The youngest sailor?

By Stephen J. Shaw

In 1942, Seaman Calvin Graham, age 13, was decorated for valor in a South Pacific battle. When his mother learned where he’d been, she revealed his secret to the Navy,

The newly christened battleship USS South Dakota steamed Calvin Graham out of Philadelphia in August of 1942 spoiling for a fight with a crew of “untested recruits” who enlisted after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Brash and confident, the crew couldn’t get through the Panama Canal fast enough, and their captain, Thomas Gatch, made no secret that he held a grudge against the Japanese.

In less than four months, the South Dakota would limp back to port in New York for extensive damage repairs. After the repairs, the ship screened carrier forces in the Western Pacific and provided support for the invasions of Leyte, Luzon, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. In July and August 1945, she joined with other battleships to shell the Japanese home islands and was present for the formal surrender of Japan in Tokyo Bay, Japan.

The Japanese were mistakenly convinced they inflicted severe damage on the South Dakota. They were convinced the vessel had been destroyed at sea, and the Navy was only too happy to keep the mystery alive — stripping the South Dakota of identifying markings and avoiding any mention of it in communications and even forbidding mentioning it in sailors’ diaries. When newspapers later reported on the ship’s extraordinary accomplishments in the Pacific Theater, it was referred to simply as “Battleship X.”

Unfortunately for the Japanese, “Big X” was not resting at the bottom of the Pacific. And aboard was a underaged gunner from Texas who would soon become the nation’s youngest decorated war hero. Calvin Graham, the fresh-faced seaman, was only 12 years old when he set off for battle from the Philadelphia Navy Yard in the summer of 1942.

Graham was just 11 and in the sixth grade in Crockett, Texas, when he hatched his plan to lie about his age and join the Navy. One of seven children living at home with an abusive stepfather, he and an older brother moved into a cheap rooming house, and Calvin supported himself by selling newspapers and delivering telegrams on weekends and after school. Even though he moved out, his mother would occasionally visit — sometimes to simply sign his report cards at the end of a semester. The country was at war, however, and being around newspapers afforded the boy the opportunity to keep up on events overseas.

When he learned that some of his cousins had died in battles, he planned to sign up. He wanted to fight. “In those days, you could join up at 16 with your parents’ consent, but they preferred 17,” Graham later said. But he had no intention of waiting five more years. He began to shave at age 11. He believed it would somehow make him look older with military recruiters. He lined up with some buddies. He forged his mother’s signature and stole a notary stamp from a local hotel and waited to enlist.

Thirteen years old, at 5-foot-2 and just 125 pounds, Graham dressed in an older brother’s clothes and fedora and practiced “talking deep.” What worried him most was not that an enlistment officer spotting the forged signature, “it was the dentist who would know how young I was by my teeth,” Graham recalled. He lined up behind a couple of guys he knew who were only 14 or 15, and “when the dentist kept saying I was 12, I said I was 17.”

In desperation, Graham played his trump card, telling the dentist that the boys in front of him weren’t 17 yet, and the dentist had passed them. “Finally,” Graham recalled, “he said he didn’t have time to mess with me and he sent me on.” Graham maintained that the Navy knew he and the others in line that day were underage, “but we were losing the war then, so they took all six of us.”

It wasn’t uncommon for boys to lie about their age in order to serve. Ray Jackson, who joined the Marines at 16 during World War II, founded the group Veterans of Underage Military Service in 1991, and it listed more than 1,200 active members, including 26 women. “Some of these guys came from large families and there wasn’t enough food to go around, and this was a way out,” Jackson told a reporter. “Others just had family problems and wanted to get away.”

Calvin Graham told his mother he was going to visit relatives. Instead, he dropped out of the seventh grade and shipped off to San Diego for basic training. There, he said, the drill instructors were aware of underage recruits and often made them run extra miles and lug heavier packs.

Just months after her christening in 1942, the USS South Dakota was off to war, and Seaman Calvin Graham aboard.

By the time the South Dakota made it to the Pacific, it had become part of a task force alongside the legendary carrier USS Enterprise (the “Big E”). By early October 1942, the two ships, along with their escorting cruisers and destroyers, raced to the South Pacific to engage in the fierce fighting in the battle for Guadalcanal. After they reached the Santa Cruz Islands on October 26, the Japanese quickly set their sights on the carrier and launched an air attack that easily penetrated the Enterprise’s own air patrol. The carrier USS Hornet was repeatedly torpedoed and sank off Santa Cruz, but the South Dakota managed to protect Enterprise, destroying 26 enemy planes with a barrage from its antiaircraft guns.

