Mervyn S. Bennion and the Unexploded Bomb at Pearl Harbor (USS West Virginia, December 7, 1941)

Captain Mervyn Sharp Bennion (1887-1941), a devout Latter-day Saint, commanded the battleship USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor. The night before the attack he had dined at the home of Ralph Woolley, president of the Oahu Stake, who urged him to stay the night and attend church; Mervyn declined, saying he had better be back on the ship. On the morning of December 7, 1941, he was shaving preparatory to leaving for Sunday School when the Japanese attack began. He instantly gave the command to battle stations and ran to the conning tower. Torpedoes tore a great hole in the ship, and a Japanese bomber scored a deadly blow directly in the magazine—but, by a remarkable providence, that bomb did not explode; otherwise, as his brother Howard recorded, 'the ship would have been blown up as was the Arizona, immediately astern of the West Virginia.' Mortally wounded by a splinter bomb, Captain Bennion refused evacuation and for two hours continued to direct his crew, speaking only of the ship and the men, until he died. The ship's crew brought down twenty to thirty enemy planes. His widow, Louise (a daughter of J. Reuben Clark Jr.), said their temple marriage was her comfort: 'Temple marriage is for eternity, and that just kept me up.' President Franklin D. Roosevelt posthumously awarded him the Congressional Medal of Honor, and a destroyer, the USS Bennion, was christened in his name. His selfless devotion is a faith-promoting witness that the Lord preserves His faithful servants in the day of trial, and that the unexploded bomb and the faithful captain alike bear witness of a watching Providence.