The surprise attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor on Sunday, 7 December 1941, remains one of the most traumatic events in U.S. history. Few images are more emblematic of that day than the battleship USS Arizona (BB-39) disappearing in a ball of flame. Among the complement of 1,514 men assigned to the ship, there were 38 sets of brothers and a total of 80 men related by blood, including a pair of twins, two sets of three brothers, and a father and son. Only 15 of these men survived the attack—a staggering 80 percent casualty rate. Of the entire crew, 1,177 sailors and Marines, from an admiral to the newest recruit, perished.
In a world at peace, there had not seemed any particular danger in brothers serving together on board warships. Big brothers in uniform made for good recruiting posters. Most of these boys—and at 17, 18, or 19 many were still boys—came from the poverty of the Great Depression. They found themselves on the front lines not out of a surge of patriotic pride or quest to see the world, but out of economic necessity. Many were from large farm families, and their absence from around the dinner table meant one less mouth to feed. The $5 or $10 they sent home out of their monthly pay of $36 helped feed younger siblings. In short, they needed the money.
It is clear from the letters these men wrote home throughout 1941 that sailors below decks throughout the fleet expected war to break out in the Pacific sometime soon. They anticipated sailing west to relieve the Philippines or duel with the Japanese in one epic sea battle. None, however, expected the magnitude of the disaster that engulfed Battleship Row that Sunday morning.
“When I get my next leave and we’re back together,” Fireman First Class Edward “Bud” Heidt of Hawthorne, California, wrote 19-year-old Donna Streur only a week earlier, “let’s not waste a minute of it because it may be the last time we get together.” Maybe he shouldn’t have said that, Heidt continued, “but you know as well as I do that we may be at war any day now. It will be hard for those we love and those that love us. All my love, Bud.”1
Bud’s letter to Donna aside, his younger brother, Wesley—just promoted to machinist’s mate second class—tried to reassure their mother. “I don’t know why you worry about us so much,” Wesley wrote her, “if anything happened to us you would hear from the Navy first thing. . . . I am safer on this battleboat than I would be driving back and forth to work if I was home.”2 After the attack, their father, a typesetter for the Los Angeles Times, would have the unenviable task of setting the headline.
When a string of Japanese bombers armed with torpedoes roared down the Southeast Loch that Sunday morning, they released their deadly cargoes against the battleships California (BB-44), Oklahoma (BB-37), and West Virginia (BB-48). The repair ship Vestal (AR-4) momentarily sheltered the Arizona, but then more bombers appeared overhead, dropping 16-inch armor-piercing naval ordnance converted to bombs. Three bombs from a flight of five bombers struck the stern of the Arizona, one glancing off Turret No. 4.
Five bombs from another flight fell toward the ship. One struck the Vestal, and three straddled the two ships. The remaining bomb hit the Arizona near Turret No. 2, passed through the armor of the first deck, and within seconds triggered a chain reaction that resulted in the powder in the forward magazines exploding. Throughout the Arizona, every man, whatever his rank or battle station, felt what happened—even if only for the last few seconds of his life.
When the fatal blast consumed the battleship, Bill Ball, a seaman first class from Fredericksburg, Iowa, with dreams of playing big league baseball, was trapped in the engine room along with the Heidt brothers. Bill’s brother Masten, older by one year, was above decks, and the explosion literally blew him off the ship. Somehow, Masten escaped the fiery waters almost unscathed. He was one of the very few to do so.
Back home in Iowa, five brothers named Sullivan vowed to avenge their friend Bill Ball’s death. They enlisted with the stipulation that they serve together. After the Sullivan brothers all perished when the cruiser Juneau (CL-52) sank off Guadalcanal, there was a perception in the general public that the Navy should prohibit family members from serving together. However, the Navy never absolutely forbid the practice, although it did implement a voluntary sole survivor policy later in the war.
That was little comfort to those mourning sons who had been on board the Arizona. Clara May Morse, the widowed mother of brothers Francis and Norman—her only children—reflected the depth of the losses. Clara lived another 40 years after she lost her boys, finding what solace she could in volunteer work. “It is a wonderful thing for me to be able to do Red Cross work after Pearl Harbor, my Pearl Harbor,” she wrote on the 13th anniversary of the attack. “Others will have their Pearl Harbors, I feel for them very much because I know. God how I do know.”3
Three Becker Brothers
In the summer of 1938, as the Great Depression held a grip on central Kansas, 21-year-old Harvey Becker took the Santa Fe train east to Kansas City and enlisted. Harvey was the second child in a family of seven. After Harvey reported to the Arizona and got his rating as a gunner’s mate, his younger brother Marvin decided that the Navy’s steady income sounded good. In the spring of 1940, he joined Harvey in the Arizona’s Turret No. 2, which housed three of the ship’s big 14-inch guns. The next brother in line, Wesley, despite his aspirations of becoming an artist, followed in his brothers’ footsteps on board the Arizona after he turned 18. He, too, would be assigned to Turret No. 2.
