John Harllee Carmichael

Captain, U.S. Navy

John H. Carmichael was born on 7 September 1914. He was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Class of 1936.

In the five years after graduation from the Academy, but prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Carmichael was cruising in the Atlantic on the USS Nashville. While Nashville was on Neutrality Patrol in the Central Atlantic, she was based in Bermuda. They landed in Bermuda for a four-day liberty in early December and it was there, on 7 December 1941, in the mess hall of the Nashville, that Carmichael and his poker buddies were interrupted by a loud commotion coming from the other side of the room. When they went over there to ask them to keep it down, they discovered that Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese. Carmichael said, "We knew that the Japanese were going to attack, we didn't know where. We didn't expect it to be Pearl Harbor." He was very sure that the rest of the country felt very much like he felt at the time.

On 25 October 1944, he married Elizabeth Gordon Ellyson.

Death and Burial

Captain Carmichael died on 5 December 2010 and is buried at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, MD.

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