“There’s a little rosewood casket
Lying on a marble stand
And a packet of old love letters
Written by my true love’s hand”
— American folk song
LIBERTY — The remains of an Amite County sailor who died at Pearl Harbor will be returned in July, and a funeral service is planned.
A rosewood casket containing the remains of Russell Melton, which were identified last year, will be flown to Baton Rouge and escorted to Brown Funeral Home.
A funeral service with military honors will be held 10 a.m. Saturday, July 9, at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church outside Gloster. Melton’s parents are buried in the church cemetery, said his niece, Patsy Brown of Liberty.
Melton, 23, was among 106 crew members aboard the USS West Virginia killed on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese airplanes bombed and torpedoed American ships at Pearl Harbor.
“The battleship was hit by two bombs and at least seven torpedoes, which blew huge holes in her port side,” according to the Naval History and Heritage Command. “Skillful damage control saved her from capsizing, but she quickly sank to the harbor bottom. More than a hundred of her crew were lost.
“Salvaged and given temporary repairs at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, in April 1943 West Virginia steamed to the West Coast for final repair and modernization at the Puget Sound Navy Yard.”
It took considerably longer to assemble and identify remains of the victims.
“During efforts to salvage the USS West Virginia, Navy personnel recovered the remains of the deceased crewmen, representing at least 66 individuals,” according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). “Those who could not be identified, including Melton, were interred as unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu.
“From June through October 2017, DPAA, in cooperation with cemetery officials, disinterred 35 caskets, reported to be associated with the USS West Virginia from the Punchbowl, and transferred the remains to the DPAA laboratory.”
Brown said she and her husband, Herb, went to Birmingham, Ala., in 2018, where the Navy did a DNA swab on her.
Her uncle’s remains were identified on Feb. 1, 2021, with the use of dental, skeletal and DNA analysis. Almost the entire skeleton was recovered.
Brown volunteered to be the contact person for the return of Melton’s remains.
“His siblings are all dead, and there’s not many of us of the next generation,” she said.
“It’s been 80 years. I lacked three days of being a month old” when Melton died, she said.
One relative lives in New Orleans but agreed to let Brown handle the arrangements for Melton.
“We wanted him brought back to Liberty. We didn’t want him buried in New Orleans,” Brown said. “He was Mama’s youngest brother.”
The funeral will be held at Mount Pleasant because Melton’s parents are buried in the church cemetery.
According to a DPAA report, seven torpedoes struck the port (left) side of the West Virginia just before 8 a.m. Dec. 7. Oil fires from the adjacent USS Arizona spread to the West Virginia. Two bombs struck the deck but didn’t go off as the vessel sank to the shallow ocean floor in the harbor.
After the ship was raised and drained, officials found and buried the remains of 66 crew members in Hawaii. From 1947 to ‘49, authorities exhumed and identified the remains of all but 35 of the sailors. Melton was among the unknowns.
The case was closed until 2003 when the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command exhumed unknown sailors from the USS Oklahoma. The unknown sailors from the West Virginia were exhumed in 2017.
