Twelve days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the newspaper in Nevada, Missouri — 85 miles south of Kansas City — reported that Alice Wells was “suffering under the terrible suspense of not knowing whether her two fine boys have made the supreme sacrifice for their country or whether they escaped from the inferno in Pearl Harbor.”

Two days later, on Dec. 21, 1941, the Navy notified Mrs. Wells that William Bennett Wells was among the missing on the U.S.S. Arizona. The note didn’t mention the fate of his older brother, Raymond Virgil Wells Jr. It wasn’t until January that she learned that Raymond, too, was dead on the battleship.

The brothers were seamen first class.

Their lives had been difficult. Their father, Raymond Virgil Wells Sr., an Army veteran of World War I, was sentenced to a year in prison in 1929 for vehicle theft and liquor possession. In 1934 he was acquitted of murdering a woman. He was arrested again within months and sentenced to 15 years for holding up a local doctor and stealing his new car.

Alice Paul Wells, a homemaker, was left to raise their five sons and newborn daughter during the depths of the Great Depression.

Raymond Jr. was born March 31,1919 in Nevada, Missouri, where his mother was born and raised. He enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era federal jobs program, in 1935 and served two years at Co. 4776 in Monticello, Utah.

The CCC, as it was known, 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.

William, the second oldest, was born July 2, 1920 in Nevada, Missouri. William delivered newspapers and also served two years in the CCC, in Co. 1712 at Kaiser, Missouri. That company helped develop Lake of the Ozarks.

Both brothers attended high school in Nevada, a town of about 8,000.

Raymond Jr. enlisted in the Navy on Jan. 7, 1938, and went aboard the Arizona that April. William enlisted on Feb. 13, 1940, and joined his brother on the battleship that June.

Raymond Jr. landed in some trouble in the Navy. He pleaded guilty at a summary court martial in June 1941 to taking a Pontiac car he didn’t own. He was sentenced to a month of confinement and lost pay  of $27 a month for four months, later reduced to two months. That was nearly his entire monthly paycheck.

All in all, it appears he was a good young man. One of his enlistment references was the local police chief.

A month after the brothers died the state director of the Missouri Selective Service System wrote to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox that there were “no finer or better boys in Nevada” than the Wells brothers. He said that their mother was “in almost destitute circumstances” and he hoped any money she was entitled as a death benefit could be “speeded up.”

Their brothers also served in the military during World War II. Robert was in the CCC and then in the Navy. Richard served in the Army Air Forces and Charles in the Navy. A sister was the youngest sibling. In honor of his brother, Charles named his son William.

William and Raymond Wells were honored at a memorial service at Centenary Methodist Church in Fort Scott, Kansas in February 1942.

Sources: The Fort Scott (Kansas) Herald; The Southwest Mail and The Weekly Post of Nevada, Missouri; the Joplin (Missouri) Globe; The Chillicothe (Missouri) Constitution-Tribune; the St. Louis (Missouri) Post-Dispatch; the Jefferson City (Missouri) Post-Tribune; application for military interment; grave markers; Census; Navy enlistment records and muster rolls; Nevada High yearbook. Thanks to a great niece, Kristin Wells, for the photographs, which show Raymond on the left and William on the right. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.