Our Arklahoma Heritage: A Mansfield-born sailor went down with the U.S.S. Herring off the coast of Japan in 1944

On a February morning in 1924, in Mansfield on the Sebastian and Scott line in western Arkansas, George Roy Harper and his wife Mary had a son they named Paul Blaney Harper.

The middle name reached back to Rev. Blaney Harper, the North Carolina-born Methodist preacher who came out of Tennessee with Elizabeth Griffey, settled first at Fort Smith about 1850, then moved twenty-five miles south onto the Sugarloaf and Coop Prairie ground that became the town.

Blaney Harper preached, sat in the Arkansas legislature after the war, and is remembered as first po

stmaster when the office shifted nearer Coop Prairie. He and Elizabeth lie at Coop Prairie Cemetery.

Their son James W. Harper, cotton dealer and real-estate man, lived on the homestead that became the townsite. In 1869 James married Mary J. Dixon. Among their children was a son named George, born October 8, 1872, the farmer George Roy Harper of Mansfield. That is the line that put the middle name Blaney on a boy born February 3, 1924.

By 1930 the household stood in Sugar Loaf Township: George R. Harper, fifty-eight, Arkansas-born; Mary, thirty-eight; Gray, eleven; Paul, six; Daniel, five; and David, a year and three months.

George Roy's World War I draft card, filed when he was forty-five, listed him as a white farmer at Mansfield and named Jennie Roxie Harper as nearest relative, so more than one woman appears in his adult record. Mary is the mother the younger boys later named.

Daniel R. Harper, born in Mansfield on April 23, 1925, went to sea in the Pacific, came home, took a civil-engineering degree at the University of Arkansas, and built roads and mines in southwest Florida until his death on April 20, 2022. His obituary still said son of Mary and George Harper of Mansfield.

Paul grew up in a railroad, cotton, and coal town of depots, churchyards, and farm work. No Mansfield High School yearbook page with his face has surfaced. He was six in 1930 and sixteen in 1940, the age of the local high school. He enlisted in the United States Naval Reserve young enough that the war, not a long civilian trade, took him next.

There is no record of a wife or child. Official next of kin remained Mr. and Mrs. George Roy Harper of Mansfield.

The Navy made him a torpedoman.. After recruit training and submarine school he qualified as Torpedoman's Mate Third Class. On a Gato-class fleet boat, that meant the forward or after torpedo room: the Mark 14s, the loading trays, the firing keys, and damage control in a steel compartment that would flood first if the hull opened.

He served in USS Herring (SS-233), built at the Portsmouth Navy Yard, commissioned May 4, 1942, and already a veteran of Mediterranean patrols around the North African landings and of the Pacific hunt. By the spring of 1944 she was on her eighth war patrol under Lt. Cmdr.

Herring topped off at Midway on May 21, 1944, and ran north for the Kuriles. On the night of May 30 and 31 she sank the Japanese escort Ishigaki and the merchant Hokuyo Maru. Ishigaki was the ship that had destroyed USS S-44 the year before. On the evening of May 31 Herring met USS Barb.

The two skippers split the area by megaphone. Barb would work south and west of the shipping lane. Herring would work north and east, toward Matsuwa Island. That was the last time any American saw the boat.

At dawn on June 1, 1944, Herring found two ships at anchor off Matsuwa: Hiburi Maru, a troop-laden transport of about 4,366 tons, and Iwaki Maru, about 3,124 tons. She fired into the harbor and sank both. Matsuwa was a fortified island. Shore batteries saw the submarine, reported her grounded or backing away near the anchorage, and opened fire.

Two shells struck the conning tower. Japanese observers wrote that bubbles covered an area about five meters wide and that heavy oil spread across roughly fifteen miles of sea.

The position was about two kilometers south of Point Tagan. Herring is the only United States submarine of the war confirmed sunk by shore-battery gunfire. There were no survivors.

Eighty-three men went down with her. Paul Blaney Harper was one of them. As a torpedoman he would have been in a torpedo room for the attack. In shallow water, with the conning tower holed, the boat had neither time nor depth to recover.

Herring was expected at Midway around July 3 or 4. When she had not appeared by July 13, 1944, she was posted presumed lost. She was stricken from the Navy Register on November 13, 1944.

Paul was twenty years, three months, and twenty-nine days old. He was missing in action.

His body was never recovered. His name is on the Tablets of the Missing at the Honolulu Memorial in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, the Punchbowl wall the American Battle Monuments Commission keeps for the Pacific missing.

Harpe received the Purple Heart, posthumously, awarded for his combat death, and the campaign and victory medals that followed wartime Navy service in the Pacific. Titles such as Presidential Unit Citation, Good Conduct Medal, and Navy Expeditionary Medal would have all been awarded under the circumstances.

For eighty-two years that was the end of the story that could be told from paper. In 2017 a Russian Geographic Society expedition reported a submarine wreck in the right water. Further dives documented an intact Gato-class hull sitting upright on her keel in a little more than three hundred feet, with grounding damage at the bow and battle damage around the conning tower, matching the Japanese report of 1944.

A plaque was left in 2022. On June 1, 2026, exactly eighty-two years after the sinking, the Naval History and Heritage Command identified the wreck as USS Herring. The site is a protected sunken military craft and a war grave.

He was a farmer's son from the town his great-grandfather helped name, a reserve sailor who learned the torpedo rooms of a fleet boat, and one of eighty-three men who died in a few minutes of gunfire after sinking two ships at dawn on the edge of the Sea of Okhotsk.

The boat that held him has been found. His name is on the wall in Honolulu. He remains, with his shipmates, where the oil once spread south of Point Tagan.