Nebraskan among 54 sailors still entombed in Pearl Harbor’s ‘Forgotten Ship’

A ceremony was held for the unidentifiable remains of the USS Oklahoma from Pearl Harbor. The remains will be transported to Hawaii, where a group burial is planned.

As the ship rolled and the water rose in the engine room of the former battleship USS Utah on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Chief Petty Officer Peter Tomich knew he had to get his men out.

“Get topside, go! The ship is turning over. You have to escape now!” shouted Tomich, a 48-year-old water tender who had served 22 years in the Navy, according to an account of his valor on the military awards website Homeofheroes.com.

Tomich did not follow his own advice. He stayed below decks to secure the boilers and prevent explosions that could have turned the ship into an inferno, right there at its mooring in Pearl Harbor.

The mooring lines snapped and the Utah rolled completely over at 8:12 a.m., just 11 minutes after it was struck by the first Japanese torpedo. Tomich, an immigrant from what is now Bosnia, died along with 57 of his USS Utah shipmates. But 461 others scrambled to safety and survived, in part because the chief remained at his post.

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Tomich was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism. The Navy later named a ship for him.

Many remains of the USS Utah dead still are entombed in the ship, which still lies where it was sunk and strafed by the Japanese attackers exactly 81 years ago today.

Those killed included one Nebraskan — George LaRue, a gunner’s mate from Sutherland — and four Iowans: Forrest Perry of Northwood, Edwin Odgaard of Humboldt, Ralph E. Scott of Dubuque and Vernard Wetrich of Dexter. Scott’s brother, Melvin, also served on the Utah and survived.

It’s possible, though, that some remains that were recovered during a failed 1944 effort to salvage the Utah soon could be identified.

Earlier this year, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency disinterred 14 caskets from seven graves marked “unknown” at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, in Honolulu’s Punchbowl crater. Now they are being examined at the agency’s main lab in Hawaii. (DPAA’s second lab is at Offutt Air Force Base.)

“From my window, I can see some of the control towers and structures from Pearl Harbor,” said Laurel Freas, the DPAA forensic anthropologist tasked with identifying unknowns from the Utah and several other ships sunk in the attack. “It really moves me, to have the possibility of returning these people to their families.”

The story of the USS Utah is a barely remembered footnote to the Pearl Harbor raid, compared with better-known ship casualties on Battleship Row such as the USS Arizona (1,177 dead) and USS Oklahoma (429 dead). It apparently was attacked by mistake.

“It bothered me that the Utah, nobody ever said anything about it,” said T.J. Cooper, of Coon Rapids, Minnesota, who authored a book in 2009 titled “The Men of the Utah, the Forgotten Ship of Pearl Harbor.”

She thinks that’s partly because of the lower death toll aboard the Utah. Tomich’s valor undoubtedly kept casualties down.

“It was ‘only’ 58 men that were lost on the Utah,” Cooper said.

The Utah also was moored on the opposite side of Ford Island from Battleship Row, which was the focus of the Japanese attack. And the USS Utah Memorial is not open to the public as is the popular USS Arizona Memorial, which receives 1.7 million visitors per year.

Commissioned in 1911, the Utah had a long Navy career that included service during the Mexican Revolution and World War I.

But in 1931, the Utah was disarmed and converted into a radio-controlled target ship as part of an international naval treaty.

For the next decade, it was used to tow targets during gunnery exercises. Air crews also would practice dropping “water bombs” on the Utah’s decks, which were reinforced with heavy timbers. Its sailors called themselves “the bomb duckers.”

The Utah had just returned to Pearl Harbor from a weeklong exercise when Japan launched its surprise attack on a quiet Sunday morning.

The ship seemed to jump up in the air as the first torpedo struck on its port (left) side, just as crew members were raising the flag at 8 a.m. The ship listed sharply to port almost immediately as seawater surged into the area below decks.

Machinist’s Mate 2nd Class Robert O’Hara, 21, of Council Bluffs, was asleep in his cot above the engine room when the torpedoes struck, according to an account he gave Cooper years later for “The Men of the USS Utah.”

Clad only in shorts and T-shirt, O’Hara headed up to the deck — carrying his newly spit-shined shoes, which he told Cooper he did not want to lose.

It took him three tries to get out of the ship because Japanese aircraft were strafing the deck with gunfire. Unable to swim, O’Hara grabbed a line that secured the boat to an offshore pier.

As he was crossing, an explosion broke the line and sent him crashing onto the pier. He suffered a broken back and head injuries and was hospitalized for a year.

Most survivors escaped by sliding down the ship’s hull and swimming about 60 yards to shore. Others were picked up in small boats. Many took refuge from Japanese gunfire in a trench under construction ashore on Ford Island.

Nothing is known of George LaRue’s last moments on the Utah.

Growing up in Sutherland, LaRue had earned the nickname “Tuffy” as a star on the high school football team. He graduated in 1937 and joined the Navy a year and a half later, said George Tacey, a historical researcher in Sutherland.

“George was the type of boy that one expects to see in a uniform of Uncle Sam’s forces,” reported the local Sutherland Courier.

Perhaps he was eating breakfast on the mess decks. That’s where many of the men were who didn’t get off the ship, Cooper said — some of them were injured or crushed beneath furniture as the ship rolled on its side. Others made it to the deck but were trapped among the tumbling timbers that protected the decks from dummy bombs.

Several weeks later, his parents, William and Edna LaRue, received word from the Navy that George, 24, had “died in action.” The Navy said he would be buried in Hawaii until the end of the war if his body was recovered.

That was not the end of the LaRue family’s World War II sacrifice. George’s older brother, Ralph, 32, was killed while serving in the Army in Europe on April 29, 1945 — barely a week before the Germans surrendered.

Fireman 2nd Class John Vaessen, 25, of Sonoma, California, may have had the most harrowing escape of any of the Utah’s crew. He stayed below decks after the torpedo hit to keep the lights running as long as possible so his shipmates could escape.

Vaessen didn’t know what had happened. But as the ship rolled and the water rose, he realized his escape routes had been cut off. Using two tools, a flashlight and a wrench, he climbed and squeezed through several compartments until he reached the bottom of the ship’s hull. He began tapping with his wrench.

Two shipmates heard him and rushed to a neighboring ship, the USS Raleigh, to get cutting tools and some extra hands. Even as the Japanese continued the attack, the sailors kept cutting until Vaessen was freed, dirty and disheveled, but alive.

For his valor, Vaessen was awarded the Navy Cross. He served in the Navy for the rest of the war, and then worked at a Navy shipyard near San Francisco. A founding member of the USS Utah Memorial, Vaessen often brought the flashlight and the wrench that had saved his life to reunions. He died in 2018, at age 101.

In the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, only four bodies were recovered and identified. The rest were presumed to be inside.

The Utah itself remained where it was for more than two years. Navy salvors refloated and salvaged other battleships, including the Oklahoma and the West Virginia, first because their hulks occupied more critical mooring spots and because they seemed to be in better condition.

“The Utah was sort of the last ship,” Freas said. “It was a very low salvage priority for the Navy.”

In early 1944, the salvors attached a series of tow ropes to pull it upright, hoping to use the keel as a fulcrum — a method that had successfully dislodged the Oklahoma.

This time, the tactic didn’t work. Instead, the ship dug deeper into Pearl Harbor’s soft mud. The Navy decided to leave the half-submerged hull where it was. A memorial plaque was attached to the deck in 1950.

What the salvage efforts did unearth, though, was some human remains from the ship. They were buried at a nearby cemetery in a grave designated X-261.

After the war, in the late 1940s, military anthropologists undertook a massive, if largely unsuccessful, effort to identify the remains recovered from the ships at Pearl Harbor.

They made no identifications from X-261, but the anthropologists calculated that it contained the remains of 14 individuals — amounts ranging from a few bones to nearly complete skeletons, Freas said. Then they were reburied at the Punchbowl in separate caskets.

Last spring, they were unearthed as part of DPAA’s latest Pearl Harbor identification effort. The previous USS Oklahoma project, conducted at the Offutt lab from 2015 to 2021, resulted in the identification of 361 of 394 missing service members.

Freas also is in charge of ongoing projects involving the West Virginia and the California. The projects have led to the identification of 14 of 25 missing West Virginia sailors and three of 20 California sailors.

The West Virginia and California remains have been slow to yield DNA for identifications in part because some of the caskets had ruptured, letting in soil and water. The bones, Freas said, are in “a very, very fragile state.”

She is hopeful for better results with the Utah remains. Only two of 14 caskets were ruptured, and not as severely as the California and West Virginia ones.

Freas said her team of anthropologists still is counting and cataloging the Utah bones to determine which might yield DNA samples. Then they will be submitted to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Delaware for comparison with family reference samples, which have been gathered for 40 of the 54 missing Utah sailors.

The team has determined that Utah caskets almost certainly contain bones from far more than 14 sailors, Freas said.

“The Utah remains were very, very heavily commingled,” she said. “I think (the anthropologists) did the best they could in the 1940s. We have much more powerful tools today.”

Robert O’Hara was one of many Utah survivors who resented how their ship was overlooked in the honors accorded to the fallen at Pearl Harbor, said Troy Myrberg, his grandson.

“Grandpa always told me: It’s a sister ship to the USS Arizona, and nobody talks about it,” said Myrberg, of Everett, Washington.

He said O’Hara and his two brothers had grown up in Midwest orphanages, and all three served in World War II. After the war, he returned to Iowa to work as a government contractor. He married and raised two sons, eventually settling in Washington state.

Myrberg said O’Hara participated actively in Navy and Pearl Harbor survivor events. He joined other USS Utah veterans in pushing for the construction of the ship’s memorial on Ford Island, and participated in annual sunset services there in conjunction with Pearl Harbor Day — traditionally, on the evening of Dec. 6. He died in 2007.

“He went there every year. He would be there,” Myrberg said. “Grandpa loved the Navy. He loved his ship.”

Though the USS Utah always may be overshadowed at Pearl Harbor, the ship’s veterans have ensured that it won’t be forgotten.

“The Utah is still alive,” Myrberg said.

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