A Mystery

Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of
America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. FDR

Esteemed Reader,

This is a travelog wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. There are several strands in the saga and I will essay to use my meager skills to wrap them together into a skein of a story. I present them roughly in the chronological order that they occurred to me.

The first strand starts with yours truly in 1979. I am a 1Lt in the USAF and on vacation in Honolulu. It is Dec 7^th and we decided that it would be a good day to see the Arizona Memorial. Since I had my AF uniform with me, I chose to wear it in respect for the occasion. The brain cells that contain this memory are now 30 years old, but I remember feeling properly somber as I walked through the memorial. You can look down into the water and see the tendrils of oil that still seep up to the surface. Through the oil and water you can see the outline of the ship; especially the round mounts that used to contain the huge guns.

Towards the end of my time on the memorial I stopped to look at the marble wall that contains over a thousand names of the dead. The names of the Marine Contingent are etched over in the bottom right hand corner of the wall. I was – quite literally – shocked to discover the name PFC GH Whisler on the list. I remember getting goose bumps and chills.

Here is the next strand in the story. It is accepted wisdom in my family that the two branches of the family tree containing the Whistler’s and the Whisler’s were once all one happy family sharing the missing ‘t’. Somewhere in American History, an Nth Great Grandfather had a falling out with a Granduncle, heated words were exchanged and the ‘t’ was dropped from our branch of the family tree. Now we are Whislers – no ‘t’.

So, seeing a G Whisler as one of the dead on the Arizona has always fascinated me with a morbid sense of pride. But, before last December, I’ve never really bothered to try to learn more about this and our saga remains fallow for almost 30 years.

Now for another strand in the story: My son, George, is a captain in the AF and visited Hawaii on vacation this last December. Like me, he made a trip to the Arizona Memorial and noted the chilling name etched in the marble. I don't know that I had ever told him about it. When he got back from his vacation he emailed me a copy of the picture he took which I insert here.

This triggered a flurry of research on my part attempting to discover more information about PFC Whisler. I fired up Google and got many hits. I found this link which gave me his full name and reinforced his rank as Private First Class.Then I found this link which contains several puzzling facts.

First, PFC Whisler was born in 1911, which makes him a 30 year old Private First Class at his death in 1941. I engaged in some deductive logic as I tried to build an image of PFC Whisler. In today’s military, a 30 year old Marine PFC either just recently enlisted and is progressing in rank at a normal pace or he enlisted as a young man and is incapable of holding and maintaining rank. But, in the pre-WWII military, promotions were slow and based on the retirement of those senior to you. Further, soldiers and Marines were allowed to stay in the military well past middle age – it could take literally decades to make rank as you waited for those above you to age and retire. This aging military was poorly prepared to fight WWII and the present day “Up or Out” Policy of the US Military is a direct result of that demographic. I remain curious of about when PFC Whisler enlisted in the Marines and exactly what being a 30 year old PFC means.

The next curious fact in this latest link is that PFC Whisler rests in a grave plot in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. (NMCotP) But the Arizona Memorial specifically states that the vast preponderance of the dead are entombed in the ship. At this point in our saga, I did not know what to make of this new fact. I did note that the NMCotP was established in 1949 and I surmised that the Arizona’s dead were given the individual respect of a memorial in that cemetery even though their remains were entombed on the Arizona.

At this point, I have two mysteries worrying me. First, when did PFC Whisler enlist? Second – and more morbidly grisly - where are his mortal remains? ….and in all honesty, I wonder if he and I are related in some more direct way than merely sharing a name that thousands of us share. Not soon after all this, I get my schedule for Jan 2009 and learn that I will have a trip to Honolulu that entails a 24 hour layover.

At this point, I must introduce a new strand to our story. I spend a significant portion of my life in a hotel room in a far-away lands bored out of my skull. I have always been intrigued with the game of poker but fearful of the loss of money that lack of skill would entail. Several years ago, I found a computer program called “Poker Academy” (PA) that was heralded as a having the best and most challenging artificial intelligence engines written. So, I bought the program and whiled away some hours learning the game against the ‘bots’. Then I discovered that PA had an online game where you could play for fake money against real humans and that intrigued me. I discovered that the online players of PA had two things going for them. 1) They play poker very well given that real money is not involved and 2) they have a very friendly chat atmosphere.

