Early December, 1941, Hardin, Montana

Ruby Murfin in Hibbing, Minnesota, 1937 showing off her new bought-on-time furniture and prosperity for her family.

Note—We are not quite finished with Pearl Harbor.  Herewith, a Murfin Memoir story of those days.

Mrs. Murfin, Ruby to her friends and family, was still in her chenille robe and slippers lingering over a strong cup of coffee perked on the range and listening idly to the stock reports from Omaha waiting for some morning music to come on when she heard the mail man pull up in his rattle-trap Model A truck and slam the door of the post box by the road.  Eager for some good news in those bleak days—maybe a letter from home or some Christmas cards.

For more than a week there had been nothing but talk of war on the radio, down at the grocery store, at the beauty parlor, even in Church.  Her husband Murf had grown sullen and restless.  After years of struggle and sometimes outright hunger, they were finally set.  He had a good job with prospects at the bank.  They just took out a mortgage on a snug little house.  But now Murf, an old married man of 28 and probably safe from the Draft for at least a while, wanted to throw it all away and run off to enlist.  Ruby could use some cheer.

So she rushed out of the house letting the heavy storm door slam after her.  It was in the teens and the wind howled down the mountains to the west and swept the little town on the prairie.  A couple of inches of fresh, dry, powdery snow swirled along the ground, her bare toes in the mule slippers hardly noticing.  She pulled the robe tight around her and dashed to the road and the mail box on the post, its little red flag up and signaling there was mail.

Down town Hardin, Montana, seat of Big Horn County about 1930.  It hadn't changed much by '41.

Inside, shivering at the table, Ruby poured another cup of coffee and measured a spoon of sugar into its blackness. She sorted through the small bundle.  Yes, some cards.  Looked like a letter from little sister Mildred.  A butcher and the telephone bill.  The weekly church bulletin and something for Murf from the Masons.  And…what’s this!...a squarish pastel blue tissue envelope edge all around with red and blue stripes…Air Mail!  From Oahu…addressed to her!

She didn’t know anybody in Hawaii and if it had not been in the news all week would have had no idea where Oahu was.  She peered at the envelope intently.  She thought she recognized the smoothly looping Palmer method handwriting.  Her heart suddenly sank.  Her hands trembled.  She laid aside the rest of the mail and held the envelope in her hands for several moments before slitting it open with a paring knife.

“Dear Daughter Ruby,” it began.  “I know you have not heard from me for a good long while, but as you see, I’m in Honolulu…”

No she had not seen him for a long time, nor had she missed him.  Sometimes he haunted her nightmare.  He had long since abandoned the family or the family had abandoned him.  Six of on, half a dozen of the other.  Good riddance, either way.

Mona and Lemuel Mills on their wedding day in 1910.  He hardly looked like a monster then.  The only picture of him the family kept.

Lemuel Mills had been a vicious drunk.  Born into a good family he had wasted once bright prospects and even in the boom days of the ‘20’s the family had half-starved on a neglected Missouri farm.  And he had beat his wife Mona terribly and often in his rages and spared not his children including Ruby, the eldest daughter his discipline.  One summer evening in the park in Kirksville he had caught a glimpse of him raping a high school class mate in the bushes.  In shame and terror she had said nothing.

It got so bad that one night Mona packed up the kids while Lem was out on a toot with his gang of lay-about pals, and fled the whole damn state of Missouri in his broken down Fliver.  The fled to Mona’s sister Myrtle and her husband Vern’s in in Des Moines.  After a while Lem found them there and after an infusion of corn courage, kicked the front door down blasting his shotgun as everyone fled out the back door or jumped through widows. 

The Sheriff got him and after a couple of month in the cooler got out with a stern warning not to be found in town again.  The deputies, friends of Vern, may have thrown him on a freight train.  No one had seen or heard from him since.

Ruby went back to Kirksville and married the handsome boy who had courted her in high school—Will Murfin, the son of the music store manager.  She always called him Murf.  He worked in the Bank which never re-opened after FDR’s bank holiday.  After that he could not find good, steady work for years.

They had to go back to Iowa and move in with Myrtle and Vern again.  Murf peddled vacuum cleaners door to door for a while.  No one was buying.  He got on here and there as a store clerk for a while, but it always petered out.  It was not until 1937 that he landed a job as teller in a Hibbing, Minnesota bank, more than five years into marriage, that they had finally been able to establish themselves as a married couple on their own in a cozy three room apartment.  Ruby sent pictures home to Mona proudly posing with bought-on-time Sears furniture and cathedral radio.

That had led, eventually here to Hardin where Murf was promised that if he worked hard he could become vice president of the bank in a few years.  Not long after settling in Ruby finally became pregnant.  It was a difficult birth and within two days the baby Murf had already nicknamed Butch was dead and lay beneath a small stone inscribed “William Infant Son.”

