Just three months after standing at Pearl Harbor to deliver a salute on behalf of the nation’s aging World War II generation, Navy veteran Milton “Rip” Ripple has died. He was 98.
Pacific Historic Parks, the nonprofit that partners with the National Park Service at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial, announced Ripple’s passing on March 22, 2026. The organization shared a tribute describing Ripple as a beloved figure in the Pearl Harbor commemorative community who had maintained a deep connection to Hawaii for more than half a century.
From Paper Boy to Sailor
Ripple was the fourth of nine children growing up in Pennsylvania. He was just 13 years old and working as a paper boy when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, pulling the United States into the deadliest conflict in human history. By 1945, at age 17, he dropped out of school and enlisted in the Navy.
After completing training in Illinois, Ripple shipped out to Hawaii and was assigned to USS Pollux (AKS-4), a general stores issue ship tasked with ferrying supplies across the Pacific. In that role, he traveled between Pearl Harbor, Wake Island and the Marshall Islands, keeping forward-deployed forces stocked with the equipment and provisions they needed to sustain operations in the vast Pacific theater.
Witness to the Atomic Age
In the summer of 1946, the U.S. military assembled a fleet of 95 target vessels in the lagoon at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands for Operation Crossroads, the first nuclear weapons tests of the postwar era. The operation involved two detonations of Fat Man-type plutonium bombs, the same design dropped on Nagasaki the year before. About 42,000 military personnel took part. Ripple, still aboard Pollux, was among them. He watched both blasts from his ship further out at sea.
The roughly 42,000 sailors who participated in Operation Crossroads became known as “atomic veterans.” The 80th anniversary of the operation is in July 2026, though very few veterans are known to still be alive today. With Ripple’s passing, one of the last connections to the atomic tests at Bikini Atoll is gone.
Ripple served two years in the Navy before returning to civilian life. He used the GI Bill to attend Reading Business Institute in Pennsylvania and went on to build a career as an industrial engineer.
In 1953, he married his wife, Jeanne, and the couple remained together for more than 60 years until her death in 2017. In the 1970s, Milton and Jeanne purchased a condominium on Oahu, and for decades the couple made annual visits to the island where Ripple had once been stationed as a young sailor.
A Final Salute at Pearl Harbor
On Dec. 7, 2025, Ripple attended the 84th anniversary commemoration of the attack on Pearl Harbor at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial. It was the first time since the war that no survivors of the 1941 attack were present at the ceremony. Pearl Harbor survivor Ira “Ike” Schab, 105, had planned to attend but canceled due to health concerns. Schab died just 13 days later.
In Schab’s absence, Ripple stepped forward. He rose from his seat to render the ceremonial return of salute to sailors aboard the destroyer USS Carl M. Levin as it sailed through Pearl Harbor in a pass-in-review past the USS Arizona Memorial.
“I’m so honored to be here,” Ripple told KHON2 in Honolulu. “I always think of the veterans who passed away and are buried on the Arizona.”
According to Pacific Historic Parks, Ripple considered rendering the salute a great honor. He was among several WWII veterans who attended the ceremony, representing the Army, Navy and Marine Corps.
Ripple’s death is another reminder of how quickly the WWII generation is disappearing. The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that fewer than 46,000 of the 16.4 million Americans who served in the war are still alive, a figure that drops by roughly 230 per day.
VA projections show that by 2036, only about 300 will remain. Within the next decade, WWII will pass entirely from living memory into documented history, and with it the ability to hear firsthand from the men and women who fought in it.
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