He was 18 years old. Edwin Joseph O’Hara, born November 27th, 1923 in Lindsay, California.
A farm boy, his father grew oranges and wheat in the Sanwaqin Valley. Edwin was a member of the Future Farmers of America, but he didn’t want to be a farmer.
His sister Dorothy would remember it years later. Edwin wanted to see the world. He dreamed of submarines at first.
Then he heard about the Merchant Marine Cadet Corps, a program that would train young men to serve on cargo ships to see every ocean, every port.
In late 1941, Edwin O’Hara was accepted into the cadet corps. He started his training at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay.
Basic school, navigation, engineering, the fundamentals of the sea. It was hard work, long days, technical subjects.
Edwin had grown up on a farm. He knew about hard work, but this was different.
This was preparing him for a life on the ocean, for a career that would take him around the world.
He was good at it. He was eager. He wanted to learn. He was 17 years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
Everything changed. The cadet program accelerated. The country needed merchant officers. Needed them now. Edwin was assigned sea duty for training.
His first ship was the SS Maraposa, a troop transport. He signed on March 14th, 1942, but a knee infection forced him off the ship when it reached San Francisco.
Two months of training cut short by bad luck. When the infection cleared in May, Edwin was assigned to a new ship, a Liberty ship, brand new, just delivered from the Kaiser Yards, the SS Steven Hopkins.
He signed aboard on May 16th, 1942. He had just turned 18 years old. America needed ships desperately.
German yubot were sinking Allied vessels faster than anyone could build them. In the first 6 months of 1942, over 400 ships went down in the Atlantic.
The country was bleeding cargo and men into the sea, and someone had to sail those ships.
The merchant marine wasn’t the navy. It wasn’t the army. Merchant mariners were civilians technically.
They worked for private shipping companies. They didn’t wear military uniforMs. They didn’t get military pay.
But they carried everything. Think about what it takes to fight a war across an ocean.
Every bullet your father fired. Every tank that rolled across Europe. Every gallon of fuel that towered every plane in every theater of war.
Every bag of flour that fed the troops, every crate of medicine that kept them alive, every letter from home that kept them sane, all of it crossed the ocean in the holds of merchant ships, the convoys that sailed to Britain, the supply runs to North Africa, the treacherous route to Merman, where German yubot and bombers picked off ships one by one in the freezing Arctic.
Someone had to sail those ships. The men who did were called merchant mariners. They weren’t soldiers.
They weren’t sailors. Not officially. They were civilian workers doing the most dangerous job in America.
And those ships had targets painted on their halls. The men who sailed them would have the highest casualty rate of any American service in World War II, higher than the Marines, higher than the Army.
One in 26 would die. Your father might have been on a troop transport, surrounded by a thousand other soldiers crossing the Atlantic toward Europe.
He might have looked out at the convoy. Dozens of ships spread across the horizon.
Those ships were manned by merchant mariners. The guns on their decks were manned by armed guard sailors, Navy boys, most of them teenagers.
Your father watched those ships. He knew what happened when a torpedo hit. And when they came home, if they came home, America would forget they ever served.
The SS Steven Hopkins was a Liberty ship. Liberty ships were the backbone of America’s wartime merchant fleet.
Simple, functional, built fast, and built cheap. Henry Kaiser had revolutionized ship building at his Richmond, California shipyard.
Pre-fabricated sections, assembly line construction, welding instead of riveting. Workers who’d never built a ship before, women, men from farms and factories trained in weeks and put to work.
A traditional ship took a year or more to build. Kaiser’s yard could turn out a Liberty ship in weeks.
They were churning them out as fast as the steel could be welded. The ships themselves weren’t elegant.
They were ugly. Honestly, British designers had created the basic template, a simple, reliable cargo hauler with an old-fashioned steam engine.
Sailors called them ugly ducklings, but they could carry 9,000 tons of cargo. They could make 11 knots, and most importantly, they could be built faster than the yubot could sink them.
That was the whole strategy. The whole war, in some ways, came down to math.
Could America build ships faster than Germany could destroy them? Kaiser’s answer was yes. The SS Hopkins was laid down on January 2, 1942, launched April 14, delivered May 11, 4 months from Keel to Ocean, 102 days from the first steel to the final fitting.
She was named after Steven Hopkins, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from Rhode Island, a founding father, a man who pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor for a nation not yet born.
The ship that bore his name would live up to that legacy. Her captain was Paul Buck.
