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Casualty Info
Home Town North Andover, MA
Last Address 3711 47th St San Diego, CA (Wife~Mary Margaret Nichols-Aplin)
Casualty Date Dec 07, 1941
Cause KIA-Killed in Action
Reason Other Explosive Device
Location Hawaii
Conflict World War II
Location of Interment USS ARIZONA (BB-39) - Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
Wall/Plot Coordinates Entombed in the Hull of the Arizona
Chief Petty Officer James Aplin was Killed in Action on December 7, 1941, during the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was stationed aboard the USS Arizona BB39.
Comments/Citation:
James Raymond Aplin was born in North Andover, Massachusetts on April 22, 1904, about a year after his mother, Charlotte Annie, a native of Ireland crossed the Atlantic from England with his then infant sister, Beatrice, and brother, George. His father, George, arrived earlier from England, but the date isn’t clear. James was working by the time he was 15. The 1920 Census identified him as a farm helper. His father and brother were employed at a machine manufacturer and his sister at a woolen mill. His mother was a housewife.
James enlisted in the Navy in 1925. After recruit training, James served on several vessels including the U.S.S. Trenton, U.S.S. Memphis and ultimately the U.S.S. Arizona. He was a watertender, which is a crewman aboard a steam-powered ship who is responsible for tending to the fires and boilers in the ship's engine room. He had risen to the rating of chief petty officer on the U.S.S. Arizona before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
His Navy job paid well by the standards of Depression-era America. He reported $1,200 in income in 1939, while his wife Mary Margaret Nichols, a waitress he married in Los Angeles in 1934, earned $390. Their earnings totaled the 2018 equivalent of about $28,000. James Aplin’s elderly parents had moved to San Diego and were living with James and Mary when the 1940 Census was conducted. George died at age 80 just three months after his son was killed. By the time her husband was killed, Mary Aplin was working as a clerk at Consolidated Aircraft Co., a huge manufacturer of flying boats and bombers.
At the onset of the December 7, 1941 attack at Pearl Harbor, the battleship U.S.S. Arizona (BB-39) was moored at berth Fox 7 on “Battleship Row.” The repair ship Vestal (AR-4) was on the port side; and the starboard side faced the northeastern shore of Ford Island. Just before 8 am, the ship’s air raid alarm sounded and the crew was ordered to general quarters. During the attack the battleship was struck by as many as eight aerial bombs, including one 1,700 lb. armor-piercing shell which penetrated the deck near the Number 2 turret and detonated in the smokeless powder magazine, causing a “cataclysmic” explosion “which destroyed the ship forward” and ignited a fire which burned for two days. Most of the Arizona crewmen who perished in the attack died instantly during the explosion. The ship quickly sank to the bottom of the harbor along with 1,177 of the 1,512 personnel on board, representing about half the total number of Americans killed that day.
James Raymond Aplin, service number 2011373, was a chief watertender on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. James Aplin’s sacrifice is memorialized in several locations. His remains are interred at the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Hawaii and his name is inscribed on the Courts of the Missing in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific also located in Honolulu, Hawaii. A baseball field, Aplin Park, in North Andover is named in honor of James Aplin.
Sources: grave markers; Census; ship passenger list; The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, Massachusetts; the San Diego (California) Union.
This information was researched and written on behalf of the USS Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.
******** 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 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.
If you have any details, photos, or corrections for this story, please email me by clicking on my name below.
Mitzi Laughlin - Contributing Editor, Stories Behind the Stars
