Walter Leon Collier

Very little information about Walter Collier’s early life is publicly available. He was born in Los Angeles, California on 27 November 1921 to Evelyn Collier and an unknown father; within a few years, Eva was either divorced or widowed. She remarried to John Jacob Paul in 1927, and they made their home in Burbank. Walter grew up with two older stepbrothers, Lawrence and Ronald Paul, and attended local schools. He kept his Collier surname, and while he named John Paul as his emergency addressee upon joining the Marines, their relationship was (legally speaking) still guardian and ward rather than father and son.

Collier enlisted in the Marine Corps from Los Angeles on 9 April 1939. He first served with a reserve battalion based in Burbank. After a few months of attending weekly drills, Collier decided to sign on for a four-year Regular hitch and reported to the San Diego recruit depot for boot camp. Enlisting meant dropping out of high school, but Collier was not through with his education; he received his diploma while in uniform.

As one of the top men in his recruit platoon, Collier was offered a spot at the San Diego Sea School. On 2 February 1940, he was assigned to the Marine detachment aboard the battleship USS Oklahoma. The ship would be his home for nearly two years, and Collier served dependably if unremarkably on cruises from the West Coast to the Hawaiian Islands. He received a promotion to Private First Class in October 1940.

Collier’s specific duties aboard Oklahoma are not known; he may have served as an orderly to the ship’s senior naval staff, with the crew of an anti-aircraft gun, or with the five-inch secondary batteries that lined the battleship’s hull. Life aboard the ship in peacetime was largely uneventful – until 7 December 1941.

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 Collier 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. Walter Collier was reported as missing in action after the attack; a few weeks later, his status was changed to killed in action.

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.

One of those remains belonged to Walter Collier. He was officially accounted for on 25 May 2021.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific
USS Oklahoma Memorial, Pearl Harbor

FINAL BURIAL
National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific