Crewmen reading their mail, after returning to Pearl Harbor from the Makin Island Raid, 26 August 1942.
Few black veterans were recognized for their valor during WWII. In the Navy, Dorie Miller is probably the most notable example: he actually recieved the Navy Cross back in 1942 for his heroism during the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was killed in action a year later, and in the 1970s the Navy named a ship – the USS Miller – after him. He has not been forgotten – Cuba Gooding played him in the movie Pearl Harbor. But there were many more black sailors who have gone unrecognized, then and now. Carl E. Clark is one of them.
After at least 6 kamikaze planes had hit his ship,
Mr. Clark was the only survivor of an eight-man damage control unit. He grabbed a hose so powerful it usually took four men to control, and he aimed it at the flames that had begun to make the ammunition locker smolder. If that went up, the explosion would crack the ship in half. The Aaron Ward was the last destroyer on “picket duty” to warn and protect the fleet at Okinawa.
Mr. Clark would later discover that he had broken his collarbone (an explosion had blown him right out of his shoes and into the ceiling of a passageway). Despite that, he fought the flames. “When I put out that fire at the ammunition locker,” he recalled, “that’s when the captain said, ‘You saved my ship.’ ”
There’s a movement now to give him and other African Americans who served the recognition they are due – while they are alive to receive it. For Mr. Clark, at 93, time is short.
Good reading