Four local soldiers among those lost with USS Oklahoma

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Nine torpedoes blasted open the USS Oklahoma on Dec. 7, 1941, sinking the 600-foot-long battleship and leaving a gaping hole in the community of Woodland.

Three of the town’s native sons died on the Oklahoma, which was part of the U.S. fleet attacked at Pearl Harbor.

For 74 years, the remains of those men and one Longview sailor have rested in communal graves with the bones of 388 other Navy men and Marines who died aboard the ship. A memorial denotes their names, but the graves are simply marked as “unknowns.”

Because of an effort by the Navy to identify the men through DNA, the families of Daryle Artley, Francis “Ham” Dick and Merle Smith and that of Longview’s James Norman Phipps might have the chance to either bring their relatives home for burial or inter them in their own gravesites in Hawaii.

The notion brings hope to those closest to these men, including Mary Lou (Dick) Jones of Seattle, whose brother, Francis Dick, was on the Oklahoma. Jones was 12 years old when the attack on Pearl Harbor took her brother’s life.

“(Many) of the boys who graduated from Woodland that one year joined the service,” she said. “A bunch from Woodland were on the Oklahoma. It was quite a tragedy for our town and was all over the newspapers.”

Dick, a musician in his hometown and aboard the Oklahoma, was popular among his schoolmates and “was sort of the favorite in the family,” Jones recalled. His mother, Lela, lived to be 99, and she mourned her son until the day she died in 1998, Jones said.

“He was her firstborn. She was devastated,” said Jones, 86. “She never was the same after we lost him.”

The late Richard “Swede” Artley also felt Dick’s death deeply. Although not blood-related, he considered Francis Dick a cousin. On the day of the Japanese attack, he lost Dick and his own older brother, Daryle Artley. Swede Artley came close to losing his own life on the Oklahoma. He was one of 32 men who were cut out out of the bowels of the sinking, capsized ship.

His daughter-in-law, Jennifer Artley of Grangeville, Idaho, said Artley didn’t talk much about the brother he lost in attack. After recovering from a leg injury, he returned to Pearl Harbor, looking for his brother and friend, hoping that they had been rescued.

It was a futile hope.

“I remember one of his letters to his parents. He told them that there’s so many others in the same boat as us. So many people who have lost people,’” Jennifer Artley recalled.

The four Cowlitz County men are a small percentage of the total of 429 sailors who died on the Oklahoma, but Joe Todd of Bartlesville, Okla., is familiar with their names.

Besides authoring a book about the ship, “USS Oklahoma: Remembrance of a Great Lady,” Todd also runs the USS Oklahoma Survivors Association website and has developed a multimedia presentation on the ship and its tragic end. His involvement began while working as an oral historian with the Oklahoma State Historical Society. After interviewing a survivor who was living in Oklahoma, he began attending ship reunions so be could talk to crewmembers.

The bond among shipmates is a strong one, Todd said. At get-togethers, he learned many survivors were disturbed that their fellow sailors were in anonymous graves. Paul Goodyear, who had been the head of the survivor’s association prior to his death earlier this year, told Todd, “They are not unknown. I knew these guys.”

Goodyear pushed the Navy and worked with senators from his home state of Oklahoma to make an attempt to identify the men.

“He always hit a brick wall,” Todd said.

Recently, the barrier against identification has started to crumble.

Normandee Nelson of Newport, Ore., and other family members had given DNA three years ago to help identify her uncle James Norman Phipps, Longview’s Oklahoma casualty. That was about the time that the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command floated a proposal to dig up the caskets of unknowns from the Oklahoma to begin making identifications. Only 41 of the 429 men were positively identified and buried in individual graves in the months and years following the attack. The rest of the remains — organized by bone type because skeltons were all that remained after two years in salt water — were buried in 62 caskets in 46 grave sites.

Although DNA was collected, the project remained in limbo as the Department of Defense, the Army, the Navy and the Veteran’s Administration failed to reach consensus on how to move forward. A year ago, Normandee Nelson received a letter from the Navy that dashed their hopes.

“They said they were not going to pursue the project any more,” she said.

But in April of this year, Robert O. Work, the deputy secretary of defense, gave the green light for the caskets to be dug up and the identification project to move forward.

Lt. Col. Joe Sowers, Department of Defense spokesperson, explained: “Science caught up, with newer forensic tools and techniques available for the identification effort.”

Plus, he said, with further medical information provided by relatives of the missing, “we now feel we have the capability to get a high percentage of identifications.”

The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command began calling families who had given DNA samples, letting them know that their relatives were being exhumed. Digging up the remains will take about six months, but it may be five years before all the remains are identified, Sowers said. Neither he nor other Navy representatives could say how much the effort will cost.

The family members of the local men said they look forward to being able to give their loved ones the recognition they deserve for their sacrifice.

Greg Smith of Longview, nephew of Woodland casualty Merle A. Smith, didn’t know his uncle. But he thinks his father, the late Ralph Smith, would have supported the project.

“If not bring them back to the mainland, at least give them individual plots, named plots. They deserve that,” he said.

Nelson said her family is excited at the prospect, but unsure of where Phipps’ final resting place would be if they can identify him.

“We were thinking about bringing him back here, but one of my other cousins said that he might want to be buried with his shipmates,” she said.

Carole Green of Vancouver was not even 3 years old when her brother, Francis “Ham” Dick, died aboard the Oklahoma. But she knows that her mother would have loved being able to lay her son to rest in his own grave.

“If Momma were alive … it would be closure for her,” Green said. “She never — not until she had Alzheimer’s very bad — did not remember him. And she continued to mourn his loss. It was terrible.”
Contact Daily News reporter Brenda McCorkle at 360-577-2515 or bmccorkle@tdn.com.