Sailor who disobeyed orders at Pearl Harbor to get Bronze Star
Joe George helped save the lives of injured sailors on the USS Arizona
The ship was burning, and Donald Stratton and Lauren Bruner thought they were going to die.
Bruner already had been wounded aboard the USS Arizona, taking bullets to a leg. He was bleeding badly. Stratton was burned on his back, face and leg. Part of his ear was missing. Japanese Zeros buzzed above Pearl Harbor.
Through the smoke and haze, Stratton saw Joe George standing on the deck of the USS Vestal — a repair ship moored next to the Arizona. George had been ordered to cut the lines between the two ships as the battleship was sinking. But Stratton and Bruner were yelling at him to throw them a rope. A lifeline. An officer ordered George to let the men be. He threw the rope anyway. It was caught and secured to the Arizona, and Stratton and Bruner began scooting along it, hand over hand, for 75 feet. It felt much longer.
“As we got closer, he was standing there nodding his head, yelling, ‘You can make it! You can make it! You can make it!’” Stratton said in a phone interview Monday from Hawaii.
The two did make it — along with four others on the Arizona. Two eventually succumbed to injuries, but those who survived credit George with saving them. Despite his act, he never was awarded a medal. That will change Thursday. His family will see him honored at Pearl Harbor on the 76th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941. At around sunset, Rear Adm. Matthew Carter, deputy commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, will present the Bronze Star Medal to George’s daughter, Joe Ann Taylor, at the USS Arizona memorial — reversing a past decision by the Navy not to give him a medal for disobeying that order. It’s one of the nation’s highest awards given.
Both Bruner, 97, and Stratton, 95, will be in attendance, as well. George died in 1996.
“It means everything,” Taylor said. “It’s a wonderful, exciting thing because it validates everything we know about my father.”
The process to get George the medal began in 2002, according to Randy Stratton, Donald’s son. But progress was sluggish — until last year.
On the 75th anniversary of the attack a year ago, the Strattons met Matt Previts, an officer in naval intelligence. Stratton and Bruner recounted George’s actions, and Previts said he would help to “try and work things from the inside.”
They flew to Washington. They met with four senators, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis and President Donald Trump earlier this year. Previts said having them all hear George’s story told directly from those he saved sped things along.
“It went from a proposal to being personal,” Previts said. “That was the moment. It was a real story, and I think everyone recognized Joe had acted heroically.”
Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., introduced the proclamation in August and, with five co-sponsors — both Republican and Democratic — it passed unanimously in the Senate in September. Flake called the honor “long overdue.”
“It has been a privilege to join USS Arizona survivors Donald Stratton and Lauren Bruner — both heroes in their own right — and the families of Joe and the men whose lives he saved, to help secure this honor for Joe George,” Flake said in a statement.
Randy Stratton notes that “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for what Joe George did. I have him to thank for saving my father.”