William Walker Ford was born on April 2, 1922 in Kenton County Kentucky. His parents, Marion Walker Ford and Eula Kite, also had a daughter, Ruth. Marion Ford owned a grocery store and was a veteran of WWI. He died in 1931 when his son was only 9 years old.

William’s mother worked as a beautician. She remarried in 1932 to George P. Evans. William graduated from Holmes High School in Covington, Kentucky in 1940. On September 5, 1940 William, joined along with a friend and fellow graduate, Edward Alfred Walther, join the Navy. Their families lived a two-minute walk apart in Covington.

After training both William and his friend were assigned to the USS Arizona. William had attained the rank of Electrician’s Mate 3rd Class by the time of his death in the Japanese attack.

At the onset of the December 7, 1941 attack, the battleship USS Arizona (BB-39) was moored at berth Fox 7 on “Battleship Row.” The repair ship Vestal (AR-4) was on the port side; and the starboard side faced the northeastern shore of Ford Island. Just before 8 am, the ship’s air raid alarm sounded and the crew was ordered to general quarters. During the attack the battleship was struck by as many as eight aerial bombs, including one 1,700 lb. armor-piercing shell which penetrated the deck near the Number 2 turret and detonated in the smokeless powder magazine, causing a “cataclysmic” explosion “which destroyed the ship forward” and ignited a fire which burned for two days. Most of the Arizona crewmen who perished in the attack died instantly during the explosion. The ship quickly sank to the bottom of the harbor along with 1,177 of the 1,512 personnel on board, representing about half the total number of Americans killed that day.

EM3c Ford’s mother was first told that he was not on the Navy casualty list for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but that was soon followed by an official government telegram saying he was missing.

It was almost another year, his mother wrote to the Cincinnati Enquirer, before he was officially declared dead in the attack of Dec. 7, 1941. During her long wait, she visited a military hospital in Maysville, Kentucky, where unidentified war wounded were being treated. Some men were screaming in torment. One man asked “Am I your boy?”

“We were grateful they were not ours,” she wrote 50 years later, “but so burdened for them…. After knowing what I do about those who survived, I thank the Lord that he took my boy in the first bomb. He didn’t have to go through that war, and I expect to be with him again for eternity.”

EM3c William Walker Ford (Serial Number 2797262) is entombed in the hull of the USS Arizona, as is his friend Edward Alfred Walther.

In May 1942, William received an honor when he was “posthumously appointed aide de camp on Governor Johnson’s staff with the rank of Colonel for valor and heroism displayed in the discharge of his duties during the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

This story was originally created for the USS Arizona Mall Memorial project at the University of Arizona.

Sources: The Cincinnati (Ohio) Enquirer; the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald; the Kentucky Post (Covington, KY); Census; Navy muster roll; War Department headstone application for military veterans; U.S. Defense Department.

Ford, William Walker, EM3c