John Franklin Middleswart

John Middleswart was born on 10 April 1921. He grew up in Alton, Illinois with two older siblings – Loretta and Edgar – in a household run by parents John and Dora Middleswart. After several years in Alton, the Middleswarts moved north to Peoria. Their house on Farrelly Avenue was bustling with activity – in addition to the five Middleswarts, Loretta’s three children moved in as well. In the midst of this familial chaos, John graduated from Woodruff High School with the class of 1940.

John Middleswart joined the Marine Corps from Chicago on 5 March 1941, and trained with the First Recruit Battalion at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego. He was selected for Sea School upon completing boot camp, and was assigned to the battleship USS Oklahoma in the early summer. The tall, athletic Middleswart quickly made an impression, and was promoted to Private First Class on 7 October 1941.

Middleswart likely wrote to his parents to share his success, and he may have received word that the family was on the move. While Loretta and her family returned to Alton, the rest of the Middleswarts were heading west to California. Good jobs were available at the San Diego shipyards, and in November 1941 John, Dora, and Edgar moved to 4148 Poplar Street in Hollywood Park.

The family must also have hoped that living in San Diego would increase their chances of seeing their Marine whenever the Oklahoma was in port. However, they would never get the chance.

On 7 December 1941, the Oklahoma‘s crew was preparing for a routine Sunday in Pearl Harbor. Many were brushing off the effects of a Saturday spent ashore; dozens more began lining the rails to wait for the liberty launch. PFC Middleswart might have been among them; he might have been below decks in the Marine quarters, on his way to the galley, or preparing for the morning color ceremony. Exactly where he was when the first torpedo hit the Oklahoma will likely never be known.

It took the Japanese pilots less than twelve minutes to transform Oklahoma from a powerful battleship to a smoking wreck, capsized in the muck of Pearl Harbor. In the chaos of the surprise attack, John Middleswart disappeared. He was one of over 400 sailors and Marines to lose their lives in the sinking.

Following a painstaking engineering operation, the Oklahoma was righted and refloated in early 1944. While salvage crews cleaned and removed anything of possible military value – and Sergeant Don Lowery returned to collect several personal effects from his locker – other teams searched through years of accumulated muck for human remains. Navy diver Edward C. Raymer was tasked with taking a civilian reporter aboard the ship:

We reached the third deck, and Burns asked me about dead bodies: how many had been found, what was done with them, how they could be identified. I explained that the medics sorted through all the sludge and debris for bones. Then they placed approximately two hundred bones in a bag, which represented the number in a human body. The bag was sent to the army hospital, where a chaplain performed services for the remains.

According to the Oklahoma’s muster records, four hundred of the crew perished aboard her. I finished by saying I was glad it wasn’t my job to explain to the sailors’ families why their loved ones remained unidentified. The reasons could seem very offensive to them.

Slithering through the ankle-deep filth, Burns caught himself as his foot struck something on the deck. He cried out in revulsion when he found it was part of a human body. “My God, I’ve stumbled over a leg. It even has a shoe on what’s left of the foot.”

– Edward C. Raymer, Descent Into Darkness: Pearl Harbor, 1941, A Navy Diver’s Memoir

The remains recovered from the Oklahoma were buried in fifty-two mass graves in Halawa and Nuuanu Cemeteries on the island of Oahu. At the end of the war, the graves were exhumed with the intent of identifying as many of the dead as possible before reinterment in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. Dr. Mildred Trotter, one of the anthropologists in charge of the Central Identification Laboratory, was dismayed to note that “common graves consist[ed] of bones of a kind buried together (i.e. one casket was filled with skulls, another with femurs, another with hip bones and so on)” – a strange decision that “added greatly to the difficulty of the undertaking.” Although her technicians made “a very honest effort… to segregate all the remains from the Oklahoma,” Dr. Trotter admitted that it would take “a very long period (years)” and “different circumstances” to fully separate all the remains. Only 49 men could be identified by the end of 1949; the remainder were buried in 46 common graves in Honolulu.

In 2015, an official directive was passed to exhume the graves of the Oklahoma’s final crew. Modern science and DNA analysis provided the “different circumstances” Dr. Trotter’s note required and have identified hundreds of Oklahoma men.

Among them at last is PFC John Middleswart. His remains were officially accounted for on 28 January 2021..

CENOTAPHS
National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific

FINAL BURIAL
Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery