Fifty years ago Saturday, John Barry came out of 7 a.m. mass at a church in downtown Honolulu wondering what to do with the rest of the day.
The offices of Naval Intelligence, where Barry, an enlisted man, was posted, weren`t open on Sunday. Afterward, President Franklin Roosevelt would call Dec. 7, 1941, ”a date that will live in infamy.” But that morning, it seemed no different from any other day in Hawaii`s sunshine paradise. So Barry considered heading for nearby Waikiki beach.
”Those were the days of the old, peacetime Navy,” recalls Barry, now a retired Chicago police officer. ”Supposedly, we were on a wartime footing, but sailors still got weekend liberty.”
Among the scores of enlisted men expecting to take shore leave that morning was Ambrose Ferri, now a retired employee of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center who lives in Waukegan. In December 1941, Ferri was serving on the Vestal, a repair ship tied up alongside the battleship Arizona in Pearl Harbor, about 10 miles from Honolulu.
George Lininger, now a retired lawyer living in Munster, Ind., has similar memories of thinking that long-ago Sunday morning marked nothing more than the beginning of a lazy day off. An Army enlisted man, Lininger was nursing a second cup of coffee in a mess hall at Wheeler Field, about 15 miles from Honolulu and the Air Corps` largest fighter base in the Pacific.
It wasn`t that the idea of war never crossed Lininger`s and the others`
minds. The newspapers were full of war news. Hitler`s armies were on the march in Europe, and Japanese forces had been occupying Chinese territory for a decade. Through fall 1941, Roosevelt had called on Japan to stop its aggression.
To give Roosevelt`s words some weight, the Navy had moved the Arizona and other ships to Pearl Harbor from their home ports along the U.S. West Coast. Even so, Lininger figured that if America got into the war, it would be in response to a Japanese attack on Malaysia or the Philippines, which are relatively close to Japan.
”We thought: `No way the war is going to begin here. Hawaii is 5,000 miles from anywhere,` ” Lininger says.
Even as Lininger and his buddies were taking comfort in that thought, a Japanese fleet was steaming in their direction. Shortly, its fighters and bombers would demonstrate that, in an age of aircraft carriers, distance no longer provides defense.
As the price of that lesson, the U.S. entered World War II by suffering its greatest military defeat in history.
First inkling of disaster
Now Lininger, Ferri, Barry and other Chicago-area veterans of Pearl Harbor, along with thousands of their counterparts across the nation, are returning to Honolulu. At 7:55 a.m. Saturday, exactly half a century after looking up to see the first waves of Japanese planes, they will gather on the USS Arizona Memorial, erected where the battleship sank, to honor the 2,403 of their comrades who died at Pearl Harbor-and perhaps to wonder how much succeeding generations of Americans actually want to remember.
”I`ll be thinking of Bill Cottier, another kid from the Northwest Side who was there in `41,” Barry says. ”His father and my dad worked together. Bill went down with the Arizona along with a thousand shipmates whose bodies still lie in her sunken hull.”
Barry got his first inkling of disaster while still standing in front of the church where he had attended mass. Hearing a series of explosions in the distance, he started running for his post at Naval Intelligence in downtown Honolulu, hoping someone would be there to open the doors. In fact, other off- duty personel were streaming into the office.
”Someone picked up a telephone and shouted: `They`re bombing Pearl Harbor! It`s war!` ” Barry recalls.
James Baker got the same message from an enlisted man while standing on the bridge of the Pelias, a submarine tender. Baker had paid his tuition at Northwestern University`s Law School by serving as a Naval Reserve officer aboard the USS Winnetka, a training ship moored at Chicago`s Navy Pier. In 1941, he was called to active duty as part of the buildup of America`s armed forces.
”A sailor came running up to the bridge, saluted and said, `Sir, do Japanese planes have orange circles under their wings?` ” Baker recalls. ”An officer said yes and the sailor replied, `Well, sir, then we`re at war.` ”
That realization came slower to Edward Gertschen, now a retired employee of Great Lakes Naval Training Center, who served aboard the destroyer tender Dobbin in 1941.
Just before 8 a.m. on that first Sunday in December, he was waiting for a launch to ferry him to church services. Suddenly, he saw a formation of airplanes flying low over Ford Island, which sits in the center of Pearl Harbor.
”I remember thinking, `It`s got to be the Navy`s dawn patrol returning to their airfields over there,` ” says Gertschen, who lives in Waukegan.
In fact, the Japanese`s battle plans were calculated to create just such confusion in their opponents` minds. Adm. Isoroko Yamamoto, who planned the attack, realized that America`s economic and military potential dwarfed Japan`s. He reasoned that the only way his country could win a war with the U.S. was by dealing a sudden and crippling blow to its Navy.
Yamamoto knew the American fleet went on maneuvers during the week but returned weekends to Pearl Harbor, where its major ships were moored, bow to stern, just off Ford Island in a great flotilla, known as Battleship Row, while crews took shore leave. So an attack early on a Sunday morning would maximize the chance of catching the Americans defenseless.
