John W. Finn, 100, Dies - Received Pearl Harbor Medal - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com
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John W. Finn, the end subsister of the 15 Navy men who standard the Medal of Honor for valour during the Japanese attempt on Pearl Harbor, died Thursday at a nursing plate in Chula Vista, Calif. He was 100 and had been the oldest life receiver of the palm, the commonwealth’s highest honour for gallantry.
His dying was proclaimed by J. P. Tremblay, surrogate repository of the California Department of Veterans Affairs.
On the daybreak of Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese planes bombed the American battleships in Hawaii, plunging the land into World War II, legion acts of gallantry played out. Most of them took berth alongside the struck ships — in approximately cases efforts by the maimed and the anxious to write their blighter sailors. Amid the dying and end, Chief Finn, on an field rail, was waging a war of his own against the Japanese.
A few transactions earlier 8 o’clock, Japanese planes attacked the Kaneohe Bay Naval Air Station, most 12 miles from Battleship Row at Ford Island, hoping to belt out ternary 12 Navy aircraft ahead they could get aloft.
Mr. Finn, the head lilliputian officeholder in tutelage of munitions at the naval place and a ex-serviceman of 15 years in the Navy, was in bed in a nearby flat with his wife, Alice. He heard the phone of aircraft, saw one sheet fanfare retiring his windowpane, so another, and he heard motorcar guns.
He appareled hastily, and horde to the naval send. At commencement, he discovered the groundwork’s 20 miles-per-hour speeding limitation. But so, “I heard a airplane arrive holloa in from abaft of me,” he recalled decades afterwards in an question with Larry Smith for “Beyond Glory,” an viva chronicle of Medal of Honor recipients.
“As I glanced up, the guy made a wing-over, and I saw that big old red meatball, the uprising sun insignia, on the undersurface of the annex. Well, I threw it into sec and it’s a curiosity I didn’t run ended alwaysy bluejacket in the air place.”
When Chief Finn arrived at the hangars, many of the planes had already been hit. He recalled that he grabbed a .30-caliber motorcar gun on a stopgap tripod, carried it to an uncovered domain nigh a track and began dismissal. For the adjacent two and a one-half hours, he blazed by, although peppered by shrapnel as the Japanese planes strafed the runways with carom flack.
As he remembered it: “I got stroke in the leftover arm and stab in the leftover base, stony-broke the ivory. I had shrapnel blows in my breast and paunch and correct cubitus and compensate hitch. Some were just scratches. My scalp got cut, and alwaysytrunk persuasion I was demise: Oh, Christ, the old honcho had the top of his brain knocked off! I had 28, 29 holes in me that were hemorrhage. I was walk-to some on one dog. I was barefoot on that coral disperse. My remaining arm didn’t workplace. It was just a big testicle suspension consume.”
Chief Finn intellection he had hit at least one flat, but he did not experience whether he had brought it kill. When the attempt terminated, he standard beginning aid, so returned to expect a potential indorsement onslaught. He was hospitalized the chase afternoon.
On Sept. 15, 1942, Chief Finn standard the Medal of Honor from Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, commandant in boss of the Pacific Fleet, in a ceremonial alongside the newsboy Enterprise at Pearl Harbor. Admiral Nimitz cited Chief Finn for his “splendid courageousness in the aspect of near sealed last.”
John William Finn was innate on July 23, 1909, in Los Angeles County, the son of a plumber. He dropped out of schooling to join the Navy at age 17.
He served stateside afterwards he healed from his Pearl Harbor wounds, became a deputy in 1944 and remained in military avail later the war. He had been aliveness on a kine spread in Pine Valley, Calif., some 45 miles e of San Diego, earlier incoming the nursing habitation where he died.
His survivors admit a son, Joseph. His wife died in 1998.
Ten of the 15 servicemen who standard the Medal of Honor for their actions at Pearl Harbor died in the attempt. Among them were Rear Adm. Isaac C. Kidd, commandant of Battleship Division 1, who was alongside the Arizona when it blew up and sank; Capt. Franklin Van Valkenburgh, commandant of the Arizona; and Capt. Mervyn S. Bennion, commandant of the battlewagon West Virginia.
Four of the Pearl Harbor ribbon recipients survived the war. Cmdr. Cassin Young, awarded the decoration for reboarding and redeeming his mending send, the Vestal, afterward beingness winded into the pee, died in November 1942 in the fight for Guadalcanal.
In 1999, Mr. Finn was among Pearl Harbor veterans invited to Hawaii for the premier of the Hollywood picture “Pearl Harbor.” “It was a damn effective flick,” he told The Boston Herald in 2001. “It’s helped civilise mass who didn’t acknowledge approximately Pearl Harbor and what happened thither.”
“I liked it particularly,” he aforesaid, “because I got to osculate all those reasonably petty picture actresses.”
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