b. 10/09/1921 Springfield, Ohio. d. 07/12/1941 Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
DATE OF MOH ACTION: 07/12/1941 Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
James R Ward MOH
Ward was born September 10, 1921, in Springfield, Ohio, to parents Howard and Nancy Ward. He had a sister named Marjorie.
As a teen, Ward, who went by the nickname Dick, did odd jobs for his neighbors to earn some cash. He played football and the trumpet, but his real love was baseball. After graduating high school in 1939, Ward took a factory job before landing a minor league baseball contract with the Shelby Colonels out of North Carolina. However, the gig only lasted a month before he was replaced. Ward then worked at a steel mill for a time before enlisting in the Navy on Nov. 25, 1940.
After basic training, Ward was sent to serve on the USS Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii. Since baseball was a huge pastime for service members, he was able to join the ship’s team. Ward helped them win the Pacific Fleet championship, and he was even named top batter. Unfortunately, Ward would not live to see beyond the opening moments of the United States’ entry into World War II.
In the early morning hours of Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Oahu, surprising installations all over the island. The Pacific Fleet’s ships that were moored at Pearl Harbor’s Ford Island took the brunt of the assault, including the Oklahoma. In the first few minutes of the attack, the ship was hit by as many as nine aerial torpedoes, which ripped open more than 250 feet of hull on the ship’s port side. The massive amount of damage caused the Oklahoma to roll over and sink in less than 20 minutes.
Ward was in one of the ship’s turrets, which lost electricity immediately, leaving him and his fellow sailors in darkness. According to the Dayton Daily News, Ward was the only one in that turret with a flashlight.
When the order was given to abandon ship, Ward stayed in his turret, using the flashlight to allow the remainder of the crew to see to escape. While many of them made it out of the turret, Ward did not. At 20 years old, he sacrificed his own life for the lives of his fellow sailors. All told, the Oklahoma lost 429 men that day. Thirty-two men who had been trapped inside its upturned hull were rescued days later. In the aftermath of the attacks, it took a while for official death notices to go out. According to the Dayton Daily News, Ward’s parents didn’t officially learn of his death until Feb. 20, 1942.
Despite the chaos of that fateful day, Ward’s valor didn’t go unnoticed. He was quickly nominated for the Medal of Honor, which was mailed to his parents in Springfield in March 1942, along with a letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Navy Secretary Frank Knox. In 1943, the capsized Oklahoma was rolled upright and raised in one of the salvage profession’s greatest undertakings, naval historians said. Throughout the war, Navy personnel worked to recover the remains of the men who died inside the ship and bury them in temporary Hawaiian cemeteries.
After the war, the American Graves Registration Service was created to carry out a new mission — to identify and recover our fallen service members from around the globe. AGRS members disinterred the remains of the men from the Oklahoma and transferred them to an Army laboratory, which confirmed the identities of 35 men at that time. The rest of the remains were buried in plots at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu. By 1949, a military board classified those who hadn’t been identified as “nonrecoverable,” including Ward.
Nearly a lifetime went by before that changed.
In 2015, investigators — now with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency — exhumed the comingled remains of the buried unknown men from the Oklahoma to run tests using dental, anthropological and mitochondrial DNA analysis in the hope of identifying them. The agency compared those findings to DNA samples that had been provided years earlier by the 394 families of those who were never identified from the Oklahoma.
On Aug. 19, 2021, the DPAA announced it had accounted for Ward’s remains. He was interred in Arlington National Cemetery in 2023 — a decision that was made by Richard Ward Hanna, his nephew and namesake. Hanna, who lives in Gainesville, Florida, said his family didn’t talk about Ward much while he grew up, but he knows how incredibly respected the fallen sailor is in his hometown of Springfield.
MOH CITATION:
For conspicuous devotion to duty, extraordinary courage, and complete disregard of his life, above and beyond the call of duty, during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces on 7 December 1941. When it was seen that the U.S.S. Oklahoma was going to capsize and the order was given to abandon ship, Ward remained in a turret holding a flashlight so the remainder of the turret crew could see to escape, thereby sacrificing his own life.
BURIAL LOCATION: ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY, ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA.
SECTION 81, GRAVE 1560.
LOCATION OF MEDAL: FAMILY.
