Martin Anthony Gara would have turned 100 this year. He died at the age of 20, the forgotten New Mexican of Pearl Harbor.
Gara was a seaman aboard the USS Oklahoma when Japanese pilots shot nine torpedoes at the ship in the surprise attack on December 7, 1941.
The Oklahoma capsized in 10 minutes under a cloud of thick black smoke. Gara and 428 of his shipmates were killed.
Another 1,177 sailors and Marines died on the USS Arizona, which was also an easy target in Battleship Row harbor. All in all, the Japanese air strike killed 2,402 Americans and drove the United States into World War II.
The chaos and all the losses resulted in countless soldiers dying without notice. Gara was one of them.
Born in Chicago in 1921, he grew up as a child of the Great Depression. In the 1940s, jobs became scarce and Gara joined the Navy.
Its introduction took place in Illinois, a fact that over the years obscured its connections with New Mexico. At the time Gara was serving as a Navy second-class firefighter at Pearl Harbor, his mother and sister lived in Albuquerque.
Two weeks after the bombings in Hawaii, they heard about a telegram from the War Department. The news was short: Gara was missing.
In February 1942 his mother received a second telegram. This was worse. Gara had died on the Oklahoma.
A two-part story about Gara appeared in the Albuquerque Journal a few weeks later. No mention was made of whether his body had been found.
In fact, the Navy recovered the remains of many unidentifiable sailors on the Oklahoma. They were buried as strangers in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.
Decades went by and there were breakthroughs in forensics. The Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency re-examined the graves and identified the remains of Gara in 2017.
The staff at Santa Fe National Cemetery erected a tombstone to commemorate him. No mention is made of his birthplace, Illinois. It lists Gara as a sailor from New Mexico who died on Pearl Harbor Day.
Like many military in the 1940s, Gara saw a bit of the world. He didn’t have a chance to live a great life.
Neither did Oren Sumner. He and a buddy, Ernest “Dick” Werner, left Albuquerque High School after their junior year in 1941. A month later, on July 3, they joined the Navy.
Sumner, a second class seaman, was aboard the USS Arizona when the bombs hit Pearl Harbor. He died at 17.
Werner received another assignment that would take him to a destroyer near Casablanca in Morocco. In the fall of 1942, the fighting in the North African campaign was so intense that seafarers referred to the area north of Casablanca as a torpedo hub.
Werner told newspaper reporters about the day on which an enemy torpedo missed his ship by about six feet. All he could think of was Sumner, who was now almost a year dead.
Sumner’s decision to drop out of high school to serve in the Navy may have been influenced by more than a pact with a buddy. Two of his older brothers were in the military, one in the army and the other in the navy.
The endless debate today revolves around whether freedoms are being undermined because certain governments and companies are in need of masks to help mitigate the coronavirus pandemic. Remembering Pearl Harbor is a great way to gauge how much harder life it used to be for Americans, even teenagers.
Billy Spurgeon Walters Jr. of Tucumcari joined the Navy in August 1940. He was 18 years old when he traveled to Denver to enroll. Walters came from a large family of four sisters and one brother.
He knew his decision to get involved could put him in danger. World War II had broken out in Europe the year before, after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
Walters and thousands more teenagers sacrificed out of patriotism, family needs, or both. Military service provided an immediate opportunity to earn a paycheck.
Walters’ specialty in the Navy was third-class fire escape. He died on the Arizona when Japan escalated the war with its attack in the Pacific. Walters would have celebrated his 20th birthday in nine more days.
If there was any doubt about how much rougher the world was in 1941, the children of Pearl Harbor should dispel it.
Ringside Seat is an opinion column about people, politics and news. Contact Milan Simonich at [email protected] or 505-986-3080.
Comments are closed.