She had sunk into black depression and Murf went a little wild and crazy, taking to the mountains with his Mason buddy Hollis Johnson and Yellow Tail, the Chief at near-by Crow Agency for long hunts.  Try as she might, Ruby could not conceive another child.

They were just getting back to a semblance of normal when they heard the news about Pearl Harbor on the radio after Church.  Ruby was frightened.  Murf seemed exhilarated.

Now this letter in her hands brought it all back.

Hickam Field under attack on December 7, 1941.  Somewhere there Lemuel Mills was scrambling for cover.

It went on to say that he had taken to working construction on some of the big projects out west.  He ended up in a civilian construction gang at Hickam Field, living on the base in barracks.  That Sunday morning he was sleeping off last night’s Honolulu binge when he was awaked by explosions and machine gun chatter.  He ran outside and saw the swooping planes.  Dodging strafing runs he ran to a slit trench and dived in.  After a seeming eternity the noise stopped and he emerged.

“Just wanted you to know the old man is safe,” he wrote and added a clumsy sentiment that invited a reply to the hotel address on the envelope.

Weeping, Ruby, laid the letter down.  She never answered it.  That evening she told Murf, “He thinks this makes him a hero.”

Just after the New Year Murf was gone to basic training at Camp Grant in Illinois.  Ruby tried to busy herself with war work in Hardin—organizing scrap drives, bond sales, and knitting projects with the Ladies Aid.  She was good at it.  Always a go-getter and organizer when presented with a challenge.  It kept her, mostly, from slipping back into the blackness.

She saw Murf on furlough before he went to the California desert to train with a Field Hospital.  Then he was shipped out.  After a long wait not knowing where he was going, she got a letter from Cape Town telling her that he was on his way by ship around Africa and up the Red Sea to Egypt where the hospital would be attached to the British and Anzacs fighting Rommel.

Ruby gave up the snug little house in Hardin and moved to Omaha to work in the Boeing plant with her younger sister Mildred.  Murf came back stateside for Officer Candidate School and they spent about three months together while he was posted to Ft. Lewis in Washington State.  And then he was gone again into the green hell of the Pacific War—landings at Leyte in the Philippines, Guam, and Okinawa. 

Late in ’46 he came back, a changed man.  They lived in Helena and then he opened a sporting goods store and hunting guide service in West Yellowstone.  It went bust.  He went crazy again for a while.  To settle them both down they adopted twin boys at birth in ’49.

Ruby never heard from Lemuel again.  When her brother Pearl, now a doctor, got word that he died in Arizona in the ‘70’s, he went out there to arrange a burial and “make sure the bastard was dead and piss on his grave.”

Admiral Murfin and The Day That Lives in Infamy

Today is December 7, a date so significant in American history almost every one—except recent high school graduates who never got that far in their pitiful history survey classes—immediately recognizes.  Yes, it is “a date that shall live in infamy,” in the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the day when the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hickam Field, and other naval and military installations in Hawaii. 

I’m betting you know at least the rough details of that catastrophe, so this post is not going to detail them.  If not, look it up.

I am going to take the opportunity to explore a kinship relationship, albeit a distant one, with a historical personage connected to the events. 

Actually, I also have a much closer connection, too.  Lemuel Mills, my maternal grandfather, was a civilian construction worker on Ford Island who came under personal fire that Sunday morning.  He shared the story in a letter to his daughter, my mother, Ruby Irene Mills Murfin.  She was not pleased to hear from the nasty, drunken, abusive father who had abandoned her mother, to no one’s regret, years before.  Even dodging Japanese bullets couldn’t make a hero out of the man so despised by his family that when he died in Arizona years later my Uncle Pearl Mills—no that isn’t a typo, that was his name—went all the way there from South Dakota just to make sure the bastard was dead and piss on his grave.

Anyway, my distant kinsman Admiral Orin Gould Murfin, is the one I want to write about today.  Not that he was there that Sunday.  The Admiral had recently retired stateside after serving from 1936 to late 1940 as Commander of the 14th Naval District, headquartered at Pearl Harbor.  But in 1944 he was called out of retirement to become the President of the Navy Court of Inquiry of the attack.  This is his story.

Murfin was born on April 13, 1876 at Hanging Rock, Ohio.  His father was an engineer of the coal fired furnaces used in the iron and steel industries.  By the age of four the family had relocated to Wellston, Ohio where his father was superintendent of Superior Coal Plant #1.

The boy was such a bright and eager student that he obtained an appointment to the Naval Academy after completing his junior year of high school.  He graduated from the Academy in 1897 and although he saw no action in the Spanish-American War advanced rapidly in the Navy.  He was a full Lieutenant in 1902, very rapid advancement indeed.