Wesley’s departure from the family farm was particularly hard on the youngest Becker brother, soon-to-be 14-year-old Bob. Wesley and Bob considered each other “best buds,” and Wesley wrote Bob a “Dear Bud” letter from the battleship on 13 October 1941. Wesley didn’t like his temporary duty as a relief mess cook, but he told Bob he had gotten “all the good ham I wanted and all the strawberry ice cream.”
Before mailing that letter, Wesley turned it over to scrawl a few lines to his mother, assuring her, “We three are all OK.” He signed it, “Your son Wesley,” but added what may have been his shipmates’ way of keeping the three Becker brothers straight: “(Big Becker, Little Becker, & Little Little Becker).”4
Happy though the three Becker brothers appeared, they had thoughts of home. “Boy, how I would love to be back on the farm for a few weeks,” Marvin wrote to their cousin Willard Hansen. “I guess I’ll do well if I ever see it again,” he continued. Then, wistfully commenting on Willard’s attendance as a freshman at Kansas State, Marvin concluded, “I wish I was there with you.”5
On the night of 6 December, Marvin was busy packing for his scheduled leave home. He would have a chance to see his girlfriend and receive his Christmas presents in person. When asked what he wanted from his family, Marvin mentioned only one thing: a jar of his mother’s canned pickles. Weeks before, Freda Becker had lovingly labeled a jar for Marvin and placed it in the cellar awaiting his arrival.
While Marvin daydreamed of his mother’s pickles, his brother Wesley was on board ship, likely drawing something, and oldest brother Harvey was ashore with his wife. Their father, Bill, and brother Bob were hard at work building a sheep barn on the farm Bill and Freda had recently purchased near Savonburg, Kansas.6
When Harvey Becker rushed to the harbor the next morning and found the Arizona in flames, there was no sign of Turret No. 2, where Harvey knew his brothers would have been. At the Savonburg farm, Bill and Bob were in the midst of another long day of construction when they heard the news. Pearl Harbor attacked by the Japanese? Their reaction was disbelief. As Bob later recalled, “The first impression on something tragic like that is one that you just can’t believe that this is happening.”
Freda refused to believe her sons were dead. “Mom really wouldn’t concede that they were gone for a long time because they were never recovered,” Bob told an interviewer more than 70 years after the attack.7 The jar of canned pickles with Marvin’s name on it was carefully packed and moved to the cellar of the new family home. It remained untouched, still labeled for Marvin, for many years.
From Alabama to Arizona
The Murdock clan was tied to the Alabama hill country. Charles Wesley Murdock, a boy from across the Georgia line, married Mary “Sleatie” Rains on Christmas Eve 1905 when he was 22 and she was 15. “C. W.” was a blacksmith by trade, but he also rode the circuit as a Baptist pastor. He and Mary had seven children who survived to adulthood, five boys and two girls. The five Murdock brothers all became Navy men.
The oldest, Thomas, stuck it out on the farm until he was 21 and then took a bus to Birmingham to enlist in the spring of 1930. When the mid-1930s brought no improvement in economic conditions, Luther Murdock enlisted in the fall of 1934, and kid brother Melvin followed in the spring of 1938. After their respective basic training, Luther and Melvin joined their big brother, by then a chief yeoman, on board the Arizona.
In the fall of 1939, these three Murdock brothers got leave at the same time to visit their family in Alabama. They left the West Coast planning to drive straight through. Two days into the trip, their 1938 Chevrolet coupe ran into a stopped truck in a fog near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Banged and bruised, they sent their parents a telegram announcing, “Arriving Friday noon with tape, bandages and crutches.”
