Hot off the press: U.S. declares war on Japan on Dec. 7, 1941
Editor's note: Each Sunday, The Dispatch features a front page from this week in history to celebrate the newspaper's 150 years of publication, with a little update on what's happened since.
More than 2,300 U.S. troops died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, an assault that pulled the country in World War II.
One veteran who survived that day and later resettled to Greater Columbus was Milton Mapou.
Mapou's story was recounted more than once in The Dispatch.
He grew up in the Rockaway Beach neighborhood of Queens and enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a boatswain's mate in 1940. On the morning of the Pearl Harbor attack, he had just filled his breakfast tray when the sky filled with planes. He ran topside.
"I looked up, and I seen this plane coming," he once told The Dispatch.
Mapou's ship, the USS Detroit, was spared in the attack, and he was virtually unscathed — physically, anyway.
He was reassigned to the USS Pringle, a warship that was split into two and sunk on April 6, 1945, during the battle of Okinawa. Mapou was one of 258 who survived that attack — barely. His body was shattered, and he was left floating, nearly dead, until sailors from another ship plucked him from the water hours later.
Mapou eventually moved to Columbus' South Side, where he almost always was seen wearing a ball cap with "Pearl Harbor Survivor" stitched across the front panel.
He told a Dispatch reporter that he wore the cap because he wanted people to remember the horror and sacrifice of that day.
Mapou died in 2019 at age 97. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Hot off the press: U.S. declares war on Japan on Dec. 7, 1941
