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Casualty Info
Home Town Christian, KY
Last Address Herdon, KY
Casualty Date Dec 07, 1941
Cause KIA-Body Not Recovered
Reason Other Explosive Device
Location Hawaii
Conflict World War II/Asiatic-Pacific Theater/Attack on Pearl Harbor
Location of Interment USS Arizona Memorial - Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
Wall/Plot Coordinates (cenotaph)
Military Service Number 2 916 091
Official Badges
Unofficial Badges
Additional Information
Last Known Activity:
Mess Attendant/2c Tommy Moss was Killed in Action on December 7, 1941, during the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was stationed aboard the USS Arizona BB39.
Comments/Citation:
MOSS, Tommy Lee MATT2/c – Service Number 2916091
When Tommy Lee Moss joined the Navy in 1939, there were just 4,000 other black personnel serving out of the 170,000 sailors in the U.S. Navy.
Tommy Lee Moss was born April 19, 1915, in Christian County, Kentucky. His mother, Lucy Carr, was a homemaker. His father, Buck Moss was a sharecropper. Tuberculosis killed their oldest son, Buck Jr., at age two in 1911. A second son, Raymond, was born about 1914. Their mother died in 1934 of chronic nephritis, a kidney disease.
Moss enlisted in the Navy on Nov. 22, 1939, at a recruiting station in Indiana. He became a mess attendant second class on the USS Arizona. Moss was African-American. The mess attendant branch was the only job open to him in the segregated Navy. Mess attendants cooked, cleaned, and performed other service jobs for the officers. The black newspspers labeled mess attendants and steward mates as the “seagoing bellhops.” Even though their enlistment contracts restricted their training and duties, mess attendants and stewards, like everyone else aboard ship, were assigned battle stations, including positions at the guns and on the bridge. Moss’ general quarters station would probably have in the below deck to help pass ammunition.
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 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.
Moss and 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.
MATT2/c Moss’ sacrifice is memorialized in several locations. He is interred on the USS 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.
By Jeff Veesenmeyer
Sources: Kentucky birth index; Census; Navy muster roll; Kentucky death records.
Findagrave.com, Fold3.com, Acenstry.com, Honor States.
World War II/Asiatic-Pacific Theater/Attack on Pearl Harbor
From Month/Year
December / 1941
To Month/Year
December / 1941
Description The attack on Pearl Harbor, also known as the Battle of Pearl Harbor, the Hawaii Operation or Operation AI by the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters, and Operation Z during planning, was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory, on the morning of December 7, 1941. The attack led to the United States' entry into World War II.
Japan intended the attack as a preventive action to keep the U.S. Pacific Fleet from interfering with military actions the Empire of Japan planned in Southeast Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States. Over the next seven hours there were coordinated Japanese attacks on the U.S.-held Philippines, Guam and Wake Island and on the British Empire in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
The attack commenced at 7:48 a.m. Hawaiian Time. The base was attacked by 353 Imperial Japanese fighter planes, bombers, and torpedo planes in two waves, launched from six aircraft carriers. All eight U.S. Navy battleships were damaged, with four sunk. All but Arizona were later raised, and six were returned to service and went on to fight in the war. The Japanese also sank or damaged three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and one minelayer. 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed; 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 others were wounded. Important base installations such as the power station, shipyard, maintenance, and fuel and torpedo storage facilities, as well as the submarine piers and headquarters building (also home of the intelligence section) were not attacked. Japanese losses were light: 29 aircraft and five midget submarines lost, and 64 servicemen killed. One Japanese sailor, Kazuo Sakamaki, was captured.
The attack came as a profound shock to the American people and led directly to the American entry into World War II in both the Pacific and European theaters. The following day, December 8, the United States declared war on Japan. Domestic support for non-interventionism, which had been fading since the Fall of France in 1940,[19] disappeared. Clandestine support of the United Kingdom (e.g., the Neutrality Patrol) was replaced by active alliance. Subsequent operations by the U.S. prompted Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to declare war on the U.S. on December 11, which was reciprocated by the U.S. the same day.
From the 1950s, several writers alleged that parties high in the U.S. and British governments knew of the attack in advance and may have let it happen (or even encouraged it) with the aim of bringing the U.S. into war. However, this advance-knowledge conspiracy theory is rejected by mainstream historians.
There were numerous historical precedents for unannounced military action by Japan. However, the lack of any formal warning, particularly while negotiations were still apparently ongoing, led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to proclaim December 7, 1941, "a date which will live in infamy". Because the attack happened without a declaration of war and without explicit warning, the attack on Pearl Harbor was judged by the Tokyo Trials to be a war crime.
