SAN ANGELO, Texas — Eighty-one years ago, three young residents of the small town of San Angelo, Texas, found themselves at the center of a brutal, fiery, unprovoked attack that would forever alter the course of history on this planet.
Hawaii had not yet become the 50th state, they were 3,500 miles from home as the holiday season was in full swing, and two of them would not make it back.
Those three young men, Walton Erwin, James Martin and Ernest Shawn were honored Wednesday in San Angelo, along with more than 3,000 other soldiers, sailors and Marines who were killed or wounded on Dec. 7, 1941, or what President Franklin Roosevelt would succinctly describe as “a date which will live in infamy.”
On Wednesday’s National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, Goodfellow Air Force Base offered “A Special Tribute to San Angelo Sons” — a wreath laying and plaque unveiling in Fairmount Cemetery.
Seaman First Class Walton Aluard Erwin worked at a grocery store before his service. Upon graduation from San Angelo High School in 1940, he enlisted in the Navy and received training in San Diego before sailing the Pacific to Oahu. He was aboard the USS Arizona at the time of the attack, and had just celebrated his 21st birthday earlier that summer.
Seaman Erwin’s remains rest inside the Arizona, along with more than 1,100 of his shipmates, all of whom are memorialized by name on the “Courts of the Missing” in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
In addition to San Angelo, Boatswain’s Mate First Class James Albert Martin had also called Coleman and Schleicher County home at one time before enlisting in the Navy on June 7, 1933, and after his training in San Diego, he spent his entire military career assigned to the USS Arizona. His parents lived on Pulliam Street when they learned of the attack.
Earlier in 1941, Martin was cited for courageous action, swimming out to another vessel stranded on a coral reef and helping to save the lives of the men on that ship.
Only 25 years old, his body was also never recovered from the USS Arizona.
Gunner’s Mate First Class Ernest M. Shawn lived with his family on West 20th Street, and worked as a delivery driver for his father’s grocery store before enlisting in the Navy in the summer of 1940.
In the chaos of the attack, he was able to dive overboard from the USS Arizona and swim to nearby Ford Island, just before the ship sank.
He later participated in the Battle of Midway and operations in the Solomon Islands before returning home to San Angelo.
He died June 28, 1998, and was laid to rest in Belvedere Cemetery on Arden Road.
By the end of that world-altering but somehow just 75-minute span in 1941, 2,403 US military personnel at Pearl Harbor were dead or mortally wounded, a number that would be roughly 8% of San Angelo’s entire population that year.
“Today we played eight bells to signal their end of watch, and we unveiled a marker for Seaman Erwin, next to his parents’ grave,” Lt. Cmdr. Mark Wess, Officer in Charge of Goodfellow's Navy Detachment, said at the ceremony.
“When the hardworking citizens of San Angelo spend their money and take a trip to Hawaii, and visit the USS Arizona Memorial, they’re gonna look up there and they’re gonna see Seaman Erwin’s name, they’re gonna see Petty Officer Martin’s name, and they’re gonna be proud. And when they teach history in schools, they’re gonna know about the stories of Erwin and Martin. And they’re gonna learn how Petty Officer Shawn courageously served in Midway and the battles of the Solomons, and they’re gonna have that pride in the community, to know that San Angelo answered the call.”
