Sergeant Henry C. Blackwell, US Army, Service Number 20920836, was born on May 27, 1921 in Texas. He enlisted in the CA Army National Guard’s 251st Coast Artillery (CA) Regiment (Anti-Aircraft), while living in South Gate, CA. His unit was mobilized on 16 September 1940; then in November 1940, deployed for duty at Camp Malakole, on the Island of Oahu.

Blackwell, along with his fellow soldier Corporal Clyde C. Brown, had been trained to be private pilots during their off-duty time on Oahu. On the morning of 7 December 1941, Blackwell and Brown both rented Piper Cub airplanes from Robert and Edna Tyce, the owners of K-T Flying Service, located on John Rodgers Airport, in Honolulu. One additional soldier from the 251st, Sergeant Warren D. Rasmussen, accompanied Blackwell and Brown, in order to ride along as a sightseeing passenger.

Shortly after taking off at 7:40 am, while flying offshore from Pearl Harbor, both aircraft were shot down by attacking Japanese fighters. A sailor aboard a Navy tugboat, later recalled in a sworn deposition, seeing two yellow Cub airplanes flying offshore at about 500 feet in altitude, being attacked by several aircraft. The sailor went on to say he observed one club go straight into the ocean, while the other circled for a moment before also diving into the water.

Blackwell, along with Brown and Rasmussen, was declared Missing in Action, Non-Recoverable (Killed in Action) on 7 December 1941. They were all awarded the Purple Heart, are memorialized in the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii and are generally recognized as having been the first military casualties of the Pearl Harbor attack.

Note: Remains washed ashore near Ft Armstrong on 31 December 1941. They were initially interred in the Post Cemetery at Schofield Barracks, then after the war, transferred to grave A-780 in the National Memorial Cemetery. As of December, 2021, these remains are under investigation as Unknown Case #238 and still remain unresolved.

This story was contributed by John Harris.

According to Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness by Craig Nelson, Blackwell and Brown were scheduled to return to California on December 8. They wanted to take one last look at Hawaii from the skies.

According to the article “First Planes Down at Pearl” by Stephen Hariding, there was a fourth man who was supposed to part of the early morning flight, but he chose to sleep in instead.

This story is part of the Stories Behind the Stars project (see www.storiesbehindthestars.org). This is a national effort of volunteers to write the stories of all 400,000+ of the US WWII fallen on Together We Served and Fold3. Can you help write these stories? Related to this, there will be a smart phone app that will allow people to visit any war memorial or cemetery, scan the fallen's name and read his/her story.

Sources:

http://libraryjournal.com

http://grizzly.shorthandstories.com

https://www.historynet.com/first-planes-down-at-pearl.htm

http://militarymuseum.org/251stea.html

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/56115568/henry-c-blackwell

Ancestry.com

Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness by Craig Nelson

Blackwell, Henry C., Sgt

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