Bellamy, James Curtis, OS3c

This Military Service Page was created/owned by Felix Cervantes, III (Admiral Ese), BM2 

Officer's Steward/3c James Bellamy was Killed in Action on December 7, 1941, during the attack on Pearl Harbor.  He was stationed aboard the USS Arizona BB39.

 

James Curtis Bellamy was born 24 September 1917 in North Carolina. No records have been found for him except that he married Velma in 1935 while in Los Angeles, California. He enlisted in the Navy on 4 February 1936 and was aboard the USS Arizona by June as an officer’s cook.

The USS Arizona housed 1,512 officers, sailors, and Marines, one of the two largest battleships in the Navy’s fleet. She was invincible – until she was bombed by armor-piercing shells modified into bombs on 7 December 1941. Ten torpedo bombers hit the Arizona from amidships to stern and shortly after, other bombers hit the bow area. The stern-most shell ricocheted off Turret IV and penetrated the deck; the next bomb hit near the port edge, detonating the area of the anti-torpedo bulkhead. Another hit the portside near an anti-aircraft gun; the last in the vicinity of Turret II penetrating the armored deck near the magazines located in the forward section of the ship.

This last bomb caused a catastrophic explosion, venting through the sides of the ship and destroying much of the interior structure, causing the forward turrets and conning tower to collapse downward and the foremast and funnel to collapse forward, effectively tearing the ship in half and resulting in the unique silhouette of the USS Arizona memorial today. The explosion set off fierce fires that burned for two days. There was not enough of the Arizona left intact to be able to determine the exact locations of these hits. Men were being strafed as they rushed to battle stations, others were killed instantly; ships were listing, capsizing, spilling oil which congealed when it hit the water and then caught fire. The dive bombers were too low for the ships’ guns and the horizontal bombers were too high; our planes never got a chance to get off the ground as the Japanese hit them first. Of the crew, 1,177 lost their lives – approximately half the total lives lost on 7 December 1941.

Officer’s Steward Third Class James Curtis Bellamy (Service Number 2619049) is listed as Missing in Action and his remains have never been recovered. He is memorialized on the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor and his name is inscribed on a wall within the Courts of the Missing in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, located in Honolulu, Hawaii. He received a Purple Heart, a WW II Victory Medal, the American Defense Service Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, as well as a Combat Action Ribbon for his service.

SOURCES: Pearl Harbor Ghosts by Thurston Clarke; Find-a-Grave; Ancestry.com; HonorStates.org; Fold3; ussarizona.org; newspapers.org.
https://pearlharbor.org/facts-uss-arizona-bb-39/
http://www.ibiblio.org/phha/arizona/history.html#pearlharbor


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This story is part of the Stories Behind the Stars project (see https://www.storiesbehindthestars.org/). This is a national effort of volunteers to write the stories of all 400,000+ of the US WWII fallen here on Together We Served and on Fold3. Can you help write these stories? Related to this, there will be a smartphone app that will allow people to visit any war memorial or cemetery, scan the fallen person’s name and read his/her story.

Lee Braswell - Contributing Author, Stories Behind the Stars

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