One last roll call for survivors of an infamous day

[thedrifter]

December 07, 2006
One last roll call for survivors of an infamous day

The Associated Press

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii — This will be their last visit to this watery grave to share stories, exchange smiles, find peace and salute their fallen friends.

This, they say, will be their final farewell.

With their number quickly dwindling, survivors of Pearl Harbor will gather Thursday one last time to honor those killed by the Japanese 65 years ago, and to mark a day that lives in infamy.


“This will be one to remember,” said Mal Middlesworth, president of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. “It’s going to be something that we’ll cherish forever.”

The survivors have met here every five years for four decades, but they’re now in their 80s or 90s and are not counting on a 70th reunion. They have made every effort to report for one final roll call.

“We’re like the dodo bird. We’re almost extinct,” said Middlesworth, now an 83-year-old retiree from Upland, Calif., but then — on Dec. 7, 1941 — an 18-year-old Marine on the USS San Francisco.

Nearly 500 survivors from across the nation were expected to make the trip to Hawaii, bringing with them 1,300 family members, numerous wheelchairs and too many haunting memories.

Memories of a shocking, two-hour aerial raid that destroyed or heavily damaged 21 ships and 320 aircraft, that killed 2,390 people and wounded 1,178 others, that plunged the United States into World War II and set in motion the events that led to atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“I suspect not many people have thought about this, but we’re witnessing history,” said Daniel Martinez, chief historian at the USS Arizona Memorial. “We are seeing the passing of a generation.”

———

The attack may have occurred 65 years ago, but survivors say they can still hear the explosions, smell the burning flesh, taste the sea water and hear the cries.

“The younger ones were crying, ‘Mom! Mom! Mom!”’ said Edward Chun, who witnessed the attack from the Ten-Ten dock, just a couple hundred yards away from Battleship Row.

Chun, 83, had just begun his workday as a civilian pipe fitter when he was thrust into assisting in everything from spraying water on the ships to aiding casualties.

“From the time the first bomb dropped and for the next 15 minutes, it was complete chaos,” he said. “Nobody knew what was going on. Everybody was running around like a chicken with their head cut off.”

Chun saw the Oklahoma and West Virginia torpedoed by Japanese aircraft. He heard the tapping of sailors trapped in the hulls of sunken ships. He escaped death when Ten-Ten was strafed, leaving behind dead and wounded.

“How I never got hit, I don’t know,” said Chun, who was later drafted and served in the Korean and Vietnam wars. “I’ll tell you a secret: When your number comes up, you’re going to go. Well, every morning I get up, I change my number.”

Everett Hyland doesn’t know how he stayed alive when almost everyone around him didn’t. He was radioman aboard the Pennsylvania, which was in Dry Dock No. 1, and was helping transport ammunition to the anti-aircraft gun when a bomb exploded.

Badly burned, Hyland regained consciousness 18 days later, on Christmas night. During that time, his older brother visited.

“The only way he knew it was me was the tag on my toe,” Hyland said. “He (later) told me we looked like roast turkeys lined up.”

Today, scar tissue covers most of his arms and legs.

“I got a quick facial out of it. I used to be a freckled-faced kid,” he said. “I don’t have any lips. They could fix faces, but they couldn’t build any lips.”

And he was lucky.

Many of the dead were teenage sailors and Marines away from home for the first time. They died before they had an opportunity to get married, have children, build lives.

Four in five servicemen on the USS Arizona — 1,177 in all — did not survive the day. It was the greatest loss of life of any ship in U.S. naval history. They remain entombed in the battleship’s sunken hull, which still seeps oil every few seconds, leaving a colorful sheen on the harbor water.

The survivors say they have more than horrific memories to offer. “Remember Pearl Harbor” is just the first half of the association’s motto; the rest is “Keep America alert.”

Martinez said many Pearl Harbor survivors were disheartened by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, “as if they had not done their job hard enough.”

Once again, it seemed that America had been caught sleeping. Interest in Pearl Harbor and its aging survivors surged. The old soldiers are much in demand — to sign autographs, walk in parades, speak to classrooms and pose for pictures. Visits to the USS Arizona Memorial are at record levels.

Not that everyone sees similarities between the two attacks. “There is no comparison,” Hyland said. “That was terrorists killing a pile of civilians. Here, you had professional fighters versus professional fighters. Two different things.”

There are those who are unable to forgive the Japanese, But others testify to the power of reconciliation.

