On May 7, 1942, the USS Neosho was no longer simply carrying fuel. She was fighting for her life.
The fleet oiler had spent the opening months of the Pacific war sustaining American ships at sea. Now, during the Battle of the Coral Sea, Neosho and the destroyer USS Sims had been detached from the main carrier force when Japanese aircraft found them.
The attack came hard. Dive bombers struck Neosho repeatedly, tearing open the ship, igniting fires, and filling engineering spaces with smoke and steam. Men were killed or wounded. Systems failed. The oiler began the long struggle to remain afloat.
Below decks, Chief Watertender Oscar V. Peterson was in charge of a repair party. He had already been wounded. The other members of his team were out of action.
But four bulkhead steam-line valves still had to be closed.
Peterson understood what reaching them would cost. The compartment was brutally hot, and the damaged machinery had turned the space into a trap. Still, he moved in and manually shut every valve.
He succeeded—and suffered devastating additional burns across his face, arms, shoulders, and hands.
Those closed valves helped keep Neosho afloat for four more days, long enough for survivors to be rescued. Peterson was taken aboard the destroyer USS Henley, but the injuries he accepted in order to save others were too severe. He died on May 13, 1942.
The Navy awarded him the Medal of Honor posthumously. His citation did not celebrate a dramatic charge or a weapon fired in battle. It honored a chief who stayed at his station, entered a burning engineering space without a team beside him, and did the exact work the ship required.
Tenacity is not always loud. Sometimes it is four valve wheels in a smoke-filled compartment—and one Sailor who refuses to leave them open.
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