Pearl Harbor love stories

The first of the two Pearl Harbor love stories cherished by former Navy nurse Alice Darrow of Kelseyville involved a handsome, 24-year-old patient with a machinegun slug lodged in his heart and dim prospects for living to see age 25.

He was sailor Dean Darrow, a fire controlman 3rd class from rural Wisconsin. He'd been blown off the deck of the bombed and torpedoed battleship West Virginia early on in Imperial Japan's Dec. 7, 1941, attack on U.S. forces on Oahu.

Nearly 2,400 Americans died that Sunday morning and a nation long reluctant to join the fighting against Japan, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy girded for the war that would change the world, and America's role and standing in it.

Sailor Darrow was bleeding from a small wound to his back when rescuers pulled him out of the oiled water of Pearl Harbor and into a small boat. He had no idea he would make medical history.

He was treated for a flesh wound believed at the time to have been caused by shrapnel and then was returned to duty — suddenly, there was a war on. With the West Virginia sunk, Darrow was transferred onto the destroyer Porter.

Through the first two months of the war he served in the South Pacific — and he often felt lousy. He recalled in an interview with The Press Democrat shortly before the 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor that he'd run to his battle station and arrive feeling woozy.

He also recounted taking a vigorous ocean swim one day late in January of 1942 and becoming so thoroughly fatigued that when he was next summoned to quarters, he couldn't pull himself from his bunk.

"My brain would get the message but my feet wouldn't move," he said in December of 1991. He was sent to sick bay, where he slept for 10 straight days.

Medical personnel shipped him back to Pearl Harbor and the hospital ship Solace. There, a series of X-rays taken on March 7, 1942, produced a shocking discovery:

A large bullet was lodged deep in his chest, very deep. Darrow had served aboard ship for three months of war with a slug piercing his heart.

At the naval hospital at Mare Island, near Vallejo, a 21-year-old nurse named Alice Beck — "I was always called &‘Becky'" — had grown up quickly and steeled her heart by tending to the wounded sailors that streamed in from throughout the Pacific theater.

"They were such good patients, despite their injuries," she said.

It was April of 1942 when she met the sailor the hospital was abuzz over, the sailor who didn't seem so badly injured despite the bullet in his heart.

Dean Darrow was scheduled for an unheard-of surgery, a procedure to remove the slug and sew up the hole. His former nurse will never forget the moment he took hold of her hand and asked her to make him a promise.

He said, "Miss Becky, if I come through this, will you go on liberty with me?" Alice Beck replied that she'd be happy to go out of with him, but privately she doubted he'd survive the operation.

It took place April 17 — 131 days after Darrow was shot without knowing it amid the bedlam in Pearl Harbor. Stanford University surgeon Emile Holman performed the procedure with Navy doctor C.C. Myers.

Myers would write in the Navy medical bulletin that the bullet resisted being pulled out with forceps.

"Traction on the forceps lifted the heart completely out of its bed, but failed to dislodge the bullet, presumably due to the creation of a vacuum behind it," Myers wrote. When a narrow tube or similar device was inserted alongside the bullet, that relieved the vacuum and the bullet slipped right out.

Days later, Darrow examined the slug and showed it to his nurse. It was a big bullet, nearly an inch and a half long, and it wore a heavy gouge.

Seeing that it was a 7.7 mm Japanese machine gun slug, Darrow figured that it had been fired by a strafing Japanese fighter pilot and had ricocheted, perhaps off the West Virginia. Had it not been slowed by that impact, it might well have gone clear through him.

Not long into his recovery he looked up at "Miss Becky" and said, "Oh, we're going on liberty, aren't we?"

What could she say?

Upon Darrow's release from the hospital, they went into San Francisco on a date, then another, and another. In August of that year they traveled to Reno and were married.

On Sept. 1, the Navy released Dean Darrow on a medical discharge. "He liked the Navy, he would liked to have made a career of it," Alice said. For decades after his discharge, Darrow mused that the best thing he got out of the Navy was his nurse.

The marriage allowed his bride to take a discharge, too. Dean Darrow found work performing service and repairs on oceangoing ships with the Sperry Gyroscope Company. Alice took a break from nursing to raise their four children.

The Darrows lived in Southern California and then Pleasant Hill in Contra Costa County, and in 1977 retired to a home with a lake view in Clear Lake Riviera, near Kelseyville.

About 30 years ago, they joined the Lake-Mendocino arm of the Santa Rosa-based Chapter 23 of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association.

While speaking to school children about the significance of Pearl Harbor and taking part in the association's meetings and observances, Dean and Alice came to know and enjoy the company of Walt and Iris Urmann.

Walt Urmann had grown up in Windsor and dropped out of Healdsburg High to join the Navy in 1940, when he was 17.

On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, he was on watch in Pearl Harbor aboard the USS Blue, a destroyer. Coincidentally, he was also a fire controlman 3rd class.

"All of a sudden there was a terrible explosion over Ford Island," he said. As a Japanese torpedo bomber that had just hit the battleship Utah flew past him, "the pilot looked at me and waved," he said.

"Then all hell broke loose."

The Blue managed to return fire and sail out of the harbor — Urmann said he's certain the crew sank a Japanese submarine, though it wasn't credited with the kill.

He blinked tears as he recalled that at Guadalcanal in August of 1942, the Blue was struck by a torpedo and damaged so badly the Navy had to scuttle her.

"That was our home. It was my ship and it went down," he said.

After the war he went to work for Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. He and Iris retired to Clearlake in 1982 and a short while later met the Darrows at a meeting of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association.

Dean Darrow died in 1991, Iris Urmann in 2005. Eventually Walt and Alice began seeing each other outside of the association gatherings, and today they share Alice's house overlooking the lake.

"I love her very much," said Walt, 88, making Alice smile.

They never miss a local Pearl Harbor meeting or ceremony and they'll be at the 70th anniversary observances in Lakeport this morning. Alice is usually ready to reach into her purse should someone ask to see the miracle bullet.