DeCastro’s crew; his memoir Trapped at Pearl Harbor is the main first-hand account of the wait in the dark.

Lt. Ruth Erickson. Navy nurse at the Naval Hospital whose oral history is one of the most exact accounts of the day there; she later became the tenth director of the Navy Nurse Corps (MOAA).

Lt. Grace B. Lally. Chief nurse of Solace, which took in casualties from 0825 and admitted 132 that day (MOAA; BUMED).

1st Lt. Annie G. Fox. Chief nurse at Hickam, the first of many Army nurses awarded the Purple Heart (Bellafaire).

Cmdr. Solomon S. Isquith. Senior officer aboard Utah, who heard tapping inside the capsized hull and called for the volunteers who freed ten men (HyperWar, DANFS, “Utah”).

Losses and uncertainty

By the numbers

Dead in the ships whose crews earned the Medal of Honor

Killed or died of wounds, 7 December 1941 (medals in brackets)

Arizona (3)1,177

Oklahoma (2)429

West Virginia (1)106

California (4)103

Nevada (2)about 60

Utah (1)58

Ship totals. Arizona‘s 1,177 dead of about 1,512 aboard is the current figure; the older ship history still online gives 1,103 of 1,400 (HyperWar, DANFS, “Arizona”). For Oklahoma the ship history counts 20 officers and 395 men killed or missing, 415 in all, against the 429 used by the Park Service and the Navy’s identification program, which include her Marines and later reconciliation. Utah is usually given as 58 dead, sometimes 64; the DANFS text on HyperWar says six officers and 68 men, so her total is unsettled.

The rescue. Every source consulted agrees on 32 men cut out of Oklahoma. When the last was freed does not agree: about 0100 on 9 December in the ship history, “over the next two days” in the Park Service account, the afternoon of 8 December in some popular retellings.

The medals. Fifteen is firm for Pearl Harbor; lists of sixteen include Cannon, and some give eleven posthumous awards by counting him. Ranks vary for Reeves (Radio Electrician or Chief Radioman) and Ross (Machinist or Chief Machinist), warrant titles that do not map neatly onto today’s. Most NHHC material gives Miller as Mess Attendant Second Class, but the NHHC page carrying his citation calls him Third Class. Finn’s presentation appears as both 14 and 15 September 1942. CMOHS records no presentation date for several posthumous medals.

Medical figures. BUMED’s 546 casualties and 313 dead in three hours, and 960 by nightfall, are for the Naval Hospital alone. Army and other Navy facilities kept separate counts that were never fully combined, and the 60 percent burn rate is an estimate.

Questions readers ask

Why fifteen Medals of Honor, and not sixteen?

Fifteen were awarded for Pearl Harbor, all to Navy men, ten posthumously (NHHC, H-Gram 001-3). A sixteenth for 7 December went to 1st Lt. George H. Cannon, USMC, for the shelling of Midway that night. Lists covering the whole day include him.

Did Doris Miller receive the Medal of Honor?

No. He received the Navy Cross from Admiral Nimitz on 27 May 1942, after Secretary Knox advised against the Medal of Honor; it was the first Navy Cross awarded to an African American (NHHC, “Doris Miller”). Proposals in Congress to upgrade it have not succeeded.

How many men were rescued from inside the Oklahoma?

Thirty-two, cut out by Julio DeCastro’s yard crew between 7 and 9 December, and three more escaped by swimming out of compartment D-57 (NHHC, DANFS, “Oklahoma”; NPS, “USS Oklahoma”). The sources do not count the men heard tapping who were never reached.

Why did so many medals go to men who died at their posts?

Most of the damage was done in the first half hour, and the men who could do the most about it were keeping ships afloat and guns supplied. The Navy’s medal could then recognize extraordinary devotion to duty as well as combat. Even so, the board first left off Kidd and Van Valkenburgh as having done their duty, until Knox added them (NHHC, H-Gram 001-3).

Where are the recipients buried?

Kidd and Van Valkenburgh remain with Arizona and are named on the Courts of the Missing at the Punchbowl, where Hill and Reeves are buried. Ward, Fuqua, Pharris and Scott are at Arlington; Flaherty was returned to Charlotte, Michigan; Ross was buried at sea over Nevada (CMOHS).