We don’t know much about Buck’s early life. He came from Marramac Port, Massachusetts, a small town north of Boston, a seafaring place where men had gone down to the sea and ships for generations.
What we know is what his crew remembered. Paul Buck was the kind of captain who trained his men relentlessly.
Gun drills, emergency procedures, damage control, abandoned ship protocols. Over and over, day after day, week after week, the Hopkins made her way from San Francisco to Bora Bora.
From Bora Bora to Auckland, New Zealand, from New Zealand to Melbourne, Australia, from Melbourne to Port Lincoln, from Port Lincoln to Durban, South Africa, from Durban to Cape Town.
At every leg of the journey, Captain Buck drilled his crew. Some captains relaxed when nothing was happening.
Some figured the armed guard could handle any trouble. Some didn’t want to worry the men with constant reminders of danger.
Not Paul Buck. He’d been at sea long enough to know what happened to ships that weren’t ready.
He’d heard the stories from other captains, ships torpedoed in the night, crews caught sleeping, men dying in the water because nobody had practiced the boat drills.
And he told his crew something they never forgot. If we meet a raider, Buck said, “We will fight.
I will never surrender this ship.” Some captains said things like that and didn’t mean them.
Empty words to boost morale. His crew would learn that Paul Buck meant every word.
The Steven Hopkins had a crew of about 40 merchant mariners, able seaman, engineers, stewards, deck officers.
She also carried 15 Navy armed guard, young sailors assigned to man the ship’s guns.
These armed guard sailors were mostly teenagers, 19, 20, 21 years old. They’d been through gunnery school, learned the basics of naval combat, then assigned to merchant ships to provide protection.
It wasn’t glamorous duty. It wasn’t a destroyer or a cruiser. It was a cargo ship, a slow, ungainainely target.
But those boys took their job seriously. They ran drills just like Captain Buck wanted.
They kept those guns clean and ready. And their guns weren’t much. One 4-in cannon mounted on the stern, a World War I relic, two 37 millimeter guns forward, a few machine guns.
Against a submarine, maybe they’d have a chance against a German raider, a warship disguised as a merchant vessel armed with 6-in guns and torpedo tubes, and a crew of over 300 trained naval personnel.
Those guns were barely enough to die with dignity. September 27th, 1942. The South Atlantic, about a thousand miles west of Cape Town.
The Steven Hopkins was sailing alone. No convoy, no escort. She’d delivered wheat to South Africa and was heading to Surinom to pick up boxite, the ore used to make aluminum for aircraft.
She was empty, sailing in ballast. The morning was overcast. Fog banks drifted across the water.
Visibility came and went with the rain squalls. At 9:30 a.m., third mate Walter Nyberg spotted something through the haze.
Two ships off the starboard bow less than 2 mi away. Captain Buck came to the bridge, raised his binoculars.
One ship was about their size. The other was smaller, but bristling with guns. They were traveling together, clearly in consort.
Buck didn’t like what he saw. He ordered the crew to battle stations. The two ships were the Steer and the Tunnenfells.
The Steer, the name means bull in German, was a commerce raider, one of the deadliest weapons in the German Navy’s arsenal.
She’d started life as the Cairo, a merchant vessel built by Crup in 1936. But in 1942, the German Navy had converted her into something far more dangerous.
Commerce raiders were wolf ships, hunters. They sailed alone into the vast spaces of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, far from convoys and their escorts, seeking isolated prey.
From the outside, the steer looked like an ordinary cargo ship. Fake masts and smoke stacks disguised her profile.
A painted on name and neutral flag completed the deception. But behind false deck panels hid six 5.9in guns, heavy naval artillery that could tear through a merchant ship’s hall.
She carried torpedo tubes, machine guns, anti-aircraft weapons, two sea planes for scouting. And her crew wasn’t a handful of merchant sailors.
324 men, trained German naval personnel, experienced gunners, professional sailors who had spent months hunting Allied shipping.
The steer was commanded by Capitan Sur Horlock, an aggressive officer who had already sent three Allied ships to the bottom.
The Gemstone, the Stanvac Kolkata, and the Dalhousy. The allies called her Raider J. They knew she was out there somewhere stalking the sealanes.
The Tunnenfells was her supply ship, a blockade runner that carried fuel, ammunition, food, and spare parts.
She also had machine guns that could rake the deck of any vessel that got too close.
On the morning of September 27th, 1942, the two German ships were drifting together in the South Atlantic, conducting a resupply operation.