“There are some guys that are going to die with hate in their heart. I don’t have in me any hatred in my heart,” said 87-year-old survivor Lee Soucy, of Plainview, Texas. “They were doing their job just like we were.”

Hyland, who was almost killed in the attack, married a woman from Japan. They met at the 50th Pearl Harbor anniversary and wed the following year.

“I got over it a long time ago,” he said.

———

Former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, who dubbed Americans who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II “the greatest generation,” agreed to be keynote speaker for Thursday’s ceremony. A moment of silence at 7:55 a.m. was to mark the time when the attack began.

Martinez, the USS Arizona historian, likened it to another reunion 68 years ago — the final gathering of Civil War veterans in Gettysburg, Pa., when aging warriors in blue and gray shook hands and shared war stories. In 1938, as in 2006, the nation faced an uncertain future in a world gripped by conflict.

“The passing of that generation had its moment and we’re going to have ours,” he said.

But some veterans don’t believe, or refuse to accept, that this will be the last major gathering.

“They claimed the 60th was going to be the last one. Now they have the 65th. When they have the 70th, then they’ll be claiming, ‘This will be the last one,”’ Hyland said. “They’ve been crying wolf too many times.”

Hyland does accept the fact that their numbers are dwindling fast.

“We all have our turn and our turn is getting closer,” he said.

But until then, they are drawn to Pearl Harbor, and to each other. Military historian Douglas Smith, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I., says they are proud of their service and eager to return “to their glory days,” but most of all they revel in the bonds they formed long ago, when they were young.

The bond is so strong that some ask to have their ashes interred inside the Arizona, laid to rest with shipmates who were not so fortunate as to survive Dec. 7, 1941.

“They’re coming home,” Middlesworth said. “They feel they’re coming home.”

Ellie

[thedrifter]

December 10, 2001
A nation awakened to its destiny

By Robert Cressman
Special to the Times

“I couldn’t fathom what I saw. Then everything seemed to blow up.”

Seventy-eight-year-old Howard Snell of Pearland, Texas, makes that 60-year time trip to Pearl Harbor in an instant: December 7, 1941 — the date that will live in infamy, the day that will never recede far in memory for those who were there.

Never.

Six enemy aircraft carriers launched two waves of attack planes, 350 in all, and shocked the slumbering paradise into battle, “Like a thunderclap from a clear sky,” as Japanese Adm. Matome Ugaki later described it.

Indeed, the attack came out of the blue; the Japanese used the cover of peace to marshal the most powerful strike force yet wielded by any navy on the face of the planet for the attack on U.S. Pacific Fleet. The sucker punch devastated Pearl Harbor but pulled America into a war it was destined to win.

“Remember Pearl Harbor” became an enduring rallying cry — but who could ever forget? Being “Pearl Harbored” is part of the American lexicon as a synonym for being surprised. The same phrase could describe the startling sense of surprise when passenger jets plunged into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Ironically, the terrorists were kamikazes on a suicide mission, while the Japanese aviators of 60 years ago fully expected to fight their way into Pearl Harbor and then fight their way out.

Operating in both the high-level bombing and torpedo-carrying role, carrier bombers, supported by fighters, sank five of the eight battleships in harbor, a gunnery training ship, one minelayer and two destroyers. They damaged three battleships, four cruisers and three destroyers. Attacks on nearby airfields destroyed 188 planes: long-range Navy flying boats and utility aircraft; Army fighters and long-range bombers; and Marine Corps fighters, scout bombers and utility planes. The Navy suffered 2,008 killed, more than half on board the battleship Arizona alone when a bomb touched off a cataclysmic explosion; the Marine Corps suffered 109 dead; and the Army, 218. Sixty-eight civilians died, including some who were the victims of improperly fused anti-aircraft shells. Japanese losses numbered 29 aircraft, four midget submarines and fewer than 100 men.

American heroes wore every uniform; their bravery knew no rank.

A call to arms, then and now The attack united the country, filling Americans with resolve to defeat an enemy that had begun hostilities without a declaration of war. Many said that unified spirit lay long dormant, until Sept. 11, 2001.

“The Sept. 11 attack — that woke up America,” said 89-year-old Joseph Ruggles of St. Petersburg, Fla., who as a Navy pharmacist’s mate helped with casualties at Pearl Harbor. “Patriotism is just blooming all over the country.”

“I always thought the next war would come from within, that things would happen here at home,” he said. “But people just wouldn’t buy it.”

