During the fall of 1941, World War II was raging in Europe and other parts of the world, and for the United States the war began on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Frederick Delong, a 1932 graduate of Cridersville High School, had enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1939 and as a Marine was assigned to the battleship USS Arizona. The ship was one of 19 destroyed in the attack, and when USS Arizona sank on December 7, Delong and 1177 of his shipmates went down with it. He was among the very first U.S. casualties of World War II, and his body remains in the ship at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, now the USS Arizona Memorial, which more than two million people visit each year.