Armed with a fire hose, Downing sprayed saltwater on ammunition stored on the deck to prevent further explosions.<\/p>\n
He also undertook a more personal mission.<\/p>\n
Downing was the West Virginia’s mail clerk, and he knew most of the 1,400 sailors aboard.<\/p>\n
As he spotted the bodies of some of the 105 men killed on the West Virginia, he committed their names to memory. Some were recognizable. For others, he had to check identification tags.<\/p>\n
“I went around memorizing as many as I could with the intention of writing their parents,” he said.<\/p>\n
After the attack, Downing wrote to as many families as he could, relaying his belief that the sailors killed in the attack were heroes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Downing remained on USS West Virginia, a Colorado-class battleship, which participated in the battles of Leyte, Iwo Jima and Okinawa after she was repaired and up-gunned. Downing was commissioned after the war and remained in the Navy through the Korean War.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Devtun sends us the sad news that Navy Lt. Jim Downing, the second-oldest Pearl Harbor survivor, has passed at the tender age of 104. Armed with a fire hose, Downing sprayed saltwater on ammunition stored on the deck to prevent further explosions. He also undertook a more personal mission. Downing was the West Virginia’s mail […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":77732,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[217],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-we-remember"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Navy-Lt.-Jim-Downing.png?fit=535%2C580&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4ozh1-kdJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77731\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/77732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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