John Anthony Lipple grew up poor and applied to the Navy a few months after his 1935 graduation from Patton High School in Cambria County, Pennsylvania.

He formally enlisted on April 3, 1936 and was a shipfitter and petty officer first class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

Years later his youngest brother, Joe, recalled that “John was like just about every other guy in those days. He loved his country… but he was there because he was trying to make his way in the world.”

Both Joe and another brother, Paul, also served in the Navy during World War II and survived.

Paul was at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, on a destroyer, the Reid. It was berthed for repair about 4,400 feet north of the Arizona but the U.S.S. Solace, a large hospital ship, and Ford Island blocked much of his view of battleship row. About half an hour after the second wave of the Japanese attack, the Reid managed to get underway and headed to open water. Paul left Pearl Harbor without knowing that John was dead on the Arizona. He even wrote to their mother, Caroline, asking whether she’d heard from John.

John’s was born Aug. 10, 1916 in Logan township to Anthony Lipple, a machinist, and Caroline O’Connor Lipple, a homemaker. John worked as a boy, picking berries and hunting for ginseng. He’d dry it and sell the roots. “Nobody had any money,” brother Joe recalled of their boyhood in central Pennsylvania.

John Lipple Post 4315 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars was established in 1945 in Ashville about 9 miles southeast of Patton. The post created a documentary film about him and showed it for the first time on Dec. 7, 2012. There is a cenotaph in his memory at Saint Thomas Cemetery in Ashville. A requiem mass was said for him at the church in late December 1941.

Sources: The Altoona (Pennsylvania) Mirror; The Altoona Tribune; The Tribune Democrat of Johnstown, Pennsylvania; Census; Navy enlistment records and muster rolls; U.S. Veterans Administration; Defense Department; U.S.S. Reid Action Report on the Pearl Harbor attack. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona. Note: John’s birth certificate says he was born Aug. 10, 1916. It was recorded within two weeks of his birth. However, when he applied to the Navy and when he enlisted he said he was born Aug. 9, 1917. After the war, his father submitted a document saying John was born Oct. 9, 1916.