Discovering that some of his cousins had died in the war, Calvin Graham decided he wanted to fight. At age 11 and in sixth grade in Crockett, Texas, he hatched a plan to lie about his age and join the U.S. Navy. One of seven children living with an abusive stepfather, he and an older brother had moved into a cheap rooming house, and Calvin supported himself by selling newspapers and delivering telegrams on weekends and after school. Seeing the newspaper allowed him to keep up on current events. He began to shave at age 11, hoping it would make him look older when he met with recruiters. His buddies forged his mother’s signature and stole
a notary stamp from a local hotel. At 5 foot, 2 inches tall and 125 pounds, Graham dressed in an older brother’s clothes and fedora
and practiced “talking deep.” He didn’t worry about an enlistment officer spotting the forged signature but he did about the dentist who would look into his mouth. “I knew he’d know how young I was by my teeth,” Graham recalled. He lined up behind a couple of guys he knew who were 14 or 15, and “when the dentist kept saying I was 12, I said I was 17.” Graham had to play his ace, telling the dentist that he knew that the boys in front of him weren’t 17 yet, and the dentist had let them through. “Finally,” Graham recalled, “he said he didn’t have time to mess with me and he let me go.” Graham maintained that the Navy knew he and the others on line that
day were underage, “but we were losing the war then, so they took six of us.” Graham ended up aboard the newly christened battleship USS South Dakota, when it steamed out of Philadelphia in August 1942. The crew was made up of new recruits who enlisted after the
attack on Pearl Harbor. Brash and confident, the crew couldn’t get through the Panama Canal fast enough, and their captain, Thomas Gatch, bore a grudge against the Japanese. “No ship more eager to fight ever entered the Pacific,” one historian wrote.
By the time the South Dakota reached the Pacific, it had become part of a task force with the carrier USS Enterprise. In early October 1942, the two ships, along with their escorting cruisers and destroyers, raced to the South Pacific to engage in the battle for Guadalcanal. After they reached the Santa Cruz Islands on October 26, the Japanese quickly set their sights on the carrier
and launched an air attack that easily penetrated the Enterprise’s air patrol. Although the carrier USS Hornet was repeatedly torpedoed and sank off Santa Cruz, the South Dakota managed to protect Enterprise, destroying 26 enemy planes with its antiaircraft guns. Then a 500-pound bomb struck the South Dakota’s main gun turret, injuring 50 men, including the captain, and killed one. With Gatch knocked unconscious, some quartermasters managed to save his life. His jugular vein had been severed, and the ligaments in his arms suffered permanent damage. The crew couldn’t believe he hadn’t hit the deck when he saw the bomb coming. “I consider it beneath the dignity of a captain of an American battleship to flop for a Japanese bomb,” Gatch later said. After the battle, the South Dakota was repaired at Pearl Harbor, and Captain Gatch returned to his ship. Meanwhile, Seaman Graham became a teenager, turning 13 on November 6, just as Japanese naval forces began shelling an American airfield on Guadalcanal. Steaming south with the Enterprise, Task Force 64, with the South Dakota and another battleship, the USS Washington, took four American destroyers on a night search for the enemy near Savo Island. There, on November 14, Japanese ships opened fire, sinking or heavily damaging the American destroyers in what became known as the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. Later that evening the South Dakota encountered eight Japanese destroyers. With deadly accurate 16-inch guns, the South Dakota set three of them afire. The ship took 42 enemy hits,

temporarily losing power. Graham was manning his gun when shrapnel tore through his jaw and mouth; another hit knocked him down, and he fell through three stories of superstructure. Still, the 13 year-old got up, dazed and bleeding, and helped pull other crew members to safety while explosions tossed other crew members into the Pacific.
The shrapnel had knocked out his front teeth, and he had flash burns from the hot guns, but he was “fixed up with salve and a coupla stitches,” he recalled. “I took belts off the dead and made tourniquets for the living and gave them cigarettes and encouraged them all night,” Graham said.  “It was a long night. It aged me…. I didn’t do any complaining because half the ship was dead.
It was a while before they worked on my mouth.” The ship lost 38 men killed with 60 wounded. After regaining power and inflicting heavy damage on the Japanese ships, the South Dakota disappeared in the smoke. Captain Gatch would later remark of his “green” men, “Not one of the ship’s company flinched from his post or showed the least disaffection.” In mid-December, the damaged ship returned to the Brooklyn (New York) Navy Yard for major repairs, where Gatch and his crew were profiled for their heroic deeds in the Pacific. Calvin Graham received a Bronze Star for distinguishing himself in combat, as well as a Purple Heart
for his injuries. But he couldn’t bask in glory: his mother had recognized her son in newsreel footage and wrote the Navy to reveal his true age. Graham returned to Texas and was thrown in a brig at Corpus Christi, Texas, for almost three months.
Graham managed to get a message to his sister Pearl, who complained to the newspapers that the Navy was mistreating the “Baby Vet.” The Navy eventually ordered Graham’s release but it stripped him of his medals for lying about his age and revoked his disability benefits. He was tossed from jail with a suit and a few dollars in his pocket—and no honorable discharge Back in Houston, though, he was treated as a celebrity. Reporters wanted to write his story, and when the war film Bombadier premiered at a local theater, the film’s star invited Graham onto the stage. But the attention faded. At age 13, Graham tried to return to school, but he couldn’t
keep pace with students his age and dropped out. He married at age 14, became a father the following year, and found work as a welder in a Houston shipyard. Neither the job nor marriage lasted long. At 17 and divorced with no service record, Graham was about to be drafted when he enlisted in the Marine Corps. But he broke his back in a fall, for which he received a 20 percent service-connected disability. The only work he could find after that was selling magazine subscriptions. When U.S. President Jimmy Carter was elected, in 1976, Graham began writing letters, hoping that Carter, “an old Navy man,” might be sympathetic. All Graham wanted was an honorable discharge to help with his medical and dental expenses. The next year, two Senators from Texas

introduced a bill to give Graham his honorable discharge, and in 1978, Carter announced its approval and restored Graham’s medals except for the Purple Heart. Ten years later, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation approving disability benefits for Graham. Not until 1994, two years after Graham’s death, that the military returned his last medal—his Purple Heart—to his
family. He was the youngest American to serve in the war.