Just as it took an almost unimaginable event to focus the nation on the threat of terrorism, it took Pearl Harbor to finally commit America to World War II. The United States in 1939 had been alarmed about the spread of Nazism and fascism in Europe, and had squared off on the diplomatic front with militarist Japan over its campaign of aggression in China.

Yet the war that started in Europe in September 1939 began to draw the United States in during the two years prior to Pearl Harbor, and by the spring of 1941, efforts were well under way to escort convoys carrying supplies to England. By the late summer, U.S. ships were convoying vessels to a midocean meeting point where the British Navy would see that the ships reached England safely. By late October, German U-boats had torpedoed three U.S. Navy ships, two destroyers and an oiler, sinking the destroyer Reuben James on Halloween night.

Five weeks later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Though public knowledge of the attack came slowly by today’s standards — through radio reports and newspapers, rather than live, round-the-clock television footage — the outrage spread quickly.

Sinking the mighty U.S. battleships, “the backbone of the fleet,” 60 years ago seemed nearly as impossible and improbable as toppling the twin towers of the World Trade Center in some far-fetched suicide hijacking.

But hell-bent enemies achieved both objectives. And in 1941 and 2001, Americans responded with self-sacrifice and heroism of the highest order as suddenly they were forced to transition from peace to war footing.

Ordinary heroes Just as firefighters, police officers and citizens off the street rushed to save others trapped in the doomed World Trade Center and wounded Pentagon, heroes rose from the ranks at Pearl Harbor to save their brothers in arms and defend their country.

Marines manning machine guns on board the battleship Nevada remained at their posts as fires raged beneath them, keeping their weapons in action throughout the battle and living to tell the tale. On board the flooding battleship Oklahoma, Ensign Francis G. Flaherty, USNR, and Seaman 1st Class James R. Ward held flashlights, lighting the way for shipmates to escape at the cost of their own lives. On the target ship Utah, Austrian-born Chief Watertender Peter Tomich remained behind to secure the boilers and ensure that his shipmates in the fireroom escaped.

All three men — Flaherty, Ward and Tomich — were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

The cataclysmic explosion of the battleship Arizona’s forward magazines triggered fires that consumed the warship and swept men off the repair ship Vestal, tied up alongside. Vestal’s captain, Cmdr. Cassin Young, was among those hurled into the oily, burning waters. Young hauled himself up the accommodation ladder and into the fight. He got the Vestal under way and cleared the side of the doomed battleship, an act that saved the Vestal. Young was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions.

A kind of providence kept the disaster at Pearl Harbor from being much worse. The Japanese spared the fuel-tank farms that lay prominently in sight; some tanks even outlandishly camouflaged to resemble buildings. The fuel stored there enabled the fleet to continue operating from Pearl, for oil was the lifeblood of its ships. The Navy Yard lay virtually untouched, providing a safe haven where damaged vessels could be repaired to fight again. Had the battleships sunk that day been off Lahaina, the deepwater anchorage off Maui, they would have been irretrievable. As it was, only the Arizona and Oklahoma never returned to active service, while the others were all raised, repaired and returned to the fight.

While the Japanese attack crippled the battle line, it missed the Pacific Fleet’s aircraft carriers. The Enterprise and Lexington were engaged in aircraft-ferrying missions to Wake Island and Midway, while the Saratoga was in San Diego, readying to return to Pearl. Although some aircraft from the Enterprise engaged Japanese planes that morning, flying in to Pearl as the attack unfolded, the ship and her planes survived the day unscathed. She would remain in action, though bloodied in battle, for the rest of the war.

“It could never happen here,” could have been said by Americans in 2001, echoing their forebears in 1941. America’s security had long been assured by a moat — the oceans that wash both coasts — although the advent of the airplane had shrunk distances. Most Americans would have considered an onslaught as terrible as occurred on 11 September as virtually unthinkable — like Americans of 1941 considered the fleet secure at Pearl Harbor. After all, what nation would dare send a force across the Pacific Ocean, risking detection, to attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet at its base? While the possibility existed, none but the most farsighted could have dreamed that an adversary would carry out such a daring plan.

In 1941, there were indications the United States and Japan were headed for war, but the handful of leaders who were privy to Japanese codes failed to prepare the American public for that possibility. While the debate continues about whether the commanders on the scene in Hawaii had enough information to prepare for or prevent a possible attack, no one believed that Pearl Harbor was a target — no more than anyone could have predicted that the twin towers in New York City would be attacked and brought down.

Until that attack, calls for the need to vigorously defend against the threat of domestic terrorism were all but ignored.

Now homeland defense is a national priority.

