Brothers Down

IN A WORLD at peace, there did not seem to be any particular danger to brothers serving together on warships. Family ties were judged a good thing. An older brother sending a photo home of himself in a handsome uniform was better than any recruiting poster the US Navy could devise. For young men during the Great Depression, this was particularly true when in addition to the uniform, the Navy offered a steady paycheck and a chance to see the world—or at least more of it than the county where one had grown up.

Recalling why he joined the Navy in the fall of 1940 at the age of eighteen and reported to the battleship Arizona, John Willard Evans, one of six children from a poor farm family in the hills of northwestern Alabama, was blunt: “Most of the boys that I went in with were school dropouts. I was a school dropout. And most of ’em were hungry. Most of their families were hungry. It was very, very tough times, after having come through that Great Depression. No job, no place to go, no homes. And we found a home in the Navy.”

Like so many enlistees, Evans saved every penny from his meager pay and sent it home to help his family. His enlistment wasn’t motivated by patriotic pride or an impending threat of war, but rather by the need to put food on his family’s poverty-ridden table. As Donald Stratton from Kansas, another eighteen-year-old in similar straits who arrived aboard Arizona about the same time put it, “The Navy offered us a way out of that, and we took it.”1

The decision to enlist was even easier when an older brother led the way. Thomas Daniel Murdock stuck it out in the farmland of northern Alabama until he was twenty-one and then took a hundred-mile bus ride to Birmingham to enlist in the spring of 1930. A year later, Thomas reported to the Arizona and was soon on his way to becoming one of its old hands. When the mid-1930s gave no promise of improving economic conditions, his younger brothers joined up, too. Charles Luther Murdock enlisted in the fall of 1934, and kid brother Melvin Elijah Murdock followed in the spring of 1938. After their respective basic training, Charles and Melvin joined their big brother on the Arizona.

There was certainly no guarantee of serving alongside one’s kin, but recognizing the positive impact on morale, the Navy made an effort to accommodate such requests. There had to be an opening aboard the desired ship, of course, as well as the need for the rating held by the requester, but that wasn’t much of an issue with newly minted apprentice seamen. There was almost always a need for them on battleships where the complement of about fifteen hundred men was sometimes two or three, or even four or five times the population of a new sailor’s hometown. And battleships seemed plenty safe. As one sailor wrote home to his mother, “I am safer on this battleboat than I would be driving back and forth to work if I was home.”

Eighteen-year-old Esther Ross of Prescott, Arizona, could hardly contain herself. It was Saturday, June 19, 1915. Dressed completely in white—from wide-brimmed hat and shapely tailored jacket to a dress ending just above her shoes—Miss Ross was not a bride, but on this glorious sunny day she was nonetheless about to occupy the undivided attention of a crowd of seventy-five thousand onlookers.

Esther’s America was flexing its muscles. The country was young and decidedly rural. About half its population of one hundred million people was under twenty-five years of age; half lived in farming and ranching areas or small towns. World War I had been raging in Europe for almost a year, but the United States remained on the periphery.

Industrialization was surging, but the chief business of America was still farming. Sputtering automobiles were novelties, about one for every fifty people. Most Americans walked or hopped trolleys to get around cities or rode horses and trains across wide-open spaces. Tractors only gradually replaced horse-drawn farm equipment.

There were no antibiotics, fear of polio was rampant, and childbirth—most deliveries were made at home even in large cities—was not to be taken lightly. Only 30 percent of homes had a telephone. Bestseller lists included The Lone Star Ranger by Zane Grey, while at theaters audiences sat through three hours of Birth of a Nation, a silent film about the Civil War. News spread chiefly by word of mouth, telegraph, or multiple editions of big-city newspapers and the weekly pages of small-town papers.

On this very spot along New York’s East River just fifteen months earlier, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the thirty-two-year-old assistant secretary of the Navy, standing tall and looking natty in a derby hat, had presided over the laying of the keel of an as yet unnamed battleship, designated only as number 39. Now, it was Esther’s honor to give the mammoth ship a name.

Like the battleship Esther Ross was about to christen, her state was brand new. Arizona had become the forty-eighth state only three years earlier. Esther’s parents were among its pioneers. Her father, William Ross, was a pharmacist in Prescott. Responding to an informal competition for a suitable representative to christen the namesake of their state, Ross prevailed upon Governor George Hunt to select his daughter for the honor.

A gentle breeze blowing from the river kept those assembled at the Brooklyn Navy Yard from getting too hot under a cloudless cobalt-blue sky. As attentive Marine escorts ushered dignitaries holding white tickets to special seats near the front, a repetitive chorus of “bang, bang, bang” reverberated from the massive hull towering above.

At 608 feet in length, the ship was not much to look at yet. Inside the hull, between the bottom of the keel and the main deck, there were four lower decks running the length of the ship, each level filled with a honeycomb of compartments and passageways. Above the main deck, the superstructure and four turrets for the main fourteen-inch guns would take more than a year to complete once the ship was safely afloat.

The banging sounds came from workers knocking away supports that had held the ship in place since its keel laying. Other workers greased skids that sloped downward from the construction bay to the East River. They applied some twenty-five thousand pounds of tallow and lard, which at this stage of construction amounted to about one pound of lubricant per ton of vessel. Next came the order “Saw off!” and large blades whined through the last of the holding blocks.

A hush fell over the crowd as a billowing red flag fluttered downward from a construction crane to signal that the awaited moment was at hand. At precisely 1:00 p.m., to take advantage of a high tide, hydraulic levers gave the flag-bedecked mass a gentle nudge. For what seemed like long minutes, nothing happened. Then, quite suddenly, and very quietly, the big ship began to move.

Esther Ross’s moment was at hand. Despite the time-honored tradition of christening ships with champagne, Esther swung two bottles suspended from the vessel by a long cord and wrapped in red, white, and blue ribbons. One was indeed the traditional bottle of champagne—described by the New York Times as “American champagne from Ohio”—but the other was “a quart of the first water that flowed over Roosevelt Dam in Arizona.” As the bottles broke against the starboard bow, Esther cried out, “I name thee Arizona!”

The crowd erupted into cheers. Sirens throughout the Navy Yard and whistles from nearby ships joined in and drowned out the strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” as it was played in unison by bands from ships of the Atlantic Fleet. Later, with the benefit of hindsight, some would contend that this unusual use of water damned the ship, but at the time, Arizona was a dry state and, according to the Times, “the ‘teetotalers’ and the rest of the Arizonians demanded that the Arizona be named with water as well as wine.” As the ship slid faster and faster down the ways, one estimate claimed it bested fifteen knots by the time it hit the water of the East River and floated off in the direction of the Williamsburg Bridge. A flotilla of tugs swarmed around the hull and shepherded it to a dock in the Navy Yard for completion.2

Afterward, before an invited luncheon crowd of nine hundred guests, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels expounded at length on the role of the United States Navy on the global stage. When it was her turn to say a few words, Esther Ross came right to the point: “Mr. Secretary, friends,” she told Daniels and those seated before her, “this is the proudest day of my life, because I have christened the largest battleship in the world with the name of the greatest state in the union.”3

Few could dispute Esther Ross’s claim that the Arizona was a cutting-edge weapon of its day. The behemoth was built to project American power and counter any aggressor on the high seas. Battleships made completely of steel were themselves relatively new. America’s earliest were the Texas and the Maine, commissioned within a month of each other in 1895. Barely over three hundred feet in length and displacing only sixty-seven hundred tons, they in retrospect have been termed coastal defense battleships or, in the case of the