Men were over the side scraping marine growth from the steer’s water line. Routine maintenance, nothing urgent.
They weren’t expecting company. And now, emerging from a rain squall less than 2 mi away came an American Liberty ship alone.
The Germans ran up the swastika. They dropped the panels hiding their guns. They ordered the Steven Hopkins to stop.
Captain Paul Buck had made his crew a promise. The first German shell hit the Hopkins superructure within 3 minutes of sighting.
The ship shuddered. Metal screamed. The general alarm wailed across the deck. Ford Stillson, the 32-year-old Chief steward, heard the shot pierce the hull.
He grabbed his life jacket and ran to his battle station. His job would be medical.
He set up a makeshift hospital in the officer’s mess. On the bridge, Chief Mate Richard Mochowski shouted orders.
Turn the ship. Get the stern pointed at the enemy. Give the 4-in gun a clear shot.
Present the smallest possible target. At the helm, Able Seaman George Papus spun the wheel hard over.
The Hopkins began to turn. One of the first shells killed two mariners as they stepped on deck.
Lieutenant Kenneth Willlet, commander of the armed guard, was racing aft to the stern gun when shrapnel tore into his abdomen.
He was severely wounded, bleeding badly. He kept going. Willlet reached the 4-in gun, took command.
His men were already loading, aiming, firing. Every 45 seconds, another shot. The first American shell hit the steer’s rudder.
Just like that, the very first shot from the Hopkins 4-in gun slammed into the German Raiders steering gear.
The steer couldn’t maneuver properly now. She couldn’t bring her torpedo tubes to bear. Captain Buck had positioned his ship stern on to the enemy, and that one gun, that old World War I relic, had just evened the odds.
The second shell damaged the steer’s forward guns. The third, the fourth, the fifth, punching into the German raider at the water line.
Every 45 seconds, another shot. Load, aim, fire, load, aim, fire. The gun crew worked like a machine.
Loaders musling shells into the brereech. Pointer keeping the gun trained on target. Men passing ammunition up from the magazine below.
Blood on the deck. Smoke everywhere. Shells screaming overhead. And still they fired. The Steer had six heavy guns.
The Hopkins had one. And somehow, impossibly, the Hopkins was holding her own. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Commerce raiders were designed to sink cargo ships quickly and cleanly. Overwhelming firepower, civilian crews that would surrender at the first salvo.
Quick kills, minimal risk. The Steven Hopkins wasn’t cooperating, and somehow the Hopkins was hitting back.
The Germans were pouring fire into the American ship. Shells slammed into the hull. Machine gun rounds rattled off the deck like hail.
In the forward gun tub, second mate Joseph Layman and seaman Wallace Breck fired the 37 mm guns at the smaller ship.
Round after round, a German shell hit the forward tub directly. Layman was killed. Breck was blown into the water.
He climbed into a lifeboat. Another shell hit the lifeboat, destroying it. Breck survived again.
The only man from the forward gun crew left alive. Below decks in the engine room, the black gang kept the boilers running.
That’s what they called the men who worked the engines. The black gang firemen, oilers, engineers, the men who shoveled coal, who monitored gauges, who kept the heart of the ship beating.
Kenneth Vaughn, the third assistant engineer. Michael Fitzpatrick, fireman. Andrew Signonus, Wiper. Men whose names most histories don’t remember.
They couldn’t see the battle. They were sealed in the bowels of the ship, surrounded by pipes and pressure vessels and the roar of the engines.
They could only hear the explosions above, feel the ship shutter with each impact, watch the lights flicker and die, replaced one by one with emergency lamps as bulbs shattered from the concussions.
They knew what was happening. They knew the ship was being hit. They knew men were dying on deck.
But their job was to keep the engines running full speed, maximum power. Give the captain every knot he needed to fight.
So they stayed at their posts. The telephone rang. Orders from the bridge. The engine room responded.
They were still responding when a German shell pierced the hall. The shell hit the engine room directly.
The boiler exploded. Steam roared through the compartment, superheated, scalding, deadly. The men at their posts died where they stood, killed instantly.
Some by the explosion, some by the steam, some by the shrapnel that tore through the space.
The Steven Hopkins went dead in the water. Her heart had stopped beating. At the stern gun, Lieutenant Willlet was still directing fire, still shouting orders, his uniform soaked with blood.
His gun crew was being cut down around him. A shell hit the ammunition magazine below the gun.