Sleatie Murdock gathered in her brood and rejoiced to have her older boys home. Broken ribs or not, Melvin wasn’t deterred from looking up the girls he knew who were still single. “The Murdock boys are true blue one hundred per cent Navy,” the local newspaper paper concluded. “When a Navy man gets hurt he smiles.”8
By the fall of 1941, Luther and Melvin were watertenders, charged with operating the Arizona’s boilers, while back home their younger brother, Verlon, had just enlisted. Meanwhile, oldest brother Thomas had gotten married and had regular liberty privileges ashore where his wife, Ruth, rented an apartment. Luther had liberty ashore Saturday evening, too, and joined Tom and Ruth for dinner. They invited him to spend the night, but Luther decided to return to the Arizona and younger brother Melvin.
As the sound of explosions reached Honolulu Sunday morning, Thomas Murdock was certain his brothers would have been far below decks somewhere amid the mass of boilers and piping. If only he had tried harder to have Luther spend the night. Like so many, Thomas hurried toward the harbor with a sickening feeling that there was little he could do.
After the attack, Thomas Murdock’s service to his country collided with his personal grief. As he searched for any sign of his two brothers, it became his task to complete a final muster roll of the Arizona’s crew—those confirmed dead, those missing and presumed dead, and the eerily small number of survivors.
Just before the attack, Melvin Murdock had sent his kid brother, Ken, the youngest of the five Murdock boys, $25 to buy a new bicycle. Luther had been sending home $25 a month—about a quarter of his pay after seven years in the Navy—so his parents could purchase an electric refrigerator. C. W. and Sleatie were grateful, but they would much rather have had all the boys home in Alabama. The last time the entire family had been together was a date etched on Sleatie’s memory: 10 November 1939. Now, the date 7 December 1941 would also be indelible.9
A Marine and a Bluejacket
“Dear Mom,” Marine Private First Class Gordon E. Shive wrote, “Tomorrow is Malcolm’s birthday so I guess we will go into town and celebrate in style.” Several days earlier, Gordon’s younger brother had surprised him by reporting for duty on board the Arizona. “It sure does seem good to have him around again,” Gordon told his mother.10
The Shive boys had experienced their share of turmoil growing up in Laguna Beach, California. They delighted as barefooted beach bums, but their father died at 50 of a brain tumor and their mother, Lois, remarried. Gordon and Malcolm were into their teens, and they clashed with this new male in the household.
Gordon escaped first. He tried college but dropped out during his freshman year to join the Marine Corps. “Dearest Mother,” Gordon cabled Lois from boot camp on Mothers’ Day 1940, “Wherever I am and whatever I do you are always foremost in my thoughts.”11
Having lettered in football, Gordon was hard and lean and took to the Marine lifestyle right away. He was good at it, because only the best were assigned to Marine detachments on board battleships. Gordon put his shoulders into the Arizona’s Marine rowing team and reported to his mother that the Marines in the detachment were “all swell fellows.”
Malcolm Shive lacked Gordon’s physique but found his own escape by attending radio school. A month after he turned 17, Lois signed the papers for him to enlist in the Navy, and his radio experience gave him a leg up in getting his rating as a radioman third class. After his 18th birthday celebration with Gordon, Malcolm didn’t party ashore. Having grown up with little money, both brothers saved every penny, and each had $10 per month automatically sent to their mother.12
The Shive brothers were also sweet on girls back home. Twenty-year-old Gordon’s relationship with Marge Balfour, two years his junior, seemed serious, but their correspondence reveals the subtle innuendoes that have affected many a long-distance relationship. By the time Malcolm reported on board the Arizona—perhaps with fresh intelligence from the home front—there had been an uncomfortable silence from Marge. “What’s the matter, am I poison?” Gordon asked. Then, he got to the heart of the matter: “I have heard that you and Harry had ideas of getting hitched.”13 Marge’s response has been lost, but it set Gordon straight. “Doggone, was I glad to hear from you,” Gordon wrote back. “I thought that you were on the outs—but I see that I was badly mistaken.”14
Fearing the worst after the attack, Lois Shive Westgate sent Gordon a birthday card for what would have been his 21st birthday on 10 January 1942: “Today is a great day, your 21st birthday and wherever you are spending it, I hope you are well and happy. Mother.” The card was eventually returned to her marked “Unclaimed.”15
Toward the end of January, Lois received the dreaded confirmation—not just one son lost but both. Lois broke the news to their younger brother, Robert, and he cried for hours. Gordon’s body was found floating in the harbor and eventually buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. Malcolm lies entombed with his shipmates. Eleven-year-old Robert took it personally and tried to enlist. His mother didn’t try to stop him, knowing that kind but firm recruiters would. The thing Robert remembered most was that his mother’s hair turned gray almost overnight. She was 41. “Eventually,” Robert recalled, “she just stopped talking about them.”16
A Pair of Survivors
In the fall of 1940, approaching age 25, Russell Walter Warriner enlisted in search of a steady income. He saw the Navy, he later recalled, “as a way of staying alive.” Prior to shipping out, Russ met a girl at Turner Hall, a gathering place for German-speaking Swiss immigrants in south-central Wisconsin. A brunette with blue-gray eyes, Elsa Schild was a “turner”—German for gymnast—who had come to the United States as a little girl. By the time Russ marched up the Arizona’s gangplank on 9 December 1940, he and Elsa, almost five years his junior, had an understanding.
