Moss, Tommy Lee, S2c

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.

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.