How USS Arizona Marine Frank Stevenson Finally Returned Home After Pearl Harbor

Nearly six years after he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Frank Jake Stevenson returned to the tiny Kansas town where he was born.

Mr. Stevenson was a Marine gunnery private first class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he died on Dec. 7, 1941. The bodies of most of the 1,177 men killed on the battleship were never recovered. Those that were – whether identified or not – were buried in Hawaii for the duration of the war.

Afterward, the government gave families of 280,000 men and women buried in foreign lands during World War II a choice: Have their loved ones brought home or buried in American cemeteries overseas. Or, in the case of men buried in Hawaii, to keep them there.

The first ship bound for the United States left Pearl Harbor on Sept. 30, 1947, carrying 3,029 bodies of men killed in Hawaii and elsewhere in the Pacific, China, Indian and Myanmar. The bodies of at least 12 Arizona fallen were aboard the Army transport, the Honda Knot.

It pulled into San Francisco at noon on Oct. 10 and was met by a crowd of 20,000, including many Gold Star mothers. The San Francisco News reported that people openly wept. Flags on public buildings across the country flew at half-staff, including at the U.S. Capitol.

Over the next few days most of the coffins left the West Coast by train, each body accompanied by a military man from the same service and of at least equal rank. Frank Stevenson’s arrived at Kansas City, where a ceremony was held at the Liberty Memorial. Kansas Gov. Frank Carlson placed a wreath on Mr. Stevenson’s casket and his widowed mother, Myrtle, was chosen as the representative of all Gold Star mothers from Kansas.

Another train carried Mr. Stevenson the last hundred miles to Waterville, a town of about 700 in far northeast Kansas. It was met by members of the American Legion.

Frank, who was born there on Nov. 16, 1921, is buried at Riverside Cemetery, as are his parents.

What came to be known as the “Return of the Dead” from World War II officially concluded on Dec. 31, 1951. But work continues even now, of course. The mission of Operation 85 is to identify the 85 or more so men whose bodies were recovered from the Arizona but not identified and still remain in Hawaii.  Each of their families, too, should choose their final resting place.

The other U.S.S. Arizona men returned on that first funeral ship in 1947 include:

– Walter Koch, honored at a service at St. Olaf Lutheran Church and buried at Devils Lake, North Dakota.

– Eugene L. Katt, buried at Oak Hill Memorial Park in San Jose, California.

– John Edmund French, buried at Arlington National Cemetery alongside his wife, who died in 1945.

– Arthur Albert Huys, buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Goshen, Indiana.

– Lawrence D. Anderson, remembered at a requiem Mass at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Waukon, Iowa, and then buried at Mt. Olivet Cemetery. All of the small town’s businesses closed for the service.

– Arthur L. Coulter, honored at a service at Pond Creek Methodist Church in Hawley, Oklahoma, and then buried at the town cemetery in a service assisted by local posts of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars.

– Charles Elijah Swisher, buried at Loma Vista Cemetery in Fullerton, California, in a service organized by members of the VFW post named in his honor.

– Claude Albert Clemmens, buried at the cemetery in Talala, Oklahoma, where his parents are also buried. His mother died when Claude was three and his father when he was 13.

– Leroy Howell, remembered  at a service at First Christian Church in Gas City, Indiana, and buried there at Riverside Cemetery.

– Warren Joseph Sherrill, buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Corpus Christi, Texas, alongside his brother, Koren, a Coast Guardsman who died of a brain tumor in 1944. Koren joined the military five days after Warren was killed at Pearl Harbor/

– David Paul Jackson Jr., whose funeral was held at the Methodist Church and his body buried at Jackson Cemetery.

Author’s note: On this Memorial Day many Americans remember family killed at war. I write this post in honor of my great uncle John Buel, a B-17 Army Air Force aviator shot down in 1944. He is buried at the American Cemetery in Ardennes, Belgium.