The explosion threw Willlet to the deck. Most of the men around him were killed instantly.
The 4-in gun fell silent. 20 minutes into the battle, Captain Buck blew the whistle.
Abandoned ship. The Steven Hopkins was sinking on fire from stem to stern. Her engine destroyed, her guns silenced.
The battle was over. Except it wasn’t. Engine cadet Edwin O’Hara emerged from below decks.
The ship was dying around him. Fires burned everywhere. The super structure was riddled with holes.
Smoke poured from a dozen wounds in the hull. He was 18 years old, a farm boy from California.
His assignment was the engine room. He had no business being near the guns. He had no training on the 4in cannon, but he’d watched during all those drills Captain Buck had run all those days at sea.
When other men might have been sleeping or playing cards, O’Hara had watched the gun crew work.
He’d memorized the sequence. Load, aim, fire. He knew what each man did. The loader who muscled the heavy shells into the brereech.
The pointer who kept the gun trained on target. The trainer who adjusted elevation. He’d never done it himself, but he’d watched.
Now he looked at the stern gun. The crew was dead. Bodies lay across the deck.
Men he’d sailed with for 4 months. Men who’d shared meals with him stood watches with him become his shipmates and his friends.
Lieutenant Willlet, bleeding, wounded, still shouting orders, was down. The last of the ammunition handlers was down.
The gun was silent. Five shells remained in the ready box. Each one weighed 91 lb.
Edwin O’Hara ran to the gun. He had to move the bodies first. Men he’d sailed with, men he knew, men who had been alive an hour ago, eating breakfast, complaining about the weather, talking about what they’d do when they got home.
Now they were dead. O’Hara moved them as gently as he could. Then he turned to the gun.
The 4in cannon was a complicated piece of machinery. It took a trained crew to operate effectively.
A loader, a pointer, a trainer, men passing ammunition. O’Hara was alone. He grabbed a shell from the ready box.
91 lb of steel and explosives. A grown man would struggle to lift it. O’Hara was 18, thin, not particularly big.
He muscled the shell into the brereech. Alone, he aimed the gun at the burning German raider.
Alone, he fired. The shell hit the steer. O’Hara didn’t pause to celebrate. He grabbed another shell, 91 lb, loaded it, aimed, fired, hit another shell, another hit.
Another, another, another. Five shells, five hits. Survivors would later say he hit the steer at the waterline with every single shot.
An untrained 18-year-old operating a heavy naval gun alone in the middle of a battle with shells exploding around him and machine gun fire raking the deck.
Five shots. Five hits. Some things can’t be explained. Some things are just courage. There are two accounts of what happened next.
Some survivors said O’Hara was killed by a shell that exploded near the gun moments after firing the last round.
Others said he was cut down by machine gun fire as he ran to help wounded men reach the lifeboats.
Either way, Edwin O’Hara, 18 years old, died on the deck of the Steven Hopkins.
He had done what he could. The steer was in ruins. 35 shells from the Steven Hopkins had found their mark.
Her rudder was destroyed, her engines crippled, fires burned across her deck. She was taking on water.
Capitan Gearlock gave the order to abandon ship. His crew set scutling charges. 2 hours after the battle began, the steer sank.
She was the only German surface warship destroyed by an American ship in the entire Second World War.
And she was sunk by a cargo vessel, a Liberty ship, a floating target with one old gun and a crew of civilians.
In his battle report submitted when the Tenfells finally reached France, Captain Gerlock claimed he had fought a heavily armed cruiser.
He couldn’t believe a merchant ship had done this to him. The Steven Hopkins sank at 10:00 a.m. Of the 57 men aboard, 42 were dead.
19 survivors made it into a single lifeboat. Second engineer George Krunk took command of the lifeboat.
19 men, one boat. They had a compass, a small canvas sail, canned water, some hardtac biscuits, a few tins of pemkin, a concentrated survival food.
Not much, not nearly enough. And 2,200 m of open ocean between them and the nearest land, the coast of Brazil.
George Kronck looked at his men. Some were badly wounded, shrapnel wounds still bleeding through bandages, burns that would need care they couldn’t provide.
Some were in shock. All of them had watched their shipmates die. He set a course for South America.
Ford Stilson, the chief steward, did what he could for the wounded. He’d set up a medical station during the battle.
Now he was the closest thing they had to a doctor. Five men were badly hurt.
Shrapnel wounds, burns, internal injuries. Stillson bathed their bandages in salt water. It was all he had.
