- Rank:
- Branch:
- Home Town:
- Date Of Birth:
- Disposition:
- Family DNA on File:
S2c Howard Alton Bowman
Many new sailors on the U.S.S. Arizona were subjected to one hot, dirty, unending task — cleaning her wood decks. They not only washed them, they used bricks and sand to grind them spotless.
“I believe what I’ve heard, that a person in white clothes can lay on the deck and never get dirty,” Howard Alton Bowman wrote home. “I am a top-sideman and do I know how to scrub decks.”
Mr. Bowman enlisted in the Navy on Oct. 15, 1940, and was a seaman second class when he was killed on Dec. 7, 1941, in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
He was born Sept. 29, 1919 in Lang, Saskatchewan, Canada but moved to Coon Rapids, Iowa, about two years later. His father, Dennis R. Bowman, was a retired farmer by the time the 1940 Census was conducted and his mother, Florence A. Tuel Bowman, a homemaker. When the father became a U.S. citizen in 1927, Howard did as well as his minor child.
Mr. Bowman, known as Howdy, graduated from the local high school in 1939. He played football and baseball and sang in the boys glee club and quartet and in the mixed chorus.
A memorial service for him was held in January 1942 at the Methodist church in Coon Rapids.
That same month his mother wrote to the Navy asking if his body could be recovered. She said he could be identified by a large scar on his right knee and a ring on his left hand.
“God only knows how I would like to go there to do something to find his body,” the letter said. “It is wrecking my life, am so grief stricken to have his body found.”
The Navy wrote back in February 1942 saying his body could not be recovered.
Sources: American Legion Commander Martin Paulsen’s 2009 Memorial Day speech, as published in the Coon Rapids Enterprise; the Daily Times Herald of Carroll, Iowa; Navy enlistment records and muster roll; Census; Saskatchewan birth index. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.