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Health & Fitness

South Nyack Man Died in Pearl Harbor Attack

The short story of a young boy from Nyack lost in the attack on Pearl Harbor

The Battleship Arizona was the largest of the huge battleships in the Navy's Pacific fleet. On Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941, she was anchored off the Island of Oahu in the paradise of her homeport of Pearl Harbor, along many other ships in the United States Pacific fleet.   

At 7:55 a.m., the first torpedo in the assault on Pearl Harbor hit the USS Raleigh, breaking the peaceful morning. Battleship Row along Ford Island was hit at 7:57 a.m. by one of Lt. Cmdr. Murata's torpedoes.

When the first wave of Japanese airplanes swooped down on battleship row, no one was very concerned—many men on the ground or in ships thought they were American aircraft. Even when the first bombs began hitting water, some kind of practice drill was more believable than the truth—that the Pacific Island was under attack from a country 4,000 miles away.

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But when American airplanes parked on the runways at Ford Island and nearby Hanover began exploding where they sat, and balls of fire mushroomed across the skies from the Battleships Utah and Raleigh on the northwest side of Ford Island—and as flaming oil poured from the ruptured sides of the Oklahoma and West Virginia on battleship row—all doubts were about a drill occurring vanished. Within seconds, these men knew Pearl Harbor was under attack. They knew because of the screaming roar of the Japanese dive-bombers swooping down on the Arizona as close as twenty feet above the decks; the USS Arizona quivered under the impact.

Frantically, sailors aboard manned their guns while the bombs crashed on deck and the Japanese zeros strafed the decks. The running sailors fired back
with their machine guns.

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At 8:10 a.m., a Japanese Type 97 Attack Bomber dropped a bomb striking the Arizona between the No. 1 and No. 2 turret. The bomb was a converted armor piercing artillery shell that penetrated the Arizona’s decks and exploded amid a million-and-a-half pounds of gunpowder in the forward magazine. The battleship itself was broken in half; the Arizona was beyond salvation.

The order was given to abandon ship. Fires burned all about what few survivors remained. Calmly and deliberately, the wounded were loaded on lifeboats to ferry them ashore. Less than 300 of the ship's crew survived, most of them wounded and many burned beyond recognition. As they looked back, the Arizona finally slipped beneath the sea, taking with it the bodies of 1,177 of their shipmates. The once majestic Battleship Arizona sank to the bottom of the harbor.

You can watch the horrors of the battle here.

In the shopping center of Nyack, it was a quiet Sunday in 1941. After church, many Nyackers were visiting friends or relatives for dinner or doing some early Christmas Shopping. Some listened to the radio enjoying holiday music when their programs were interrupted with news. Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor. Nyackers were glued to their radios as news came that 2,433 sailors, soldiers and Marines were killed. They were shocked to hear about the 1,177 sailors who were
entombed in the Battleship Arizona.

They were stunned to learn among the men of the Arizona was Deane Lundy Ross of South Nyack. Ross was Second Class Seaman who never made it out the below decks damage. This Wednesday, we pause to remember Pearl Harbor and guys like our neighbor Deane Ross.

ONE THOUSAND, ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SEVEN men rest at the bottom of the harbor encased in the Arizona's rusty hull. In the United States Navy's history, there has never been a ship that has taken so many of its crew down with her.

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