Seaater isn’t sterile, but it’s better than nothing. He tried to keep infection away, tried to keep the men alive long enough to reach land.
The first week they rationed food and water carefully, 6 ounces per man per day.
The tropical sun beat down. Thirst was constant. The wounded needed more water than the healthy men.
Cut rations to make sure the wounded have more, Krunk ordered. The healthy men agreed they would give their share to the men who were dying.
On October 6th, 9 days out, Second Cook Eugene McDaniels died. He’d been wounded in the battle.
He held on as long as he could. They said what words they could, read from a small Bible someone had grabbed.
Then they committed his body to the sea. The ocean that had tried to kill them became Eugene McDaniel’s grave.
On the days that followed, two more men died. Firemen Deatrades and Galagates. Their wounds were too severe.
There was nothing Stilson could do, nothing anyone could do. They were buried at sea like their shipmates before them.
Somewhere in that vast expanse of the South Atlantic, they saw a third mate, Walter Nyberg.
He was in a shattered lifeboat, just pieces of a boat, really stuffed with bits of blanket and life jackets to keep it afloat.
He was alive, drifting. They tried to reach him, tried to row toward him, but the wind was against them, and they were weak, and the current pulled them apart.
Walter Nyberg drifted away into the fog. They never saw him again. Days passed. The sun rose and set.
Rose and set. Rose and set. The men grew weaker, thinner. Their lips cracked. Their skin burned and peeled.
They rationed water drop by drop. But something else happened, too. They talked to each other.
They encouraged each other. They shared what little they had. One man caught a flying fish that landed in the boat.
They divided it among the wounded first. They told stories, talked about home, made plans for what they do when they got back.
When, not if. October 27th, 1942. 31 days after the battle, the lifeboat reached the shore of Brazil near the village of Barad Duabapana.
15 men alive. They had sailed 2,200 m in an open boat. They had survived on almost nothing.
They had buried four of their shipmates at sea. And they had never given up.
A US Navy lieutenant was sent to meet them. He would later write, “They were never for one moment beaten.”
After days of being battered together on a cramped lifeboat, they were still lavishing praise on one another, helping one another.
That’s who they were. That’s who the merchant marine was. The men of the Steven Hopkins were called heroes.
The newspapers ran the story. A cargo ship, a civilian cargo ship, had sunk a German warship.
The only time in the entire war that would happen. Captain Buck received the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medalostuously.
So did Edwin O’Hara, the second cadet ever to receive the honor. The first to receive it postumously.
Lieutenant Willlet received the Navy Cross. Postumously, Chief Mate Machovsky, second mate Layman postumous distinguished service medals.
Chief Steward Ford Stilson and second engineer George Krunk distinguished service medals. They survived to receive theirs.
The ship herself was designated a gallant ship, one of the highest honors the Maritime Commission could bestow.
In the years that followed, five Liberty ships would be named for the crew, the Steven Hopkins 2, the Paul Buck, the Edwin Joseph O’Hara, the Richard Machovsky.
A destroyer escort, the USS Kenneth M. Willlet was named for the armed guard commander who bled on the deck of a sinking ship and never stopped fighting.
At the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York, the gymnasium was named O’Hara Hall.
A bronze statue of Edwin O’Hara, shell in hand, captured in the moment of his sacrifice, stands on campus today.
But here’s what else happened. Here’s what history doesn’t always tell you. Ford Stilson came home.
George Krunk came home. The 13 other survivors came home. They’d been torpedoed, shelled, wounded.
They’d survived 31 days in an open boat. They’d watched their shipmates die. And they were told, “You’re not veterans.”
They were not eligible for the GI Bill, no college tuition, no home loans, no job training.
They could not get VA medical care for their wounds. Men with shrapnel still in their bodies, burns that scarred them for life.
They had to pay for their own treatment. They could not receive unemployment benefits while they looked for work.
They could not be buried in national cemeteries. They could not march in Veterans Day parades, not as veterans.
Anyway, the United States Merchant Marine had the highest casualty rate of any service in World War II.
Let that sink in. Nearly 4% of merchant mariners were killed. Over 9,000 men dead.
Higher than the army. Higher than the Marines, higher than the Navy. And when the war ended, when they limped home from P camps, when they climbed off hospital ships, when they walked down gang planks with wounds that would never fully heal, they were told, “You weren’t really soldiers.