By World War I Murfin was a Captain.  He was decorated for his service as the commander of U.S. mine laying bases in Scotland.  His greatest achievement was laying the Northern Mine Barrage--57,000 mines laid across the North Sea from the Orkney Islands off Scotland to the three mile limit off Bergen, Norway.  The mine field effectively hemmed in the German fleet to  home waters and cut off virtually all remaining maritime trade.  His citation for the Navy Distinguished Service Medal cited “the pioneer work performed by Captain Murfin in the establishment of the bases and the development and administration of the industrial organization required.”

Those organizational and technical skills accelerated Murfin’s career even through the period of Naval Disarmament of the 1920’s.  He was the final Captain of the venerable cruiser the USS Alabany (CL-23) and was named in 1929 Captain of the USS West Virginia, then the largest and newest of the Navy’s battleships.

In 1930 he made rear admiral and in 1931 was named Judge Advocate of the United States Navy. This shore assignment gave the newly minted Admiral experience in legal and administrative affairs that would be called on in the future.

But you can’t keep a blue water sailor ashore for long.  After three years at a desk he was named Commander of the 3rd Division of the Battleship Fleet in the Atlantic.

As the Navy’s attention shifted to Asia and the Pacific so did Murfin’s career.  After serving as President of the board of inquiry of the crash of the Navy Airship Macon into the Pacific in 1935, he was advanced to Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic Fleet. During this assignment he gained public notice for conducting the search for missing aviatrix Amelia Earhardt.  During this assignment, he was promoted to full four star Admiral.

Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, looking south in October 1941reflected many of the expansions improvements made under Admiral Murfin’s command.  

Murfin’s final duty assignment was as Commander of the 14th District at Pearl Harbor.  At first glance, this might seem a come down from a Fleet command.  But it came as the Navy was increasingly alarmed by Japanese aggression and growing naval might and was beefing up its greatest naval base, Pearl Harbor.  Admiral Murfin was expected to bring his noted administrative skills to upgrading and expanding the facilities, along with forward bases at Midway and Wake Islands while making plans to defend them from possible attack. 

When he retired, those plans were well underway.  I am sure the Admiral thought he had done everything in his considerable powers to carry out his duty.

How his heart must have sunk as, like most Americans, he heard the news of the attack on December 7 on the radio.  Within days the scope of the disaster became clear—the destruction of much of the heart of the Pacific Fleet, including many of its great battleships, at their moorage or in dry dock.  Only the fortunate fact that the Fleets’s two carriers were at sea averted total disaster.

 

Admiral Murfin, President of the Naval Court of Inquiry

The Admiral hoped to be recalled to active duty.  It didn’t happen.   But then in 1944 he was recalled to the Presidency of the Navy Court of Inquiry.  He was perfectly qualified by his experience as Judge Advocate and as President of the Macon Board of Inquiry, but the appointment raised eyebrows in and out of the Navy.  He would be called to judge the performance of many close former comrades, some of whose careers he had personally mentored and who he had appointed to high positions as well as those of his superiors in Washington.  And it was a fact that a good portion of the defense plans for Pearl Harbor had been drawn up under his watch, although they had been somewhat modified by the time of the attack.

No matter how you looked at it, the assignment was a hot potato.  Inside the Navy and Army officer corps was a wide spread belief that the first official inquiry, hastily assembled at President Roosevelt’s direction by General George C. Marshall, was something of a kangaroo court aimed at scapegoating the on scene commanders, Admiral Husband Kimmel, of the  Pacific Fleet, and Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, Army’s Hawaiian Department to protect higher-ups in Washington including General Marshal himself and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Herald Stark.

On the other hand, pressure was growing in Congress for a more complete investigation. 

Murfin’s Board of Inquiry wove a path in between.  It was critical enough of high command to earn the wrath of both Marshall, who thought that it was too harsh on the high command  and Secretary of the Navy James Forestall, who felt it was to lenient.  But it still lay most of the blame on Kimmel and Short.  Missing from the equation was the full knowledge of the extent to which Naval Intelligence had broken Japanese Naval codes and exactly what was known about enemy intentions and movements in Washington.  Most of the intelligence, which might have effected operational decisions, was denied to the commanders in the Pacific.

Today Admiral Murfin is most frequently noted by authors in the mini-industry that has sprung up around investigating Pearl Harbor.  Ranging from crack-pot conspiracy nuts to serious historians, most have criticized Murfin and his investigation as being lax on Washington.  Thus an extraordinary officer with an unblemished record enters history as a footnote and a failure.

The Admiral died October 22, 1956 at the age of 80.