John Edward Smith was born June 5, 1921 in South Bend, Indiana. His father, Edward Oscar Smith, was a Navy aviation metalsmith and petty officer first class and his mother, Mildred Beulah Swygart Smith, was a homemaker.

The father was in the Navy in San Diego, California, when the mother disappeared in 1927 in Indiana. The son attended Memorial Junior High School in San Diego.

He served in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era federal jobs program.  It employed single men 18 to 25 to plant trees, build roads and trails and make other improvements to public land, forests and parks. The men lived at camps across the country and were provided a bed and three meals a day. Of their $30 monthly pay, $25 was sent to their families. He was in Co. 904 in California.

He’d completed 10th grade by the time he applied to the Navy in July 1938.

John Edward enlisted in the Navy on Nov. 16, 1938. He married Belle E. Cunradi in Yuma, Arizona, in June 1941. His ship, the U.S.S. Arizona, was in port at San Pedro, and many sailors and their fiancées traveled to Yuma because they could be married the same day with no waiting.

Less than six months later the new husband was a seaman first class on the Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

Sources: the San Diego (California) Union; the South Bend (Indiana) Tribune; Navy enlistment records and muster roll; San Diego city directory; Indiana birth record. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.