CPL Frederick Eugene Delong

Frederick Eugene DeLong was born May 12, 1912, at Cridersville in northwest Ohio. His father, Frank DeLong, was a laborer and his mother, Emma Freyman DeLong, a homemaker.

The son graduated from Lima High School in 1930. His father was 69 when he died in 1934.

Frederick DeLong did clerical work for a pipeline business before he enlisted in the Marines on July 17, 1939. He was a corporal on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

Mr. DeLong was “an expert auditor and accountant,” the Lima News said in reporting his death. He’d been informally told he would become a math instructor at a Marine school on the mainland in early 1942, the newspaper reported.

His body was among the few recovered from the battleship, on which 1,177 sailors and marines died. He is buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii.

American Legion Post 647 in Cridersville, now closed, was named in his honor.

Sources: the Lima (Ohio) News; cemetery marker; Census; Marine photo. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.