Seventy-six years after he died at Pearl Harbor, a Navy chaplain who helped sailors escape from a sinking battleship is scheduled to be honored with the Silver Star medal Thursday in a ceremony at his alma mater in Iowa.
Lt. j.g. Aloysius H. Schmitt, a Catholic priest from St. Lucas, Iowa, will posthumously receive the third-highest decoration for valor in combat during a ceremony at Loras College, in Dubuque.
The Navy’s chief of chaplains, Rear Adm. Margaret Kibben, will present the medal to family members during a ceremony on the campus
Schmitt was buried in a special crypt there after his remains were identified last year by experts with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA).
He had been aboard the USS Oklahoma when it was torpedoed and capsized during the attack on Dec. 7, 1941. His remains were not accounted for at first, because the bodies of most of the sailors and Marines recovered from the ship were too jumbled and decomposed to be identified.
The USS Oklahoma was sunk by several bombs and torpedoes during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. A total of 429 crew died when the ship capsized. (National Archives and Records Administration)
[Identifying the dead from a sunken Pearl Harbor battleship]
Father Schmitt, 32, had just celebrated Mass that Sunday morning when the Oklahoma was hit by at least nine Japanese torpedoes.
The battleship, with its complement of 1,300, quickly rolled over in 50 feet of water, trapping hundreds of men below decks.
Thirty-two were saved by rescue crews who heard them banging for help, cut into the hull and made their way through a maze of darkened, flooded compartments to reach them.
Others managed to escape by swimming underwater to find their way out. Some trapped sailors tried to stem the rushing water with rags and even the board from a game. One distraught man tried to drown himself.
A few managed to escape through portholes — saved by brave comrades such as Schmitt, who is said to have helped as many as 12 sailors get out of a small compartment.
In 1942, he was honored with the noncombat Navy and Marine Corps Medal. But after recent appeals by supporters and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), the Navy conducted a review and in October upgraded the medal to the combat award.
The citation details his bravery.
When the ship capsized, he and “other members of the crew, became trapped in a compartment where only a small porthole provided outlet for escape.
“With unselfish disregard for his own plight, he assisted his shipmates through the aperture. When they in turn were in the process of rescuing him, his body became tightly wedged in the narrow opening.
“Realizing that other men had come into the compartment seeking a way out, [he] . . . insisted he be pushed back into the ship so the others might escape. Calmly urging them on with . . . his blessing, he remained behind while his shipmates crawled out to safety. In so doing, he gallantly gave up his life for his country.”
The Oklahoma’s loss of life — a total of 429 sailors and Marines — was second only to the 1,100 lost on the USS Arizona. The attack at Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into World War II.
Most of the Oklahoma’s dead were found in the wreckage during the months-long salvage operation and were buried as “unknowns” in a cemetery in Hawaii.
In 2015, the Pentagon exhumed the remains of what are believed to be 388 of them. With the help of enhanced technology and techniques, experts have been gradually making identifications. Schmitt was identified with the help of DNA retrieved from a skull bone and matched with that of a relative. Last week, the DPAA announced that it had identified its 100th person from the Oklahoma.
“It’s been 76 years,” Steve Sloan, a great-nephew of Schmitt’s, said Wednesday from Dubuque. “It’s pretty overwhelming.”
As for “Father Al,” Sloan said, “I suspect he wouldn’t want any of this attention. . . . He was a common guy . . . an eastern Iowa farm boy.”
