Battle Creek native entombed with USS Arizona

The battleship Arizona has sat at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean since it was sunk by Japanese bombers on Dec. 7, 1941, and at least one Battle Creek native joined her.

According to Janet Ravenkamp of Silverdale, Wash., told the Enquirer her uncle, James Berry, was a fireman on the Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor that thrust the United States into World War II.

Berry was born in Battle Creek in 1917, Ravenkamp said, but eventually moved to Holland where he went to school. From there, he enlisted the U.S. Navy in Lima, Ohio, and never married.

Berry, Ravenkamp said, was standing on the deck of the ship talking with another crewman the morning of the attack, but that his battle station was below in the Arizona’s engineering spaces. It’s there, she said, where his body might be today.

Ravenkamp’s mom, Enda Berry, would tell her stories about the uncle she never got to meet, including the day that the family was notified of Berry’s death. A Navy chaplain and the man who had been talking to Berry the morning of the attack came to their home.

“He told our grandmother that he was standing next to Uncle James before they got hit, when he turned around to tell our Uncle James something and he was gone,” Ravenkamp said. “Grandmother asked the other man, did her son, James, ‘go down into the boat?’ The shipmate could not answer her.’”

At 5-foot-7 and 144 pounds, the slim, blue-eyed Berry was likely with more than a thousand of his fellow servicemen who died when the Arizona sank. Berry’s brother, Max Berry, also of Battle Creek, died during the war while serving in the U.S. Army.

“To me is very sad that I never got to meet our uncles,” Ravenkamp said. She noted she’s never been to the Arizona memorial that’s now positioned over the ship, but plans to go some day. “I look at the picture at the memorial of the ship and just want to cry to think that my uncle and other men were on that boat.”

Contact Andy Fitzpatrick at 269-966-0697 or afitzpatrick@battlecreekenquirer.com. Follow him on Twitter: @am_fitzpatrick. Hear him on “The Jump Page” and “The Best Podcast in the World” at soundcloud.com/enquirerpodcasting.