Buried At Sea: The Life and Loss of Corporal Earl H. Rector, USMC

In the Ghosts of the Battlefield collection are several small pieces of metal that once represented something intensely personal to a family in Hampton, Virginia: the medals of Corporal Earl Howard Rector, United States Marine Corps. Among them is his named Purple Heart, accompanied by his Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, American Defense Service Medal, and World War II Victory Medal.

They are not medals belonging to an admiral, a famous aviator, or one of the celebrated names of the Pacific War. They belonged to a young Marine whose wartime service carried him aboard one of the most famous aircraft carriers in American history and ultimately cost him his life.

Earl Howard Rector was born in Virginia on June 6, 1918. By the time the United States entered World War II, he was serving in the Marine Corps and had risen to the rank of corporal. Official Marine casualty records identify him as service number 288653 and assign him to the Marine Detachment aboard USS Hornet (CV-8). Virginia's wartime casualty records list his mother, Etta D. Rector, in Hampton as his next of kin. That assignment placed Rector aboard a ship that, despite an extraordinarily short career, would become one of the best-known American warships of World War II.

Hornet was the third and final ship of the Yorktown class. Commissioned in October 1941, she had been in service for only a few weeks when Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war. In April 1942 she carried sixteen Army B-25 Mitchell bombers across the Pacific for the Doolittle Raid, launching them toward Japan in the first American air strike against the Japanese home islands. Less than two months later, Hornet fought at Midway, where American carrier aircraft destroyed four Japanese fleet carriers and dramatically altered the course of the Pacific War.

Those achievements are an important part of Rector's story, but they can also obscure men like him. The history books naturally remember the carrier, her aircraft, her commanders, and the famous operations launched from her flight deck. Rector was one of the Marines living and working inside that history.

Shipboard Marine detachments were a long-standing part of life aboard major U.S. Navy warships. They provided security and performed shipboard duties while also serving as part of the vessel's fighting organization. Rector was therefore not merely being transported aboard Hornet. The carrier was his duty station. Her steel compartments were where he ate, slept, stood watch, worked, and prepared for battle.

By the autumn of 1942, that duty station had become one of America's most valuable surviving carriers.

The campaign for Guadalcanal had consumed ships, aircraft, and men at an alarming rate. USS Wasp had been sunk in September. USS Saratoga had been damaged. Enterprise had also taken damage. For a period, Hornet carried an enormous share of the burden in the South Pacific as American and Japanese forces fought over Guadalcanal and the sea lanes surrounding it. Official Marine Corps history describes Hornet during this period as the only undamaged American fleet carrier remaining in the South Pacific.

On October 26, 1942, Corporal Rector went to his battle station as Hornet entered what became the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. The battle was fought largely beyond visual range of the opposing fleets. American and Japanese carriers launched aircraft against one another, leaving the ships themselves waiting for attacks they knew were coming but could not see until aircraft appeared overhead. For the men aboard Hornet, that attack arrived during the morning.

Japanese dive bombers and torpedo aircraft broke through the carrier's defenses and descended on the ship. Bombs struck her flight deck and penetrated into the spaces below. Torpedoes slammed into her hull. One damaged Japanese dive bomber crashed into the carrier near the stack and flight deck as anti-aircraft fire, smoke, exploding ammunition, and burning fuel transformed the ship into a battlefield. Official Navy photographs taken during the attack capture Hornet surrounded by aircraft, shell bursts, smoke, and water columns from near misses. Somewhere in that violence was Corporal Earl Howard Rector.

The surviving official records are brutally concise about what happened to him. They do not give us a dramatic final sentence, a witness standing beside him, or certainty about which bomb or fragment caused his death. They simply record that Corporal Rector, Marine Detachment, USS Hornet, was killed in action on October 26, 1942. He was one of several Marines from the ship's detachment killed that day.

That spare entry is important because it keeps us from inventing a final moment for him simply because history failed to record one. We know where he was. We know who he served with. We know what happened to his ship. And we know that he did not survive it.

The crew fought desperately to save Hornet. Fires were attacked, damage-control parties struggled with flooding and shattered systems, and efforts were made to restore power and tow the immobilized carrier. Eventually the damage became impossible to overcome and the order was given to abandon ship. American destroyers attempted to scuttle her after the surviving crew had been removed, but Hornet stubbornly remained afloat. Japanese destroyers finally torpedoed the carrier, sending her beneath the Pacific. Navy records list six officers and seventy enlisted men of the ship's company killed in action.

The loss of Hornet became one of the great stories of the early Pacific War. Yet for Rector's family in Virginia, the strategic meaning of Santa Cruz must have mattered far less than one name among the casualties. Earl was gone.

His named Purple Heart became the physical acknowledgment of that loss. Unlike the vast carrier resting on the bottom of the Pacific, it was something that could return home. It bore his name. It could be held. It could be placed in a drawer, a box, or beside a photograph. It transformed the enormous machinery of war back into something painfully individual.  That is why Rector's medals matter so much today.

Artifacts associated with famous ships often become stories about the ship. It is easy to understand why. Hornet carried the Doolittle Raiders. She fought at Midway. She fought through the Guadalcanal campaign and died at Santa Cruz. Her career lasted barely a year, yet it contains enough history for volumes.

But Corporal Rector was not an accessory to the story of USS Hornet.  USS Hornet is part of the story of Corporal Rector.

He was a 24-year-old Marine from Hampton whose service placed him aboard that ship during one of the most desperate periods of the Pacific War. He had already been aboard during events that would become legendary before his own life was cut short in a battle thousands of miles from Virginia.

More than eighty years later, the objects that survive from his service have returned to the same region from which he came.

Ghosts of the Battlefield now preserves Corporal Rector's named Purple Heart and his other service medals in Hampton Roads, only a short distance from the community that once sent him into the Marine Corps. They are small objects compared with an aircraft carrier, but that difference in scale is precisely what gives them their power. A carrier can tell us how a war was fought.  A man's medals tell us who paid for it.

Visitors looking at Rector's display do not need to know every movement of the Battle of Santa Cruz or every specification of a Yorktown-class carrier to understand what they are seeing. They are standing before objects connected directly to a young Virginian who entered the Marine Corps, went to sea aboard one of America's most famous warships, and was killed when that ship fought its final battle.

USS Hornet disappeared beneath the Pacific in 1942. Earl Howard Rector did not disappear with her. His name survived in Marine Corps records. His family preserved his memory. His medals survived the decades. Today those medals allow his story to be told not as a footnote to the history of a famous carrier, but as the story of one of the Marines who made that history possible. That is the responsibility of preserving objects like these. The medal itself is not the history.

The man is.