You weren’t really veterans. You don’t count.” Why? Because of paperwork. Because of technicalities, because they worked for private shipping companies, because they were technically civilians, because the military didn’t want to share benefits with men who hadn’t worn the right uniforMs. There were rumors, too, ugly ones.
Some people said merchant mariners were draft dodgers, men who took dangerous sea duty to avoid the army.
That was a lie. Many mariners tried to enlist in the military and were rejected.
Bad eyesight, heart conditions, missing fingers. The merchant marine took them anyway. Some people said mariners refused to unload ships in combat zones, that they sat on their hands while soldiers did the dangerous work.
The Navy investigated that rumor and found it was completely false. Some people said mariners were overpaid and cowardly.
The casualty rate answers that charge. The rumors were lies. Every single one. Investigation after investigation cleared the merchant marine of these charges.
The Navy itself confirmed it. But the lies stuck and the benefits never came. It took 43 years.
43 years of applications denied. 43 years of legal battles. 43 years of watching shipmates die.
Old men now dying in VA hospitals that wouldn’t treat them. Buried in private cemeteries because they weren’t real veterans.
In 1988, 1988, a federal court finally ruled that the denial of veteran status was arbitrary and unfair.
43 years after the war ended, merchant mariners of World War II were granted limited veteran status.
By then, most of them were dead. The boys who sailed those ships in 1942, 1943, 1944, they were old men in 1988.
Old men with old wounds. Many had died waiting. Many more died shortly after the GI Bill that would have sent them to college.
They were too old now. The home loans that would have helped them build lives, they had already built what they could on their own.
The medical care they were finally entitled to. Too late for most of them. Edwin O’Hara’s sister, Dorothy, was still alive when this documentary was being researched.
She’d been 12 years old when her brother sailed away and never came home. “My parents were very numb,” she would say, remembering those dark days in 1942.
“Their loss was so great.” The family wasn’t even told the Hopkins had been sunk until November 1942, 2 months after Edwin died.
And then they were only told he was missing. Missing as if there was hope, as if he might still be out there.
He was 18 years old. He wanted to see the world. He saw it and then he gave his life for it.
Your father knew about the merchant marine. If your father served overseas in Europe, in Africa, in the Pacific, he crossed the ocean on a troop ship.
That troop ship was probably manned by merchant mariners. The Navy Armed Guard manned the guns.
But the men who kept the engines running, who navigated the ship, who cooked the meals and maintained the hull, they were civilians, merchant mariners.
Your father saw their ships in every port. He watched their cargo nets swing tanks and trucks and artillery pieces onto the docks.
He ate the food they delivered. He fired the ammunition they carried across submarineinfested oceans.
Every bullet, every boot, every bandage. And if your father made it home, and thank God so many did, it was a merchant ship that brought him back.
Think about that moment. The troop ship pulling into New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty coming into view, the men crowding the rails cheering, some of them crying.
The ship beneath their feet was probably manned by men who would never be called veterans.
But your father probably didn’t talk about the merchant marine much because by the time the war ended, America had already started to forget.
The victory parades didn’t include them. The GI Bill didn’t cover them. The history books barely mentioned them.
They just faded away. In 2022, 77 years after the war ended, Congress finally awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to the men of the US Merchant Marine.
A 94year-old mariner named Dave Yoho stood in Statuary Hall in the United States capital to accept it.
He was accompanied by another merchant marine veteran, 101 years old. Think about that. A man who was in his 20s during the war, still alive, still waiting to be recognized.
“We brought home the scars of war,” Yoho said, his voice steady. “But we were forgotten.”
September 27th, 1942. “A farm boy from California stood alone at a gun on the stern of a sinking ship.
Around him lay the bodies of men he’d sailed with. Behind him, the super structure was on fire.
In front of him, a German warship was still putting shells into his ship. He was 18 years old.
He had no training on that gun. He shouldn’t have been there, but everyone who should have been there was dead.
So, Edwin O’Hara picked up a 91 lb shell and he loaded it himself and he fired.
Then he did it again and again and again and again. Five shells, five hits.
Then he died on the deck of a ship named for a founding father, surrounded by his shipmates, fighting for a country that would spend the next 45 years pretending he wasn’t a veteran.
His name was Edwin Joseph O’Hara. He was 18 years old and he was one of the bravest men who ever sailed under the American flag.
Rest in peace, Cadet O’Hara. Rest in peace, Captain Buck. Rest in peace all you forgotten mariners who gave everything.
You were veterans. You were heroes. And we will not forget you.
