Centenarian Navy nurse looks back on Pearl Harbor attack

By Chris Smith

HONOLULU — Alongside Pearl Harbor on Sunday, former Navy nurse Alice Darrow peered out to the watery spot where, amid the lethal chaos of the surprise attack 84 years earlier, a machine gun bullet struck a young sailor but didn’t kill him.

Instead, it sparked an epic wartime love story.

At age 106, Darrow, of Danville,  is a remarkably vibrant and engaging member of America’s nearly depleted corps of World War II veterans. She came to Pearl Harbor as a VIP guest for the anniversary commemorations of Imperial Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941, aerial assault on U.S. ships, aircraft, installations and personnel on Oahu.

This was Darrow’s second visit in just 10 weeks to the National Park Service’s memorial and museum at Pearl Harbor. In September, she and her daughter and son-in-law, Danville’s Becky and Ken Mitchell, stopped there on a cruise, and she donated a small but extraordinary and intensely personal artifact to the museum.

It’s the gouged-up bullet that during the 1941 attack was fired from a Japanese fighter plane and entered the back of Darrow’s future husband, a seaman hurled into the water from the bomb- and torpedo-rocked battleship USS West Virginia.

At Naval Hospital Pearl Harbor, a medical team treated the wound of 24-year-old Dean Darrow. There was no sign of a projectile, so it was concluded that something penetrated his upper back and then dislodged.

The seaman was patched up, and with his battleship sunk and his country abruptly at war with Japan, Germany and Italy, he was assigned to a destroyer.

Immediately, he knew something was seriously wrong with him.

The Wisconsin native would run to his battle station and become short of breath and dizzy. His vision sometimes blacked out.

This went on for more than three months. In March of 1942, new X-rays discovered something shocking, something overlooked earlier at the Pearl Harbor hospital. The tip of a large, approximately 1¼-inch-long bullet was lodged in the muscle, or wall, of the back of Dean Darrow’s heart. The sailor, who’d recently turned 25, pondered what he viewed as his poor odds of seeing 26.

He was shipped to Mare Island Naval Hospital, near Vallejo, and was greeted by a 23-year-old Navy nurse, Alice Beck.

“We were told there was a patient coming in who had a bullet in his heart. We were all waiting for him, to see what he looked like,” she said.

An esteemed Stanford University vascular surgeon, Emile Holman, was summoned for history’s first known attempt to remove a bullet from a living heart.

Seaman Darrow had lived, uneasily, with the slug for 132 days when he was prepped for surgery on April 17, 1942. Before he was wheeled into the operating room, he asked the nurse he’d come to adore, “If I make it out of this, would you go on liberty with me?”

Alice Beck said of course she would. She recalls, “When we said goodbye to him and sent him to surgery, I had tears in my eyes.”

Holman opened the sailor’s chest. With forceps and a thin instrument that he inserted between the slug and the heart wall, breaking the vacuum, he removed the bullet. Holman would record, “There was no bleeding of consequence.”

He noticed that the bullet was dented, scraped. He deduced that enroute to Darrow’s back, it struck a steely object and slowed just enough to keep it from piercing the chamber of the sailor’s heart and killing him.

It was a sweet moment when the seaman and the nurse saw each other for the first time post-surgery. About six weeks later, they went out on the promised liberty-pass date.

Their next big outing, in August 1942, was to Reno. And a wedding chapel.

They took honorable discharges and returned to civilian life, settling in Pleasant Hill and starting a family. Dean Darrow applied his naval experience to a career as a marine engineer.

Upon retiring, he and Alice moved to Kelseyville, on Clear Lake. Dean Darrow was 74 when he died in 1991. Asked shortly before his death if he thought much about the bullet he’d saved, he replied, “I think about it every time my heart beats.”

As a widow, Alice Darrow has for years told public gatherings of the attack that drew America into World War II and of how she met Dean. Then she’ll reach into a pocket and hold up the bullet. She likes to say that after Holman pulled it from Dean’s heart, “I filled the void with my love.”

She’d long considered donating the slug to the museum at Pearl Harbor. The perfect opportunity presented itself when she and the Mitchells booked a Pacific cruise last September.

During the port call at Oahu, Alice made the gift to the harbor museum a few thousand feet from where the man she would love was shot 84 years before. She said she knows in her own heart, “That is where the bullet should be.”

More recently, she’s figured prominently in news accounts of a move to recognize her service and sacrifices, and those of all World War II nurses, by awarding them the Congressional Gold Medal.

In October, Alice accepted the invitation by the nonprofit Pacific Historic Parks, a partner of the National Park Service, to return with her story to Pearl Harbor for the annual Dec. 7 observances.

“We’re losing those stories, we’re losing those voices,” said Aileen Utterdyke, chief of the parks association. Utterdyke said Pacific Historic Parks invited Darrow as part of its mission to “take these stories and teach our children, ‘These are how these heroes in our life worked.’”

Sunday’s observances on Oahu were historic not only because Darrow was there, but because this was the first year that there was no Pearl Harbor survivor there. The dozen or so who remain are more than 100 years old.

When Sunday morning’s event concluded, Alice Darrow paused at the harbor wall and looked across at the Arizona Memorial and the Missouri Battleship Museum, both located near where the West Virginia was besieged.

“I keep thinking of Dean,” she said.

Chris Smith can be reached at csmith54@sonic.net.