Fireman Emerson Cloman

Believed to be aboard the USS Jarvis in the waters between Guadalcanal and Florida Island when its antiaircraft fire consumed a Japanese plane and its torpedo exploded against Jarvis’s side near the forward fireroom stopping her dead in the water and killing 14 crewmen. Her crew jettisoned the port torpedoes and quickly brought under control the fires that followed the explosion. USS Dewey DD-349 towed her to shallow anchorage off Lunga Point; and, after the attack, she crossed "Iron-bottom Sound" to Tulagi, where she transferred her seven wounded and commenced emergency repairs.

Despite a 50-foot gash in her side, she was considered seaworthy and ordered to proceed under cover of darkness to Efate, New Hebrides, escorted by the minesweeper Hovey . Apparently unaware of the order because her radios had been disabled, her skipper, Lt. Comdr. William W. Graham Jr., decided to steam to Sydney, Australia, for immediate repairs from USS Dobbin AD-3. Unnoticed by her own ships, Jarvis departed Tulagi at midnight 9 August and moved slowly westward through "Iron bottom Sound" and between Savo Island and Cape Esperance. At 0134 she passed 3,000 yards northward of Rear Admiral Mikaqwa’s cruisers, steaming to meet the Americans at the costly Battle of Salvo Island. Mistaking her for a cruiser of the New Zealand Achilles -class, they fired torpedoes, and destroyerYunagi later engaged her briefly, all without effect.

The destroyer, continuing to retire westward, had little speed, no radio communications, and few operative guns; but she refused aid from USS Blue DD-387 upon being sighted at 0325. After daybreak a Saratoga -based scout plane sighted her 40 miles off Guadalcanal, trailing fuel oil and down by the bow. That was the last time Americans saw her.

The Japanese, however, still mistaking Jarvis for an escaping cruiser, dispatched 31 planes from Rabaul to search out and destroy her. Once discovered, the determined, but badly damaged, destroyer was no match for bombers raking the ship with bullets and torpedoes. According to Japanese records, Jarvis "split and sank" at 1300 on 9 August. None of her 233 remaining crew survived the onslaught

Fireman Cloman is forever memorialized on the Tablets of the Missing at Manila American Cemetery.