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F2c Roger Joseph Bergin
Roger Joseph Bergin was born Sept. 25, 1916 in tiny Goodrich, North Dakota to Austin Frederick Bergin and Marian Bickel Bergin.
The family moved by December 1918 to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada. The 1930 Census shows Roger Bergin as a lodger and laborer on a farm in Deepwater, North Dakota. He’d completed 10th grade. By August 1940 he was working driving a truck in Royal Oak, Mich.
He enlisted in the Navy on Oct. 8, 1940 and was a fireman first class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Canadian newspapers identified him as a countryman when the Navy released the first official war casualty list in May 1942. His father was separated from his mother and living in Moose Jaw at that time. The dad was also in Moose Jaw in late August 1940 when the son applied to enlist in the Navy.
At least one brother, Kenneth Joseph Bergin, served as a Canadian soldier during the war. He was captured by Germans in the fall of 1944. Russians eventually overran the camp where he was held, but his journey to freedom at the Ukrainian port of Odessa on the Black Sea was nearly as harrowing as his captivity.