TEXAS — Growing up in Denton, Texas, 92-year-old Walter Stowe remembers always looking up to his older brother Jack.
“I wanted to follow in his footsteps,” Walter Stowe said. “When he joined the Navy we were all so proud of him.”
The Stowe brothers are part of a group of 63 World War II veterans who got an all-expense-paid trip to Hawaii this week to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“I remember seeing the newspaper headline, reading more than 2,000 Americans were killed,” said 95-year-old Jack Stowe.
The surprise strike by the Japanese military killed 2,403 U.S. personnel, including 68 civilians, and destroyed or damaged 19 U.S. Navy ships, including eight battleships. The attack led to the U.S. entering World War II.
The Stowes, along with their fellow former service members, were flown to Hawaii courtesy of a partnership between the nonprofit Best Defense Foundation (BDF) and American Airlines.
BDF works to honor and celebrate veterans by taking them back to the battlefields on which they served.
Of the dozens of veterans visiting Pearl Harbor Tuesday, which is National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, 10 are from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, 12 are more than 100 years old, and six were at the Pearl Harbor naval base on December 7, 1941.
Just four months after the attack Jack Stowe followed a trend of teenage boys falsifying documents to join the war before they were of legal age to enlist.
“According to all my Navy records, I’m 97, but in reality I’m really 95!” said Jack Stowe with a smile on his face.
Jack Stowe successfully lied about his age by forging a document from his high school when he was 15.
In 1942, the U.S. only allowed men and women 18 years or older to be drafted or enlisted into the armed forces, although 17-year-olds were allowed to enlist with parental consent. Women were not allowed in armed conflict.
Although the average man who fought in World War II was 26 years old, it wasn’t uncommon for 15-year-olds like Jack Stowe to serve.
The youngest known member of the United States military was a 12-year-old from Houston, Texas, Calvin Graham. Like Jack Stowe, he lied about his age when he enlisted in the Navy. His real age wasn’t known until after he was wounded.
Three years after Jack Stowe joined, Walter Stowe fulfilled the dream of following in his older brother’s footsteps and falsified his own documents with the help of his mother.
“Well back then if you were living and breathing you were qualified to be in the armed services,” Walter Stowe said.
Walter Stowe and his mother had planned on requesting a copy of his birth certificate from the city and falsifying it. It worked for Jack Stowe, and so maybe it would work for him.
“We were going to try to doctor it up, but what happened when she got there, they said, ‘All our records have been burned in a fire,’” Walter Stowe said.
“Just tell me how old he is,” a city employee said to Mrs. Stowe.
“The rest is history; I have a legal document that says I was born in 1927 instead of 1929,” Walter Stowe said. “We didn’t think it would be that easy.”
Walter Stowe joined the U.S. Navy just three days after his 15th birthday.
“I never regretted it a bit, and I enjoyed every bit of it,” he said. “We were just kids. You put a 15-year-old kid on a South Sea island who loves to swim, and his job was a swimmer, that’s a pretty good duty.”
Jack Stowe has fond memories of serving in New Orleans for a year as an 18-year-old. “Wasn’t I handsome?” he asked while holding up a picture of himself on his iPhone.
Jack Stowe is visiting Pearl Harbor for the first time but his brother has been there a couple of times. Like many of their fellow veterans on the trip, they feel lucky to have been honored to spend the 80th anniversary of the attack where it happened.
If you have an interesting story or an issue you’d like to see covered, let us know about it.
Share your ideas with DFW human interest reporter Lupe Zapata by e-mailing him at Lupe.Zapata@Charter.com