This was the lesson of 12-7-41: Expect the unexpected.

America was reminded the hard way on 9-11-01 of the need to heed that lesson.

Always.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

December 10, 2001
Battle strategy: America’s dark hour gave carriers a time to shine

By Christopher P. Cavas
Times staff writer

‘Anyone who ever thought the carrier was dispensable is a nut,” Atlantic Fleet commander Adm. Robert J. Natter said to reporters in Norfolk, Va., on Nov. 28.

The admiral was speaking about sustained aircraft carrier combat operations against targets in Afghanistan in 2001, but his words might have been just as applicable after Dec. 7, 1941.

That’s when six Japanese fleet carriers, operating as a mobile task force, launched hundreds of planes to attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor. With negligible losses, the Japanese inflicted major damage against the heart of America’s naval power in the Pacific: the powerful, big-gunned, heavily armored battleship force. Five of the eight battleships in the harbor that morning were sunk, and much of what many considered the Navy’s main striking force lay in ruins in the mud and oil-slicked water.

But out of sheer luck the Japanese had missed what they really wanted: the Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers. All were away that morning. The carriers’ escape from the attack would return to haunt the Japanese within months.

During the period between the world wars, a debate sizzled in the world’s major navies about the power of carrier aircraft versus the battleship. The big-gun ship had reigned supreme for centuries, evolving from sailing ships carrying more than a hundred guns to ironclads in the mid-19th century, culminating in the “dreadnought” style of battleship of the early 20th century. The battleships caught at Pearl in 1941 were products of World War I-era designs, each carrying about a dozen 14- or 16-inch guns, armored to protect themselves from their own kind. They were relatively slow, with top speeds of barely 20 knots.

For several decades, naval planners on both sides of the Pacific thought about how a war between Japan and the U.S. would be fought. Each of the countries foresaw a conflict where a powerful U.S. fleet, led by battleships, would fight its way across the ocean to eventually meet a Japanese fleet in a battle that would decide everything.

But visionaries on both sides had other ideas. They thought the aircraft carrier was the capital ship of the future, and air-power advocates argued since the 1920s that the battleship was dead. Traditionalists scoffed, citing the miniscule carrier planes of the day and the puny weapons delivered. But with advancing technology developing bigger and better planes that packed an ever-growing punch, carrier advocates saw the day approaching when their argument would win out.

Ironically, it was the Japanese who showed what the carrier could do.

“All of a sudden there was a demonstration that if you put a bunch of carriers in one place, you could end up with a battle fleet that could find itself outfought and out-punched by the enemy,” said Charles Haberlein, a curator with the Naval Historical Center.

“It was now demonstrably true that a sizeable force of aircraft carriers with well-equipped and well-trained people could defeat an enemy battle fleet in harbor.”

After Pearl Harbor, there could be no battleships-vs.-flattops debate. Like it or not, the U.S. Navy would have to depend on its few carriers to carry the fight to the enemy.

“The battleships were no longer available to lead an advance across the Pacific,” Haberlein said.

The attack on Pearl Harbor showed the Navy the hard way that it had other problems, too. Training thought to be adequate was shown to be insufficient; damage control methods had a long way to go; certain guns and equipment were shown to have minimal value in actual battle conditions. The Navy — and the entire country — learned the value of vigilance and preparedness, and the danger of underestimating an enemy.

In fits and starts, the Americans put together strategy and tactics based on the carrier task force, massing carriers and their air groups to deliver powerful blows against the Japanese. Within two years of the Japanese attack, the U. S. Navy’s carriers were ranging into the western Pacific, and by early 1945 were attacking Japan itself. American battleships were there too, but only in supporting roles, adding antiaircraft firepower to help protect the carriers from Japanese aircraft.

Battleships disappeared from the Navy’s active fleet soon after the war. While a few were retained into the 1990s, their main value was in providing fire support for Marine amphibious landings.

The Navy has retained its faith in the carrier ever since Pearl Harbor, and the type has withstood periodic attacks by critics who think shore-based air power can replace the flattop. In the fall of 2001, the captain of the carrier Enterprise addressed his crew as they prepared to launch airstrikes into Afghanistan. “The last time Enterprise actually went to war to defend against an attack on our homeland was almost exactly 60 years ago, when a treacherous enemy conducted a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor,” said Capt. James A. Winnefeld. “During that attack, a different Enterprise was at sea, on her way home, and was ultimately an integral response in the difficult but bloody task of soundly defeating that enemy.”

