Eighty-four years after the Pearl Harbor attack, the remains of one of the last victims to be identified from the battleship USS West Virginia have come home to North Carolina.
Mess Attendant 3rd Class Neil Frye was 20 years old when he was killed.
In later wars, families would learn of a service member's death from a uniformed notification team to cushion the blow. But it was 1941, so word that Frye was missing and presumed dead simply came by telegram to his family, who lived on a farm in the small community of Vass, North Carolina.
"The postmaster brought it out and read it to my mom and dad, and that’s how they found out," said the last of Frye's nine siblings still living, Mary Ruth Frye McCrimmon, 87.
Weeks later, a tricycle her brother had heard she wanted arrived from Hawaii.
All the Frye siblings worked to keep the family farm going, helping harvest tobacco and cotton and driving tractors before they even turned 10 years old.
But the fact that Neil Frye’s body hadn’t been identified became a kind of undercurrent in family history, sparking the tiny possibility that somehow he hadn’t died.
"My mom used to say she loved to people watch. She would go anywhere she could get a chance to go to a little town and just watch all the men go by to see if she could see Neil," McCrimmon said.
In more recent years, several family members sent the military DNA samples, with the hope that they could be matched to remains of unidentified service members.
In 2014, the family heard the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA, was hosting regular regional meetings to keep families of the missing updated.
For more than a decade, members of the Frye family attended these, traveling as far as Georgia to hear the latest news on MIA identifications, even as fewer and fewer of Neil's siblings were left.
Like some of the other family members who went to the meetings, McCrimmon's daughter, Denise, never met her uncle. But she said it wasn’t in the family’s nature to just move on.
"We all stick together, so, you know, you take care of your own," she said, nodding toward her mother. "That’s her brother, that’s my uncle."
Mary Ruth Frye McCrimmon was only three years old when Neil Frye joined the Navy, following a older brother into service. Eventually four of her five brothers and one of her sisters enlisted.
"That time they couldn't get no jobs," she said. "They had… I'm just going to say, racial thing, they didn't get no jobs, so they went where they could get paid. It was such a little amount that they got, you know, but it was an honest living."
At that point, Black sailors were allowed only to serve as mess attendants - essentially doing whatever officers wanted, from cooking their meals to doing their laundry.
"You could almost think of them as personal servants," said historian Glenn Knoblock, who has written books on the experiences of Black sailors in the U.S. Navy.
Battleships like the West Virginia with their huge crews and large numbers of officers had the greatest need for mess attendants; there might be a cadre of 40 or so.
"And it's important to understand that the Navy at the time, prior to World War II, was largely a Southern outfit," Knoblock said. "Most of the officers were Southern. And the prejudices that they brought with them came not only from their home geographic area, but also from their years of service."
During battle, Knoblock said, the mess attendants did have more important duties.
"There is still this perception that Black men only served as waiters and servants to officers, and while that was their primary duty, especially during peacetime, they also served as fighting men," he said.
A key battle station for Black sailors was have been passing ammunition up from deep in the bowels of the ship. That's where Frye's remains were found when the ship was raised, along with those of dozens of other sailors.
It may never be known what Frye was doing when he was killed, said forensic anthropologist Laurel Freas, who leads the DPAA project identifying the remains of troops lost in the Pearl Harbor attack.
Those found inside the ship, she said, had a wide variety of jobs. There were foremen, mess attendants, gunners mate, and machinists.
"It was an all hands on deck effort, of course, to try to save the ship," she said. "During the attack, the West Virginia was hit by seven torpedoes and began to list very strongly to its port side, and the crew realized that they were in danger of capsizing, just as the Oklahoma did. And so through their swift action, they were able to counter flood the opposite side of the ship."
That meant it sank essentially in an upright position.
"Which is what allowed the West Virginia to be salvaged and and returned to the battle during World War II," Freas said. “What I think it says about the group of individuals is their bravery and their heroism, fighting until the very last moments they had to save their ship and contribute to the defense of Pearl Harbor, to the defense of Hawaii, and ultimately the defense of the United States.”
Perhaps even as Frye was dying, one of his fellow mess attendants, a burly Texan named Doris "Dorie" Miller, had helped move the ship's dying captain before jumping behind a machine gun and – despite not being allowed to train with the weapon because of his race – blazed away at the attacking aircraft. Then he helped injured reach safety ashore.
Miller was awarded the Navy Cross and became a famous war hero. Schools, parks, roads and community centers across the country were named for him
The powerful Black press of the time seized on his story and used it to help force the Navy to open other jobs to Black sailors.
Freas' DPAA colleagues work on MIA cases from all over the world, but she said her job feels particularly immediate and personal. The building they work in is on the base, little more than a mile from where the West Virginia sank.
"I used to drive past some buildings on the Hickam (Air Force Base) side of the base that still have bullet holes in the facade from the attack that day," she said. "So we are surrounded and immersed in this history and reminders of it every day."
And both her grandfathers served during the war, one in the Navy and one in the U.S. Army Air Forces — branches of service she makes identifications from.
Those working in the lab always have in mind the aging family members oping for answers, she said.
"We strive to make our identifications of our missing service members as rapidly and as efficiently as we can, still making sure that they are scientifically sound and unimpeachable, but we're very, very aware of the time constraints that we're working under," she said.
The remains of dozens of sailors were found aboard after the West Virginia was refloated in 1942. Many were identified early. But about twenty-five were buried until 2017, when DNA analysis and other techniques had improved enough to lead to more identifications.
They were disinterred and moved to the lab, where they undergo an elaborate identification process that can take years, as the scientists have to be certain.
Now, just five of those lost on Neil Frye's ship remain to be identified.
For Frye's sister and her family, it seems like his identification came just in time.
"I was more happy than sad because I knew that they had found him," McCrimmon said. "I knew where he was. We didn't have to wonder."
"I know my mom and dad, there's any kind of way they know about this, I know they’re some kind of happy,” she said.
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
