ID’d at Offutt, USS Oklahoma Medal of Honor hero to be buried at Arlington

Sailors rushed to their battle stations as soon as Japanese planes started strafing and bombing Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row, eager to fight back. But within minutes, eight torpedoes had hit the Oklahoma and exploded, causing the ship to roll perilously on its side.

Seaman 1st Class James Richard “Dick” Ward, 20, of Springfield, Ohio, held the only flashlight in his part of the pitch-dark turret, illuminating the exit as his shipmates scrambled to get out.

But Ward could not escape before the ship capsized and the turret turned into a watery grave. His sacrifice was rewarded in March 1942 when his parents were presented with the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for combat valor.

For decades his remains lay in graves marked “unknown” at a military cemetery in Honolulu, commingled with those of nearly 400 shipmates who could not be identified after the ship was salvaged in 1943-44. A second effort after the war ended in failure.

Thanks to DNA technology and the efforts of anthropologists from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base, Ward’s remains have been identified — eight decades later — and will be buried with military honors Dec. 21 at Arlington National Cemetery.

“It’s hallowed ground. He definitely deserves it,” said Richard Ward Hanna of Gainesville, Florida, Ward’s nephew and closest living relative.

Following a Department of Defense directive in 2015, the accounting agency disinterred the USS Oklahoma remains from 45 grave sites at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and sent them to its new lab at Offutt. (The other DPAA lab is in Hawaii.)

The anthropologists at Offutt cataloged more than 13,000 bones and were able to identify all but 32 of the missing crewmen through DNA matches and other anthropological techniques. Ward was among the last of 362 USS Oklahoma crew members identified, in August 2021. Just this year, his relatives were briefed and burial arrangements made.

Nothing about Dick Ward’s youth marked him for greatness, except perhaps as a baseball player.

Childhood friends described him delivering newspapers and doing odd jobs for neighbors to earn money, according to a 2014 profile in the Dayton Daily News.

He fished with his father, and played football and trumpet in the band at Springfield High School. A contemporary news article said baseball was the “prime interest and major joy of his life,” according to the Daily News. He played shortstop and had a lifetime batting average of over .300 in local sandlot leagues.

“He was just like the rest of us,” Chuck Benston, a teammate, told the Daily News in 2014. “He was a good ballplayer and a nice guy.”

Ward graduated from high school in 1939, at age 17, worked in a factory, and briefly played minor league baseball. He enlisted in the Navy in 1940.

He was assigned to Oklahoma in January 1941 and batted .538 for the ship’s baseball team, which won the fleet championship, according to the Daily News.

Ward’s parents, Howard and Nancy, and his sister, Marjorie, didn’t learn of his death for more than two months after the Japanese attack. They knew nothing of his valor, how he saved his shipmates’ lives with his flashlight.

In March 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Navy Secretary Frank Knox wrote them a letter, and enclosed his Medal of Honor.

The President praised his “conspicuous devotion to duty, extraordinary courage and complete disregard of his own life, above and beyond the call of duty,” quoting the medal citation.

More honors would follow. A destroyer escort ship, the USS J. Richard Ward, was named for him, along with a Navy base in Idaho, a baseball field in Hawaii, and an American Legion post in his hometown.

Hanna, who was Marjorie’s son, said he always knew he, too, was named for his uncle, although neither she nor his grandparents spoke much about him. All three died in the 1970s. A stone has been placed in his memory near his parents’ graves in Springfield.

The family has always been really proud,” he said.

But after consulting with relatives, he chose Arlington, a national monument, for Ward’s final resting place.

“I thought it was worthy of him,” Hanna said. “He’s always been in our prayers and in our hearts.”