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THE OBSERVER | WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2017
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PEDEN from survivors and dropped depth charges on an enemy sub it had detected before leaving
for Freemantle, Australia. “It is regretted that your son was not among the survivors rescued by the Whipple,” the letter said, adding that the
Navy had now been “forced to the conclusion that [Joseph] is deceased.” In June 1946, the Pedens learned that Joe had been
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awarded the Purple Heart for making the ultimate sacrifice. An Observer news story about the Peden plaque dedication published April 8, 1954, references the Pecos bombing and says that Joe and other sailors made their way to a raft and eventually spotted a ship (evidently the Whipple) heading toward them. Instead of waiting, two of the sailors jumped into the water and began swimming to the ship while Joe and the others remained. “One of the sailors, a resident of West Orange, told Peden’s parents of the incident after his discharge …,” the story said. Sally Rogers Petito, a former Kearny resident and now a Verona resident – and Peden’s niece, who recalls attending the plaque dedication as a child, said: “I heard stories afterward, about this sailor coming to the house in Kearny to explain what happened to my uncle. He took the men outside to tell the story.” Kearny’s Lewis Battista said his uncle Carl and grandmother Michalina were invited by Sarah Peden to hear the sailor’s story which he remembers being told as a kid. None of the surviving Peden family members reached by The Observer could identify the West Orange sailor but one possibility has surfaced. Joe Fagan, the West Orange town historian, suggested that the late Henry J. Restorff of West Orange – a WWII Navy veteran and 2002 recipient of the N.J. Distinguished Service Medal – was a good candidate. A program from the dedication of a West Orange Honor Roll monument to veterans – living and dead – on Memorial Day 1944 mentions that Restorff “was a fireman [technically, Engineman 2nd Class] aboard the Langley when that aircraft tender went down off Java. A short time later, he spent six hours in the dark waters of the Indian Ocean when
the Navy tanker Pecos slipped below the waves.” It’s very likely, said Fagan, that Restorff was the man who returned stateside to look up the Pedens because it was rare for servicemen and women from the same town to be assigned to the same boat. What prompted Joe to go the Navy route? Sally Petito recalls hearing that from an early age, Joe, “wanted to be a sailor.” And Bob Rogers, a nephew now living in a suburb of Jacksonville, Fla., echoed that, noting that as a kid Joe clearly had a thing for ships. “My mom (Elizabeth Peden Rogers) would tell me stories about uncle Joe and the fellow coming over from West Orange,” he said. “And I remember when she was in her 90s – she was living in Spring Lake – she was holding a little wooden model warship, maybe six inches long, 3-masted, and it was a little rickety, and she said, ‘My brother Joe made this when he was 11.’ “For some reason, she’d had it all this time. ‘And now,’ she told me, ‘I want you to fix it.’ And I did, even frying the matchsticks – part of the masts – in a pan to darken them.” Then, so fascinated by his uncle’s adventures at sea, he put in a request for Joe’s military records. “Months went by and finally, one day, a thick brown envelope came in the mail with all the records,” Rogers recalled. “I must have spent 40 minutes going through everything. They had Joe’s hand-written application for enlistment. Then suddenly, it dawned on me that that very day was the anniversary date of the day he enlisted. I started getting chills.” He read his uncle’s Purple Heart citation and the sailor’s account of enemy planes strafing survivors in the sea following the attack on the Pecos. “For me,” he said, “that was a kind of closure.”
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