So, I’ve made some ‘online friends’ over the last several years. One – Bricks - happens to live in Honolulu. I mentioned in passing that I was going to Honolulu and suddenly found myself offered a tour of the island. One of the tours Bricks enjoys giving is a drive up Tantalus Drive to a place that overlooks Pearl Harbor, Waikiki, Diamond Head and Honolulu proper. On the way down we would get to look at the NMCotP which sits in the ‘Punchbowl’ – an extinct volcanic crater. I hoped to get a deeper insight into PFC Whisler.

Bricks is a newspaper journalist and has access to genealogical information. Before the trip to the Punchbowl – as I learned the locals call the NMCotP – Bricks did some genealogical research about PFC Whisler. I learned that in the 1930 Census, he was 18 and still living at home in Cleveland, Iowa. Cleveland is evidently a very small farm community near the town of Bloomfield, just above the Iowa/Missouri state line.

His father – James T Whisler was 53 and died in 1948. (Before PFC Whisler’s gravesite was established in the Punchbowl). His mother – Edith F Whisler was 43 and lived until 1977. Her name at death was Edith Francis Cox, so I assume she re-married. His brother – John T Whisler was 20. I assume the brothers were still living at home since the census placed them there. The census also said Ellen Shields who was 75 lived in the family. I assume she was the maternal grandmother.

The Punchbowl is a lovely if somber place. I took many pictures.

We located PFC Whisler’s grave fairly quickly.

As we turned away from the gravesite to look at the rest of the punchbowl something fairly mystical happened. At this point in my research of this riddle, I knew that PFC Whisler’s father died before this gravesite was established so he never had a chance to see it. I know that PFC Whisler’s family hails from a very small town in Iowa and were probably depression era poor. I am deducing that there is a very large probability that I am one of the few if not the first Whisler ever to visit this grave.

As I look up, one of the frequent light airy rainstorms that Hawaiian’s call ‘Liquid Sunsine” hits us.

We are not getting significantly wet and the sprinkles are not unpleasant to stand in. More importantly, the liquid sunshine is producing the most beautiful full rainbow I have seen in a long time. I got goose bumps and chills again.

Still, I am wondering if PFC Whisler’s mortal remains are in the grave or is it a memorial duplicating the Arizona Memorial? I got my answer quickly. Up the hill from PFC Whisler’s grave site is the “Honolulu Memorial” which is a huge edifice of many white marble walls that contain the names of the Missing in Action in Pacific Operations.

There is a marker that says quite specifically that if the military had recovered remains they were buried out in the punchbowl – even if the identity of the remains where unknown. As one walks through the punchbowl, one notices headstones marked simply “Unknown”.

The Missing in Action are memorialized on the walls of the Honolulu Memorial. So that clears up that mystery. PFC Whisler’s remains were recovered from the Arizona and given burial in the Punchbowl. The new mystery is this: the vast majority of the Arizona dead remain entombed. How did PFC Whisler’s come to be recovered?

As an aside to this story – I also visited the final resting spot of Ernie Pyle.

As this saga is getting long, I won’t detail his story; except this: my first assignment in the Air Force was on Okinawa and Ernie was killed on a small island offshore from Okinawa named Ie Shima. We used to go SCUBA diving on Ie Shima and you passed the spot where Ernie was killed on the way to the dive site. There is a small memorial to him there. I had to complete the circle on this one and find his grave in the Punchbowl.

Back to PFC Whisler – there are not many stories of heroism that came out of the Arizona. Not, I imagine because there weren’t any acts of heroism but because so few survived to relate them. At this point, rebuilding the story gets somewhat gruesome and I choose not to detail it except this: the few remains that were recovered from the Arizona seem to fall into two categories: those who made it to shore and then died of their injuries and the few that were discovered as the Navy started to salvage the ship. They quickly decided that salvage was a waste of time and the memorial was established. I choose to believe that PFC Whisler was in the party that attempted to rally and defend the ship under the leadership of Lt Simonson.

At this point, I leave my enigma to you and remain,

Dad / Geoff