Born January 2, 1901, in the Bells Chapel community in Gibson County, Tennessee, Claude White joined the US Navy in September 1920. On December 7, 1941, he was chief water tender on the battleship USS Oklahoma which was moored at Ford Island, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, when air forces of the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked.

Chief water tender is an archaic Navy rating from the days of coal-fired steam-powered ships. The rating existed from 1884 to 1948 for the crewman responsible for taking charge of the boiler room, it’s equipment, and the sailors who stoked the coal fires, the firemen. Chief water tender is equivalent to today’s petty officer first class. As the Navy phased out steam-powered ships, chief water tender was folded into the machinist’s mate rating. The Navy’s last steam-powered ship, aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, was decommissioned in 2009.

The Oklahoma was a 27,500-ton Nevada class battleship built at Camden, New Jersey, and commissioned to the US Atlantic Fleet in May 1916. In 1921, the battleship joined the US Pacific Fleet. She was modernized from 1927 to 1929 and rejoined the Pacific Fleet in 1930. In 1940, Oklahoma’s home port was shifted to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. She was at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941. She was hit by a great number of Japanese aerial torpedoes which tore her port side open. Oklahoma rolled over and sank to the harbor bottom, with the loss of 429 of her crew including Claude White.

Technically, Claude was missing in action, presumed dead. From December 1941 to June 1944, Navy personnel recovered the remains of the deceased crew of the Oklahoma, which were subsequently interred in the Halawa and Nu’uanu Cemeteries in Hawaii. In the fall of 1947, the dead from the Oklahoma were disinterred for the first time and transferred to American Graves Registration Service Central Identification Laboratory at Schofield Barracks on the island of Oahu.

In 1947, only 35 men from the Oklahoma could be identified. The AGRS buried the rest, classified as non-recoverable, at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (NMCP), known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu. Between June and November 2015, Navy personnel again disinterred the Oklahoma Unknowns for analysis.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced February 25, 2021, the remains of Claude White were accounted for on January 4, 2021. Scientists from DPAA and the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System used anthropological analysis, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), and Y chromosome DNA (Y-STR) to identify Claude. It is the mission of the DPAA to identify all missing US service members.

Chief Water Tender Claude White will be buried with full military honors at 2:00 PM on April 19, 2022, in the cemetery at Bell’s Chapel Cumberland Presbyterian Church near the place of his birth in rural Gibson County, Tennessee. His grandparents, Elijah B. Trosper and Martha Needham Trosper, were charter members of the Bells Chapel Cumberland Presbyterian Church (West Tennessee Presbytery). Claude’s parents as well as a number of siblings already lie in the Bells Chapel cemetery.

Before the 2015 disinterment of the Oklahoma Unknowns, which marked the beginning of Project Oklahoma, 388 service members were unaccounted for. Since then, 355 have been individually identified.