Eighteen-Year-Old Sailor Killed at Pearl Harbor on the USS Oklahoma Buried at ANC

[kingofnerf]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNohXsoKsD4

U.S. Navy Seaman Second Class Challis James celebrated his eighteenth birthday three weeks before his death at Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7, 1941. He was serving aboard the battleship USS Oklahoma when several Japanese torpedoes slammed into its hull, forcing it to capsize. The ship became his grave.

James was the namesake of his nephew, Challis Elliott, who said after the funeral that his mother rarely spoke about her brother. “She just said that he was smart and artistic,” Elliott recalled. “All we have is a picture of his ship, and he wrote, ‘this is the boat I’m going to be on.’”

Still the world's finest Navy. It's never been free.

 

[kingofnerf]

Another one from the Oklahoma, this time a Medal of Honor winner. He showed survivors the way out with flashlight, but never made it out himself.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmAsZwBRKmM

More details on the effort to ID the unknown dead appear in the video.