Veterans' Memorial Project

Haywood Norman Bryant

Nashville, TN

World War II

Lt. Bryant served with the U.S. Naval Reserve. He enlisted in the Navy during the Christmas holiday season in 1941, a few days after Pearl Harbor. Lt. Bryant took part in nine major campaigns from the occupation of Kiska through all the bloody fight for the Pacific islands to the capture of Guam in August, 1944. He was on the Destroyer USS Hull, operating off the coast of the island of Samar on a smoke-screen detail with Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet. The ship capsized in a Pacific typhoon. Lt. Bryant was lost at sea among the 201 of its crew members lost of the total 263 officers and men aboard. The officer of the deck that storm-swept morning was Lt. (j.g.) Haywood Norman Bryant, senior communications officer of the Hull. A surviving fellow officer, describing the scene on the morning of December 18, 1944, said, “The ship sank slowly–the last I saw of Norman he was on the bridge at his post.” Lt. Bryant’s wife and family established at the Joint University Libraries the Haywood Norman Bryant Memorial Collection, a collection of books in the field of German history and literature. The initial gift to the library was his own personal library of about 150 volumes. An endowment fund was established to fund the collection. Lt. Bryant is listed as Missing in Action or Buried at Sea on the Tablets of the Missing at Manila American Cemetery, Manila, Philippines. (Lt. Bryant had received a BA from Vanderbilt University on 5/1938) There is a headstone in his honor at Mount Olivet Cemetery, Nashville, Tennessee.

-taken from Web site above and University and public records

Further information: https://www.abmc.gov