By Chris Smith
HONOLULU — Alongside Pearl Harbor on Sunday, former Navy nurse Alice Darrow peered out to the watery spot the place, amid the deadly chaos of the shock assault 84 years earlier, a machine gun bullet struck a younger sailor however didn’t kill him.
As a substitute, it sparked an epic wartime love story.
At age 106, Darrow, of Danville, is a remarkably vibrant and fascinating member of America’s practically depleted corps of World Struggle II veterans. She got here to Pearl Harbor as a VIP visitor for the anniversary commemorations of Imperial Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941, aerial assault on U.S. ships, plane, installations and personnel on Oahu.
This was Darrow’s second go to in simply 10 weeks to the Nationwide Park Service’s memorial and museum at Pearl Harbor. In September, she and her daughter and son-in-law, Danville’s Becky and Ken Mitchell, stopped there on a cruise, and he or she donated a small however extraordinary and intensely private artifact to the museum.
It’s the gouged-up bullet that throughout the 1941 assault was fired from a Japanese fighter airplane and entered the again of Darrow’s future husband, a seaman hurled into the water from the bomb- and torpedo-rocked battleship USS West Virginia.
Former World Struggle II Navy nurse Alice Darrow, 106, of Danville, is greeted by first officer of her Honolulu flight, Peter Vanpelt, at Oakland Worldwide Airport on Friday, Dec. 5, 2025. A complete of two,403 People have been killed, and her husband Dean Darrow was wounded however survived after a bullet was faraway from his coronary heart. (Courtesy of Chris Smith)
At Naval Hospital Pearl Harbor, a medical group handled the wound of 24-year-old Dean Darrow. There was no signal of a projectile, so it was concluded that one thing penetrated his higher again after which dislodged.
The seaman was patched up, and along with his battleship sunk and his nation abruptly at warfare with Japan, Germany and Italy, he was assigned to a destroyer.
Instantly, he knew one thing was significantly flawed with him.
The Wisconsin native would run to his battle station and turn into in need of breath and dizzy. His imaginative and prescient generally blacked out.
This went on for greater than three months. In March of 1942, new X-rays found one thing surprising, one thing neglected earlier on the Pearl Harbor hospital. The tip of a big, roughly 1¼-inch-long bullet was lodged within the muscle, or wall, of the again of Dean Darrow’s coronary heart. The sailor, who’d lately turned 25, contemplated what he seen as his poor odds of seeing 26.
He was shipped to Mare Island Naval Hospital, close to Vallejo, and was greeted by a 23-year-old Navy nurse, Alice Beck.
“We were told there was a patient coming in who had a bullet in his heart. We were all waiting for him, to see what he looked like,” she mentioned.
Former World Struggle II Navy nurse Alice Darrow, 106, of Danville, prepares to toss a flower into Pearl Harbor from aboard the USS Arizona throughout a ceremony on the Pearl Harbor Nationwide Memorial in Honolulu, Hawaii on Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. A complete of two,403 People have been killed, and her husband Dean Darrow was wounded however survived after a bullet was faraway from his coronary heart. (Courtesy of Chris Smith)
An esteemed Stanford College vascular surgeon, Emile Holman, was summoned for historical past’s first recognized try and take away a bullet from a residing coronary heart.
Seaman Darrow had lived, uneasily, with the slug for 132 days when he was prepped for surgical procedure on April 17, 1942. Earlier than he was wheeled into the working room, he requested the nurse he’d come to adore, “If I make it out of this, would you go on liberty with me?”
Alice Beck mentioned in fact she would. She recollects, “When we said goodbye to him and sent him to surgery, I had tears in my eyes.”
Holman opened the sailor’s chest. With forceps and a skinny instrument that he inserted between the slug and the guts wall, breaking the vacuum, he eliminated the bullet. Holman would report, “There was no bleeding of consequence.”
He observed that the bullet was dented, scraped. He deduced that enroute to Darrow’s again, it struck a steely object and slowed simply sufficient to maintain it from piercing the chamber of the sailor’s coronary heart and killing him.
It was a candy second when the seaman and the nurse noticed one another for the primary time post-surgery. About six weeks later, they went out on the promised liberty-pass date.
Their subsequent huge outing, in August 1942, was to Reno. And a marriage chapel.
Former World Struggle II Navy nurse Alice Darrow, 106, of Danville, heart, practices the shaka with Southwest Airways workers who welcomed her to the Daniel Ok. Inouye Worldwide Airport in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Friday, Dec. 7, 2025. (Courtesy of Rebecca Schwab/Pacific Historic Parks)
They took honorable discharges and returned to civilian life, settling in Nice Hill and beginning a household. Dean Darrow utilized his naval expertise to a profession as a marine engineer.
Upon retiring, he and Alice moved to Kelseyville, on Clear Lake. Dean Darrow was 74 when he died in 1991. Requested shortly earlier than his loss of life if he thought a lot concerning the bullet he’d saved, he replied, “I think about it every time my heart beats.”
As a widow, Alice Darrow has for years advised public gatherings of the assault that drew America into World Struggle II and of how she met Dean. Then she’ll attain right into a pocket and maintain up the bullet. She likes to say that after Holman pulled it from Dean’s coronary heart, “I filled the void with my love.”
She’d lengthy thought of donating the slug to the museum at Pearl Harbor. The right alternative offered itself when she and the Mitchells booked a Pacific cruise final September.
Through the port name at Oahu, Alice made the reward to the harbor museum a couple of thousand toes from the place the person she would love was shot 84 years earlier than. She mentioned she is aware of in her personal coronary heart, “That is where the bullet should be.”
Former World Struggle II Navy nurse Alice Darrow, 106, of Danville, seems on the momentary show of the bullet faraway from her husband’s coronary heart after a ceremony on the Pearl Harbor Nationwide Memorial in Honolulu, Hawaii on Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. A complete of two,403 People have been killed, and her husband Dean Darrow was wounded however survived after the bullet was faraway from his physique. (Courtesy of Chris Smith)
In October, Alice accepted the invitation by the nonprofit Pacific Historic Parks, a companion of the Nationwide Park Service, to return together with her story to Pearl Harbor for the annual Dec. 7 observances.
“We’re losing those stories, we’re losing those voices,” mentioned Aileen Utterdyke, chief of the parks affiliation. Utterdyke mentioned Pacific Historic Parks invited Darrow as a part of its mission to “take these stories and teach our children, ‘These are how these heroes in our life worked.’”
Sunday’s observances on Oahu have been historic not solely as a result of Darrow was there, however as a result of this was the primary 12 months that there was no Pearl Harbor survivor there. The dozen or so who stay are greater than 100 years outdated.
When Sunday morning’s occasion concluded, Alice Darrow paused on the harbor wall and regarded throughout on the Arizona Memorial and the Missouri Battleship Museum, each situated close to the place the West Virginia was besieged.
“I keep thinking of Dean,” she mentioned.
Former World Struggle II Navy nurse Alice Darrow, 106, of Danville, proper, on the memorial wall on the Pearl Harbor Nationwide Memorial in Honolulu, Hawaii on Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. A complete of two,403 People have been killed, and her husband Dean Darrow was wounded however survived after a bullet was faraway from his coronary heart. (Courtesy of Chris Smith)