“Tonight, a ship named Enterprise will again be an integral part of our nation’s response.”

A new war, and a new Enterprise, validated once again the concept first proven by a Japanese fleet 60 years before.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

December 11, 2006
Damn the torpedoes!: Pearl Harbor shattered conventional thinking

By Charles Jones
Special to the Times

Three U.S. events led to the development of naval aviation — the weapon Japan used so effectively Dec. 7, 1941 — and all three shared a connection with Hampton Roads, Va.

The first: The 1862 battle in Hampton Roads between the ironclads CSS Virginia and USS Monitor marked the end of the wooden warship.

The second: The 1910 flight from the cruiser Birmingham, anchored in Hampton Roads — the first flight from a ship — marked the end of the gun as the deadliest naval weapon.

Combining the ironclad and the airplane resulted in naval aviation, which would make aircraft carriers and airplanes, not battleships and guns, the most dangerous naval weapons.

The third event would determine whether naval aviation was effective — i.e., could aircraft in fact sink ships? The answer came in tests in the 1920s conducted by the aircraft of Army Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell. His aircraft — operating from Langley Field near Hampton Roads and from a primitive airfield on North Carolina’s Outer Banks — sank old ships.

Conventional thinking, however, persisted through Dec. 6, 1941: Battleships and guns were the main naval weapons, and ships in shallow harbors — such as Pearl Harbor — were safe from aerial torpedo attacks, since torpedoes dropped from airplanes traveled downward several hundred feet upon hitting water before leveling off and running toward targets.

Two men who noticed changes in naval weapons and believed in air power’s supremacy over battleships were Japanese naval officers Minoru Genda, who planned the Pearl Harbor attack in detail, and Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the attack’s first wave.

Three types of Japanese aircraft inflicted an excruciating deathblow on conventional thinking, proving dramatically that carriers, not battleships, were now the premier combat ships: • Mitsubishi Zero fighter-bombers protected other Japanese aircraft, strafed ground targets and engaged U.S. fighters.

• Aichi Val vertical bombers dive-bombed and strafed ships and installations.

• Nakajima Kate carrier-borne horizontal bombers attacked ships, particularly battleships, with torpedoes and bombs.

Because of Pearl Harbor’s shallow depth, Japanese torpedoes were fitted with special wooden fins, limiting how far they sank before leveling out.

While conventional torpedoes would have hit bottom, these torpedoes hit American ships moored in Pearl Harbor with deadly results.

Some Kates carried 16-inch naval shells converted into armor-piercing bombs that could penetrate the deck armor of ships moored between Ford Island and another ship.

The effectiveness of the Japanese weapons is still seen in Pearl Harbor, where the battleships Arizona, hit by aerial bombs, and Utah, hit by aerial torpedoes, rest peacefully as graves and memorials at the same berths they occupied Dec. 7.

The writer, a Marine Corps Reserve colonel, is a writer and lawyer in Norfolk, Va. His e-mail address is cajones@earthlink.net.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

USS Arizona, Report of Pearl Harbor Attack

www.history.navy.mil/docs/wwii/pearl/ph21.htm

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Photo gallery

www.militarycity.com/gall...earlharbor

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Dec. 7th 1941


“Was it over when the German’s bombed Pearl Harbor???”

This was the famous line shouted by Jim Belushi in Animal House, a film made famous in the Seventies, but with real undertones that bother me a bit. You know the man on the street series that Jay Leno does? He walks around Hollywood Blvd and asks the average American history questions that EVERYONE should know. I remember once he asked “So what year did the Germans bomb Pearl Harbor?” They stumbled, all of them and the sad part is, not only did they mess up the year, not one of them piped up and said “Germans??? I thought it was the Japanese?”

Sixty-five years ago, the Empire of Japan, attacked our country and killed thousands of our servicemen and Americans. That was the straw that broke the camels back and got us into the whole World War act. Those generations are leaving us at the cyclic rate and pretty soon, say in the next ten years, our children will only hear about this in a chapter in their textbook at school. What scares me the most now, is how the Japanese are changing history little by little and now their books show that America forced the Japanese to attack us. Can you believe that? Now fast forward sixty-five years to the year 2071. What will the history books say about America then? If it keeps going the way I imagine it will, all of the history books will show that America forced the Muslims to attack us on September 11th 2001 and all the other attacks that we have endured.

I only hope that we never forget these brutal attacks on our country and to those men and women who survived that day in Hawaii, I will never forget, nor will my children.

Semper Fi,
Taco

Ellie