Harry H. Gaver

Portrait photograph of Gaver in full military uniform. Reproduced from Missing Marines.

Gaver (#46) as captain of the lacrosse team during his senior year at UVA. Reproduced from Missing Marines.

Harry Hamilton Gaver, Jr. (October 27, 1917 - December 7, 1941) was the first alumnus of the University of Virginia to die in World War II, meeting his end during the surprise Japanese military strike on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Biography

Early life and University of Virginia

Gaver was born on October 27, 1917 in Annapolis, Maryland. He was the only child of Helen and Harry “H. H.” Gaver, Sr., a mathematics instructor at the Naval Academy. During the mid-1920's, Gaver's father was offered the headmaster’s position at the Urban Military Academy, a boarding and day school for boys in Hollywood, California. Following that school's transition into the Black-Foxe Military Institute in 1928, he was appointed its first headmaster. During this time, Gaver was pulled from Severn School and was instead enrolled at Black-Foxe.

Gaver graduated from Black-Foxe in 1935 and entered the University of Virginia (his father’s alma mater) that same year. He was reported to have excelled in athletics, captaining the school’s tennis and lacrosse teams and serving as the head cheerleader for the UVA Cavaliers by his senior year. He was also a member of UVA’s “Eli Banana,” the Kappa Sigma Zeta fraternity, the German Club, and the secretive “Thirteen Society.” Gaver studied engineering and received his Bachelor of Science from the school in 1939.

Military training

On April 26, 1937, Gaver joined the Marine Corps Reserve during his sophomore year of college. He spent that summer training with the Eastern Platoon Leaders Class in Quantico, becoming well-versed in the duties of a Marine officer. After graduating from UVA, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant on July 28, 1939, spending two weeks “under instruction” with Company C of the 5^th Marines and subsequently being placed on temporary inactive duty status. He reported back to Quantico on September 27 of that year for assignment to a reserve officer’s course, which he completed on November 10. Along with some of his classmates, Gaver was then transferred to California in order to join the Fleet Marine Force. His assignment was to Company G of the 6th Marines, which at that time was stationed in San Diego. Following another period “under instruction” (which included accompanying a recruit platoon through boot camp), Gaver was placed on active duty status as a qualified infantry officer.

Over the next few months and into the first half of 1940, Gaver served with various companies of the 6^th and 8^th Marines, even temporarily commanding the Second Battalion of the 8th Marines on amphibious landing exercises off the California coast. Later that year, while attending The Basic School (an institution in which Gaver was at the top of his class), he resigned his reserve commission and became a Regular officer with the service number of O-6254. In early 1941, he was ordered to the naval base at Norfolk, Virginia and there joined the USS Oklahoma, soon afterwards sailing for the Territory of Hawaii for duty at Pearl Harbor. From June to December of that year, Gaver served as the junior officer of the Oklahoma’s Marine detachment.

Service and death

On December 7, 1941, Gaver was on duty on the Oklahoma. The ship's crew, in preparation for a captain’s inspection that morning, had opened all of the vessel's hatches, significantly impairing its ability to remain watertight. When the first wave of Japanese bombers began attacking Pearl Harbor just before 8:00 a.m. (Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time), the crew of the Oklahoma scrambled for general quarters but found that water began to pour through the open hatches as the battleship was struck again and again by bombs and torpedoes. Desperate to escape the incoming torrent of water, the crew members thus began streaming back up from below decks and consequently left the hatches open. During the last minutes of his life, Gaver tried to close the ship's hatches in an attempt to keep the vessel afloat. As was later described by Ensign Paul Backus,

"…I went around the barbette of turret one and started aft. I passed Second Lieutenant Gaver. He was on his knees, attempting to close a hatch on the port side, alongside the barbette. This hatch was part of the trunk which led from the main deck to the magazines and was used for striking down ammunition. There were men trying to come up from below at the time Harry was trying to close the hatch. No one who survived the attack saw Harry again. He too was killed that morning."

Burial

Excerpt of Gaver's obituary from the May 5, 1942 edition of the Los Angeles Times. Reproduced from Missing Marines.

None of the remains that were initially recovered from the Oklahoma were identified as belonging to Gaver. A telegram sent to his family stating that he was missing was quickly followed by the news that he was presumed dead, with Gaver later being declared permanently nonrecoverable as he was believed to be lost at sea.

After the Oklahoma was righted and refloated in early 1944, a number of teams searched through years of accumulated muck for human remains, with those that were recovered being buried in 52 mass graves in the Halawa and Nuuanu Cemeteries on the island of Oahu. Following the end of World War II, these graves were exhumed with the intent of identifying as many of the dead as possible before their reinterment in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. Only 49 men could be identified by the end of 1949, with the remainder being buried in 46 common graves in Honolulu. In 2015, an official directive was passed to exhume the graves of the Oklahoma’s final crew, with modern science and DNA analysis finally identifying Gaver's remains alongside over 100 others. He was thus officially accounted for on January 27, 2017.

Legacy

Gaver's death was reported to have caused a shockwave that permeated through both the Black-Foxe and UVA communities. Frank Murray, the head coach of the UVA football team during this time, later stated,

"The war came closest to the kids here when they heard Harry Gaver was dead. Harry had played lacrosse and had been a cheer leader here. He was on the Oklahoma in Pearl Harbor…. Never had a chance. All the kids here knew Harry. You know what the reaction was, the personal, selfish reaction that was in there with the sorrow and the anger and all that? They played the harder. They went out for sports more. And it was easy to see that they felt, we’ll get this in while we can, we’ll do it while there’s time and it’ll help us for what’s ahead."