“Finally,” Graham recalled, “he said he didn’t have time to mess with me and he let me go.” Graham maintained that the Navy knew he and the others on line that day were underage, “but we were losing the war then, so they took six of us.” He lined up behind a couple of guys he knew who were already 14 or 15, and “when the dentist kept saying I was 12, I said I was 17.” At last, Graham played his ace, telling the dentist that he knew for a fact that the boys in front of him weren’t 17 yet, and the dentist had let them through. “I knew he’d know how young I was by my teeth,” Graham recalled. It was the dentist who would peer into the mouths of potential recruits.
Then he lined up with some buddies (who forged his mother’s signature and stole a notary stamp from a local hotel) and waited to enlist.Īt 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 would spot the forged signature. He began to shave at age 11, hoping it would somehow make him look older when he met with military recruiters. But he had no intention of waiting five more years. “In those days, you could join up at 16 with your parents’ consent, but they preferred 17,” Graham later said. When he learned that some of his cousins had died in battles, he knew what he wanted to do with his life. “I didn’t like Hitler to start with,” Graham later told a reporter. The country was at war, however, and being around newspapers afforded the boy the opportunity to keep up on events overseas. Even though he moved out, his mother would occasionally visit-sometimes to simply sign his report cards at the end of a semester. 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. 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. Calvin Graham, the fresh-faced seaman who had set off for battle from the Philadelphia Navy Yard in the summer of 1942, was only 12 years old. That the vessel was not resting at the bottom of the Pacific was just one of the secrets Battleship X carried through day after day of hellish war at sea. Aboard was a gunner from Texas who would soon become the nation’s youngest decorated war hero. When newspapers later reported on the ship’s remarkable accomplishments in the Pacific Theater, they referred to it simply as “Battleship X.”Ĭalvin Graham, the USS South Dakota‘s 12-year-old gunner, in 1942.
The Japanese, it turned out, 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 sailors’ diaries. Navy history and acquire a new moniker to reflect the secrets it carried. The ship would become one of the most decorated warships in U.S. In less than four months, the South Dakota would limp back to port in New York for repairs to extensive damage suffered in some of World War II’s most ferocious battles at sea. “No ship more eager to fight ever entered the Pacific,” one naval historian wrote. Brash and confident, the crew couldn’t get through the Panama Canal fast enough, and their captain, Thomas Gatch, made no secret of the grudge he bore against the Japanese. The crew was made up of “green boys”-new recruits who enlisted after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor-who had no qualms about either their destination or the action they were likely to see. With powerful engines, extensive firepower and heavy armor, the newly christened battleship USS South Dakota steamed out of Philadelphia in August of 1942 spoiling for a fight.
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