How it connects

These acts took place inside the attack described in Chapter 4, Battleship Row; Chapter 5, The Airfields, for Kaneohe and Hickam; and Chapter 6, The Second Wave, for Nevada‘s run. The next chapter, A Date Which Will Live in Infamy, turns to Hawaii under martial law and to Washington. The raising of Oklahoma and the identification of her dead are in Chapter 9. The whole series is on the collection page.

What happened afterward

Of the five living recipients, Cassin Young was killed within a year, on San Francisco‘s bridge off Guadalcanal. Ross retired as a captain, Fuqua as a rear admiral; Pharris was commissioned and served to the end of the war; Finn outlived them all. Doris Miller was lost with Liscome Bay in November 1943. The Navy named ships for most of the fifteen, among them destroyers Bennion, Van Valkenburgh, Ross, John Finn, Cassin Young and three named Kidd, and destroyer escorts Flaherty, Hill, Herbert C. Jones, Reeves, Scott, Tomich and J. Richard Ward; none was named for Fuqua (NHHC, H-Gram 001-3).

Oklahoma was raised in 1943 but never repaired, and sank under tow in 1947. Her unidentified dead were buried as unknowns; from 2015 the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency examined them, and the Park Service reports more than 300 identified, Ward and Schmitt among them (NPS, “USS Oklahoma”). That story is in Chapter 9.

Walking the ground today

The Pearl Harbor National Memorial visitor center is the starting point. The USS Arizona Memorial, reached by Navy boat, spans the sunken hull; its shrine room carries the names of the men killed aboard, Kidd and Van Valkenburgh and the lost brothers among them.

The USS Oklahoma Memorial stands on Ford Island beside the ship’s former berth, near the Battleship Missouri Memorial. Ford Island is an active base, so visitors ride the shuttle from the visitor center with tickets from the Pearl Harbor Historic Sites counter; the memorial is open from 7 a.m. to sunset. The USS Utah Memorial is not served by the public shuttle (NPS, “Visit the USS Oklahoma Memorial”). Hospital Point, where Nevada grounded and Hill died, can be seen across the channel from the memorial boats. NAS Kaneohe Bay is now Marine Corps Base Hawaii and closed to the public. At the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, Hill and Reeves are buried and Kidd and Van Valkenburgh are named among the missing. Check hours and security rules before visiting.

Sources and further reading

• Congressional Medal of Honor Society, recipient pages: Bennion, Finn, Flaherty, Fuqua, Hill, Jones, Kidd, Pharris, Reeves, Ross, Scott, Tomich, Van Valkenburgh, Ward, Young, Cannon.
• Naval History and Heritage Command, H-Gram 001-3, “Navy Valor at Pearl Harbor”: usnhistory.navylive.dodlive.mil; “Navy Medal of Honor: World War II”: history.navy.mil.
• NHHC, “Doris Miller”: biography and Navy Cross citation; “USS Nevada (BB-36) Commemoration”: history.navy.mil; “Silver Star: Lt. (jg) Aloysius H. Schmitt”: history.navy.mil.
• Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships: “Oklahoma”, history.navy.mil; “Vestal”, HyperWar; “Utah”, HyperWar; “Arizona”, HyperWar.
• National Park Service, Pearl Harbor National Memorial: “USS Oklahoma”; “Brothers Assigned to the USS Arizona”; “Visit the USS Oklahoma Memorial”.
• “The Civilian Worker Who Spearheaded Pearl Harbor’s Most Successful Rescue Mission,” Smithsonian: smithsonianmag.com; NAVSEA, “Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard remembers USS Oklahoma”: navsea.navy.mil.
• André B. Sobocinski, “Navy Medicine at Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941,” Bureau of Medicine and Surgery: med.navy.mil; oral history of Lt. Ruth Erickson, NC, USN: Navy Department Library.
• Judith A. Bellafaire, The Army Nurse Corps in World War II (CMH Pub. 72-14): HyperWar; Leatrice R. Arakaki and John R. Kuborn, “Medical memories from Dec. 7, 1941”: airforcemedicine.af.mil.
• The National WWII Museum, “Valor at Pearl Harbor: Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd’s Medal of Honor” (nationalww2museum.org) and “USS California Medal of Honor Recipients at Pearl Harbor” (nationalww2museum.org).

Photographs: Official U.S. Navy photographs (National Archives and Naval History and Heritage Command), public domain. Shrine room of the USS Arizona Memorial: Wang Yu Ching, Office of the President (Taiwan), CC BY 2.0.