Standing on the bridge, Captain Gatch watched as a 500-lb. bomb struck the South Dakota’s main gun turret. The explosion injured 50 men, including the skipper, and killed one. Quick-thinking quartermasters managed to save the captain’s life — his jugular vein had been severed, and the ligaments in his arms suffered permanent damage — but some onboard were aghast that he didn’t hit the deck when he saw the bomb coming. “I consider it beneath the dignity of a captain of an American battleship to flop for a Japanese bomb,” Gatch later said.

The ship’s young crew continued to fire at anything in the air, including American planes that were low on fuel and trying to land on the Enterprise. The South Dakota acquired a reputation for being wild-eyed and quick to shoot; Navy pilots were warned not to fly anywhere near the Big E. After returning to Pearl Harbor to get his ship repaired, Captain Gatch returned, wearing a sling and bandages.

Seaman Graham quietly became a teenager, turning 13 on November 6, just as Japanese naval forces began shelling Guadalcanal Island. On November 14, Japanese ships opened fire, sinking or heavily damaging the American destroyers in a four- day engagement that became known as the Battle of Guadalcanal.

Later that evening the South Dakota encountered eight Japanese destroyers; Graham was manning his gun when shrapnel ripped through his jaw and mouth. Another hit and knocked him down through three stories of superstructure. Nonetheless, the 13 year-old made it to his feet, dazed and bleeding, and helped pull other crew members to safety while others were thrown by the force of the explosions, their bodies aflame, into the Pacific.

Regaining power, and after afflicting heavy damage to the Japanese ships, the South Dakota finally disappeared in the smoke.

In mid-December, the damaged ship returned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for major repairs, where Captain Gatch and his crew were recognized for their heroic deeds in the Pacific. Graham, age 13, received a Bronze Star for distinguishing himself in combat as well as a Purple Heart for his injuries. But he couldn’t bask in glory with his fellow crewmen while their ship was being repaired. Graham’s mother, having recognized her son in newsreel footage, wrote the Navy, revealing the gunner’s true age. Graham was ordered to Texas and thrown in a Corpus Christi, Texas brig for almost three months.

“Battleship X” returned to the Pacific and continued to shoot down Japanese planes. Graham, meanwhile, managed to get a message out to his sister Pearl, who complained to the newspapers that the Navy was mistreating the “baby vet.” The Navy eventually ordered Graham’s release, but not before stripping him of his medals for lying about his age and revoking his disability benefits. He was released from jail with a suit and a few dollars in his pocket — with no honorable discharge.

Back in Houston, though, he was treated as a celebrity. Reporters were eager to write his story. But the attention didn’t last. Graham tried to return to school, but he couldn’t keep pace with students his age and quickly dropped out. He married at age 14, became a father the following year, and found work as a welder in a Houston shipyard. Neither his job nor his marriage lasted long. At 17 years old and divorced, and with no service record, was about to be drafted when he enlisted in the Marine Corps. During training he broke his back in a fall, for which he received a 20 percent service-connected disability. The only work he could find after that was selling magazine subscriptions.

When President Jimmy Carter was elected, in 1976, Graham began writing letters, hoping that Carter, “an old Navy man,” might be sympathetic. All Graham wanted was an honorable discharge so he could get help with his medical and dental expenses.

In 1977, Texas Senators Lloyd Bentsen and John Tower introduced a bill to give Graham his discharge, and in 1978, 33 years after WWII, Carter signed off on restoring Graham’s medals — with the exception of the Purple Heart. Ten years later in 1987, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation approving disability benefits for Graham.

At the age of 12, Graham broke the law to serve his country. For fear of losing their benefits or their honorable discharges, many “Baby Vets” never came forward to claim the nation’s gratitude.

Forty-nine years after WW II, Graham’s Purple Heart was finally reinstated. It was presented to his widow, Mary, on June 21, 1994, by Secretary of the Navy John Dalton in Arlington, Texas, nearly two years after his death from heart failure.