PTR2c Ralph Dueard Hicks

Ralph Dueard Hicks was born April 17, 1915 in Polk County, Missouri north of Springfield. His mother, Nelle Butcher Hicks, was a homemaker and his father, James Hicks, a farmer.

Ralph was six when his father was kicked in the abdomen by a colt and died. His mother remarried another farmer a few years later and she and her three youngest of her five children moved to nearby Walnut Grove, Missouri. Tragedy struck again when she died a few days after Ralph’s 17th birthday.

He enlisted in the Navy on Sept. 10, 1935, and was a painter and petty officer second class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

Mr. Hicks’s younger brother, James, an Army sergeant, died in a Japanese POW hell camp in the Philippines on July 30, 1942.

Sources: Census; Navy muster roll; Missouri death certificate; gravemarkers; headstone application for military veterans; various histories of the 31st Army infantry. Ancestry.com photo. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.