The USS Nevada crew’s valiant but doomed efforts to get their battleship out to sea on Dec. 7 foreshadowed the relentless determination of America’s fighting force under fire that ultimately led the Greatest Generation to victory in World War II.

And among the Nevada’s many heroes perhaps no one better personifies that determination than Chief Boatswain Edwin Joseph Hill.

At the attack’s onset the crewmen of the Nevada were simultaneously returning fire and trying to get the battleship underway.

Under relentless strafing and bombing, Hill led a group of men to cast off the ship’s lines from its moorings off Ford Island. As the ship began to pull away, Hill, a 47-year-old career Navy man, jumped into the water, swam to the ship and climbed back up to its deck. But the Nevada was an easy target for the Japanese bombers as it moved slowly in the harbor, and it was struck by a torpedo and several bombs.

The ship, taking on water and burning from many fires onboard, was in peril. Naval commanders, fearing it could sink and block the channel, ordered it to run aground at Hospital Point. As he was leading the effort to let go the anchors, Hill was blown off the ship by a bomb blast.

The citation for his Medal of Honor, awarded posthumously, lauds him “for distinguished conduct in the line of his profession, extraordinary courage, and disregard of his own safety during the attack on the fleet in Pearl Harbor.”

Hill was one of the 50 USS Nevada men killed in the battle; more than 100 from the crew of nearly 1,500 were wounded.

The ship’s commander, Capt. Francis W. Scanland, wrote in his report on the attack, “Every officer and man aboard, without exception, performed his duties in a most commendable manner and without regard to personal safety. The courage and spirit of the antiaircraft gun crews, where bomb hits caused most of the casualties, was of the highest order.”

In great detail, Scanland describes how anti-aircraft and machine gun fire from the Nevada brought down several torpedo planes and dive bombers. “It is reported among the crew that one enemy torpedo plane was brought down by a direct hit from the 5” secondary battery, exploding the torpedo and blowing the plane to bits,” he wrote.

The Nevada was refloated weeks after the attack, repaired on the West Coast and returned to war service in 1942, fighting in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, including at the invasion of Normandy and the Battle of Okinawa.