McClung, Harvey Manford, ENS

Ensign Harvey McClung was Killed in Action on December 7, 1941, during the attack on Pearl Harbor.  He was stationed aboard the USS Arizona BB39.

Service number: 101797

Harvey Manford McClung enlisted in the U. S. Navy in September 1940, three months after the death of his father, a retired Presbyterian minister.  Harvey was born on February 17, 1918, in Hamden, New York.  He graduated from New Florence High School in Pennsylvania.  His father served in the Spanish-American Was as a private in the 6th Ohio Volunteer Infantry.

Harvey McClung had been living with his parents, Nathan and Anna, in New Florence, Pennsylvania.  He had a degree from Geneva college, a Christian school in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, but like so many people during the Depression, had trouble finding work.  The April 1940 Census states he had been unemployed for 43 weeks.

Harvey McClung earned an ensign’s commission in the Naval Reserve in June 1941 after attending accelerated midshipmen training at Northwestern University.  Ensign (ENS) Harvey McClung, Service # O-101797, was assigned to the battleship USS Arizona where he was an assistant communications officer on the flagship staff of Rear Admiral Isaac “Cap” Kidd, commander of Battleship Division 1.

ENS McClung was aboard the USS Arizona on December 7, 1941, when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  ENS McClung’s battle station was Flag Radar Plot on the third deck of the superstructure.  The ensign was thus just behind the top of the conning tower and the No. 2 turret where the forward magazines exploded, destroying the ship.

At the onset of the December 7, 1941, attack, the battleship USS 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 8:00 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 an 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.

ENS Harvey Manford McClung is listed as Missing in Action or Buried at Sea.  He is listed on the “Courts of the Missing” at the Honolulu Memorial and remembered at the USS Arizona Memorial; both are in Honolulu, Honolulu County, Hawaii.   He was awarded the Purple Heart posthumously after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

This information was researched and written on behalf of the USS Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.

SOURCES:
New Castle News of New Castle, Pennsylvania
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Census Records
Death Certificate
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania World War II Veterans’ Compensation Bureau
Photograph provided by the U. S. Navy
https://pearlharbor.org/facts-uss-arizona-bb-39/
http://www.ibiblio.org/phha/arizona/history.html#pearlharbor