An honor guard of Navy pallbearers carried the fallen hero to his final resting place, and a Navy chaplain presented his sister with the folded flag from his casket at the conclusion of the service.
In a nation which has been at war since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, this was a scene that has become all too familiar. But this ceremony stood out for another reason. It had taken 81 years for MM1c Keith Tipsword to reach his final resting place, a journey which began on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
When the Rising Sun appeared over Pearl Harbor early on that Sunday morning, hundreds of Illinoisans were stationed across the island. They were on Navy ships, at Army airfields and forts, working at port facilities and any number of other important tasks at America’s primary outpost in the Pacific. The sneak attack, forever known as the “Day of Infamy” was for all of them the first day of the Pacific War. For many, it was also the last.
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| MM1c Keith Tipsword |
One of Tipsword’s shipmates, Doris Miller, etched his name indelibly into history when the mess attendant, untrained in handling weapons, seized an anti-aircraft gun and shot down at least one (and likely more) enemy aircraft. For these heroics he earned a Navy Cross, the service’s second-highest decoration.
Tied up just yards away was the battleship USS Arizona, aboard which Gunner’s Mate Third Class George Francis Clark, a 20-year-old sailor from Paris, Illinois, had served for nearly all of his two years in the Navy.
Arizona was struck by an armor-piercing bomb dropped from a Japanese high-altitude bomber. The projectile broke through several decks and detonated near a magazine which held the ship’s shells and gunpowder. The resulting explosion demolished the ship and sent it to the bottom with over 1100 of its crew, including GM3c Clark.
While Arizona’s gun turrets and superstructure were removed, the hull of the ship remains at rest on the shallow floor of the harbor, with one of the nation’s most well-known war memorials built above it. The memorial was built in part with donations made in memory of GM3c Clark’s mother when she passed away in 1959.
Most of Arizona’s crew remains entombed within the ship, forever at rest alongside their shipmates. These include Seaman 2nd Class Bernard Conlin, and Fireman 2nd Class James Conlin, brothers from Decatur, Illinois. James, 19, and Bernard, 18, had followed their older brother into the Navy after their father died.
The Conlin brothers were among the 57 Illinoisans who died aboard Arizona. They were also one of the 23 sets of brothers who died aboard the ship during the attack.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was not just an attack on the Navy. That morning, Oahu’s Army Air Corps contingent struggled to get fighter planes into the air to defend the island. The story of airmen who “strapped pistols over pajamas,” in the words of former President George H.W. Bush, and desperately tried to get into the air while under fire, became legend.
One of these pilots was 21-year-old Lieutenant John Dains of Mount Olive, Illinois. Dains succeeded where many others failed, getting his P-40 fighter into the sky and downing an enemy plane, thought to be the United States’ first air-to-air victory of the war, though this was never firmly confirmed. When his first plane was so badly shot up that it could no longer fly, he took the controls of a second fighter and went back up, only to be shot down.
Lt. Dains was awarded a Silver Star for his bravery. His wingman wrote to Dains’ family that he “died as he wanted to die – fighting and laughing to the last. He gave his life for his country – he died a true hero’s death.” He was buried in Oahu’s National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
The USS Utah was moored on the opposite side of the harbor from battleship row, but it was not spared. One of three battleships which could not be salvaged, Utah capsized and sank after repeated bomb and torpedo hits. Aboard was a sailor from Marshall, Illinois, William Arbuckle, who had worked at a Woolworth’s store in Champaign before joining the Navy in May 1941. He had just finished mailing Christmas cards to his friends and family back in Illinois when the attack hit.
After the attack, fearing more such assaults or even an invasion of the continental United States, the Navy’s priority was to quickly return as much of the devastated Pacific Fleet to service as possible. Navy engineers performed miracles, raising devastated ships, including West Virginia, from the mud, patching holes and towing them to shipyards for repairs which would restore some of them to service before the end of the war.
Those who had been killed were buried on Oahu, some before they could be identified. With the arrival of the 21st century and more advanced DNA technology, it became possible to finally identify those who lost their lives that morning, and to begin returning their remains to their families and their hometowns. It was this process which finally brought Keith Tipsword home some 81 years after he fell.
MM1c Tipsword was not the only such Illinoisan to return home decades after the day of infamy. Navy Fireman First Class Robert Harr of Dallas City, Illinois, finally came home in August 2021. He was 25 when he was killed along with 428 other sailors aboard the battleship Oklahoma.
Another Oklahoma sailor, Michael Gladjik, 25, of Lockport, finally returned home in 2017. When his casket arrived at O’Hare Airport, he was met by a full honor guard from both the Navy and the Chicago Fire Department. He was followed home in 2022 by his shipmate, 21-year-old Herbert Jacobson of Grayslake.
Home at last, and finally at rest, a fallen hero from one of America’s darkest days.