Simply three months after standing at Pearl Harbor to ship a salute on behalf of the nation’s growing old World Battle II technology, Navy veteran Milton “Rip” Ripple has died. He was 98.
Pacific Historic Parks, the nonprofit that companions with the Nationwide Park Service on the Pearl Harbor Nationwide Memorial, introduced Ripple’s passing on March 22, 2026. The group shared a tribute describing Ripple as a beloved determine within the Pearl Harbor commemorative group who had maintained a deep connection to Hawaii for greater than half a century.
From Paper Boy to Sailor
Ripple was the fourth of 9 kids rising up in Pennsylvania. He was simply 13 years outdated and dealing as a paper boy when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, pulling the USA into the deadliest battle in human historical past. By 1945, at age 17, he dropped out of college and enlisted within the Navy.
After finishing coaching in Illinois, Ripple shipped out to Hawaii and was assigned to USS Pollux (AKS-4), a normal shops difficulty ship tasked with ferrying provides throughout the Pacific. In that function, he traveled between Pearl Harbor, Wake Island and the Marshall Islands, maintaining forward-deployed forces stocked with the tools and provisions they wanted to maintain operations within the huge Pacific theater.
Witness to the Atomic Age
In the summertime of 1946, the U.S. navy assembled a fleet of 95 goal vessels within the lagoon at Bikini Atoll within the Marshall Islands for Operation Crossroads, the primary nuclear weapons exams of the postwar period. The operation concerned two detonations of Fats Man-type plutonium bombs, the identical design dropped on Nagasaki the yr earlier than. About 42,000 navy personnel took half. Ripple, nonetheless aboard Pollux, was amongst them. He watched each blasts from his ship additional out at sea.
The roughly 42,000 sailors who participated in Operation Crossroads turned often called “atomic veterans.” The eightieth anniversary of the operation is in July 2026, although only a few veterans are recognized to nonetheless be alive right now. With Ripple’s passing, one of many final connections to the atomic exams at Bikini Atoll is gone.
Ripple served two years within the Navy earlier than returning to civilian life. He used the GI Invoice to attend Studying Enterprise Institute in Pennsylvania and went on to construct a profession as an industrial engineer.
In 1953, he married his spouse, Jeanne, and the couple remained collectively for greater than 60 years till her demise in 2017. Within the Nineteen Seventies, Milton and Jeanne bought a condominium on Oahu, and for many years the couple made annual visits to the island the place Ripple had as soon as been stationed as a younger sailor.
A Last Salute at Pearl Harbor
On Dec. 7, 2025, Ripple attended the 84th anniversary commemoration of the assault on Pearl Harbor on the Pearl Harbor Nationwide Memorial. It was the primary time because the struggle that no survivors of the 1941 assault had been current on the ceremony. Pearl Harbor survivor Ira “Ike” Schab, 105, had deliberate to attend however canceled as a result of well being issues. Schab died simply 13 days later.
In Schab’s absence, Ripple stepped ahead. He rose from his seat to render the ceremonial return of salute to sailors aboard the destroyer USS Carl M. Levin because it sailed by way of Pearl Harbor in a pass-in-review previous the USS Arizona Memorial.
“I’m so honored to be right here,” Ripple instructed KHON2 in Honolulu. “I all the time consider the veterans who handed away and are buried on the Arizona.”
In accordance with Pacific Historic Parks, Ripple thought of rendering the salute an important honor. He was amongst a number of WWII veterans who attended the ceremony, representing the Army, Navy and Marine Corps.
Ripple’s demise is one other reminder of how shortly the WWII technology is disappearing. The Division of Veterans Affairs estimates that fewer than 46,000 of the 16.4 million Individuals who served within the struggle are nonetheless alive, a determine that drops by roughly 230 per day.
VA projections present that by 2036, solely about 300 will stay. Throughout the subsequent decade, WWII will move totally from dwelling reminiscence into documented historical past, and with it the power to listen to firsthand from the women and men who fought in it.