The following spring, Russ’s younger brother, Kenneth, got his mother’s permission to join him. Ken reported to the Arizona shortly after she arrived at Pearl Harbor. Russ and Ken Warriner would be the only set of brothers assigned to the battleship to both survive the attack.
That Sunday morning, Ken was in San Diego on temporary duty at Fleet Signal School when Russ sat down to breakfast with his shipmates. When the general quarters alarm sounded, Russ attempted to reach his post, but an explosion blew him off a ladder and onto the deck. He landed face first, and although he cringed at reliving it, Russ always remembered that the heat was like landing in a frying pan.
Before Russ left Wisconsin, Elsa had had a terrible vision. Russ was on fire and picking pieces of steel out of his body. Now, this was as close to that dream as he could possibly get, and it was reality. Another explosion rocked the ship, and the next thing Russ knew, he was in the water surrounded by burning oil.
Russ made an effort to swim toward shore, but it was no use. Just as he went under, an oily hand reached out and grabbed at his tattered clothes. Russ wasn’t certain whether the specter was a shipmate or someone off another ship, but the apparition kept ahold and paddled until they were both near shore. Russ never knew who he was or whether he made it, too.
When Russ awoke, about the only thing he had left was his Hamilton watch. Most of his clothes had been burned to shreds. The watch, minus all but a shred of its band, had been molded to his wrist by the heat. With his hands badly burned and burns over much of his body, Russ eventually was transferred to Great Lakes Naval Hospital. Doctors shook their heads and wanted to amputate, but Russ was adamant. His brother Rudi arrived to become his advocate and so, too, did Elsa. After numerous skin graft operations, Russ received his medical discharge on 7 July 1942 and married Elsa two months later. They had a daughter and a son and spent 56 years together before Russ’s death in 1998.
The toll of that December day remained with them always. Russ tuned pianos for years, but Elsa was the primary breadwinner. Before diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder, Russ suffered bouts of anxiety. At other times, he would simply sit by himself and stare. A car backfiring was apt to send him jumping over the couch. Elsa usually was there to calm him; sometimes, she had to restrain him physically. Years later, their grandchildren would remember being told to play quietly “because of grandpa’s nerves.” Russell Walter Warriner Jr. still has his dad’s Hamilton watch.
1. Edward “Bud” Heidt to Donna Streur, 29 November 1941, Streur Family Papers.
2. Wesley Heidt to Genevieve Dunlap, 22 November 1941, quoted in Laura Orr, “Pearl Harbor Experiences,” unpublished manuscript, Hampton Roads Navy Museum.
3. Clara Morse Diary, 7 December 1954, Clara May Dyer Morse Collection (#453), History Colorado, Denver, Colorado.
4. Wesley Becker to Bob and Freda Becker, 13 October 1941, Becker Family Collection.
5. Marvin Becker to Willard Hansen, 25 November 1941, Becker Family Collection.
6. KMBC News, December 1991, Becker Family Papers.
7. Shawnee Mission Post, 6 December 2013.
8. Fort Payne Journal, 15 November 1939.
9. Julia D. Brown, ed., A History of World War II Veterans from DeKalb County, Alabama (Fort Payne, Alabama: Landmarks of DeKalb County, 2008).
10. Gordon E. Shive to Lois Shive Westgate, 30 October 1941, Shive Family Collection.
11. Telegram, Gordon E. Shive to Lois Shive Westgate, May 1940, Shive Family Collection.
12. Gordon E. Shive to Lois Shive Westgate, 31 March 1941, Shive Family Collection.
13. Gordon E. Shive to Marge Balfour, 2 November 1941, Shive Family Collection.
14. Shive to Balfour, 26 November 1941, Shive Family Collection.
15. Lois Shive Westgate to Gordon E. Shive, 10 January 1942, Shive Family Collection.
16. Amy Wilson and Andy Alison, “The Brothers,” Orange County Register, 20 May 2001.