Yamamoto`s greatest worry was that American planes would confront his fighters and bombers. So the Japanese attack began with raids on the ring of airfields surrounding Pearl Harbor, among them Wheeler Field, where Lininger was lingering over his morning coffee. Hearing explosions, he bolted for the mess hall`s door to see what was happening.
”No sooner was I outside than I heard an explosion behind me,” Lininger recalls. ”I turned and saw the barracks were gone. A Japanese bomb had blown it-and guys I`d been sitting with-sky high.”
Sitting ducks
Lininger recalls that the base commander feared his planes were vulnerable to saboteurs. So the fighters had been lined up, wingtip to wingtip, in the center of the field, making them a sitting-duck target, just like Battleship Row.
Sprinting across the field, Lininger saw waves of Japanese attackers reducing the American planes to smoldering heaps of scrap metal. In the middle of the carnage, ground crews were desperately patching up a few fighters, trying to get them airborne.
”As he was climbing into his cockpit, one of our pilots took off his watch and handed it to a mechanic, saying, `Send this to my mother,`
” Lininger recalls. ”Like most of our guys, he got hit by Japanese strafers before making it to the end of the runway.”
Other young Americans also were desperately trying to improvise a defense. At Naval Intellegence headquarters, Barry and other sailors grabbed rifles and climbed to the roof of the building to fire a few ineffective rounds at the enemy planes.
In Pearl Harbor, Baker`s crewmates set up a machine gun and shot down a couple of torpedo planes as they passed over the Pelias, heading for Battleship Row.
That day, though, the skies over Pearl Harbor belonged to the Japanese. Joseph Triolo, now a retired Waukegan schoolteacher, had joined the Navy to escape the Depression and was on the Tangier, a seaplane tender. He climbed to his battle station high on the ship`s superstructure to see the sky so filled with enemy aircraft that they seemed like a swarm of bees.
”The Japanese pilots came in just above water level to aim their torpedoes with pinpoint accuracy,” he says. ”They flew so low, I was actually looking down at them.”
Bob Barchenger was on the bridge of the Argonne, a repair ship docked directly across from Battleship Row. He recalls that the Japanese had pushed back the canopies of their cockpits for better visibility. He could see their expressions as they headed for the big ships.
”We saw the battleship Oklahoma capsize, then the California was hit,”
says Barchenger, who retired after 26 years in the Navy and now lives in Lake Bluff. ”The water was filled with oil and flames. Sailors were leaping off the crippled ships and trying to swim through that inferno.”
On the repair ship Vestal, Ferri was almost knocked off his feet from the impact of the explosion when a Japanese bomb set off gunpowder and shells deep inside the Arizona, to which Ferri`s ship was moored.
”The blast was so tremendous, the Arizona seemed to rise up out of the water, then she sank,” Ferri says. ”We took a couple of bomb hits and our stern was sinking, but we managed to get free and beached our ship.”
Invasion feared
Every one of the eight American battleships at Pearl Harbor was sunk or heavily damaged by the time the Japanese raid ended, scarcely two hours after it began. Lester Cadman, who now lives in Hoffman Estates, was aboard the Nevada, which sat at the end of Battleship Row. He saw Japanese planes methodically working their way up the long line of ships and started to pray. ”I had just said, `Please, God Almighty,` when I saw the Arizona, which was right in front of us, blow up,” Cadman says. His ship`s captain and officers were nowhere to be seen, Cadman recalls. But the Nevada`s chief petty officer took charge, calling down to the boiler room for steam so the ship might sail out of the line of fire.
”The men down there said that with only two boilers fired up it wasn`t possible to move the ship,” Cadman recalls. ”But Chief Petty Officer Sedberry replied, `OK, then we`ll just have to do the impossible.` ”
Indeed, despite being hit by 17 bombs and a torpedo that ripped the Nevada`s bow away, the ship was maneuvered out of its mooring and then beached near the entrance to Pearl Harbor. As night fell, Cadman and his crewmates feared the Japanese might follow up their air attacks with an invasion of Hawaii. So they hauled sacks of flour up from the galley, stacking them like sandbags to improvise machine-gun nests on deck.
”You don`t know what fear is until you`ve spent a night like that with a ball of fire in your chest,” Cadman says.
Lininger didn`t get much sleep either. Along with other survivors at Wheeler Field, he was issued a blanket and a Springfield rifle left over from World War I and posted along the approach road to the base.
”We were scared, my God!” Lininger recalls. ”Anything moved, we shot at it.”
But the Japanese never came. Having accomplished its mission, the Japanese fleet was already withdrawing from Hawaiian waters. But for many young Americans who were there on Dec. 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor was permanently etched in memory.
Getting in the way
Triolo was transferred to an aircraft carrier and participated in the Pacific campaigns that pushed the Japanese out of the islands they had captured in the wake of their victory at Pearl Harbor.
”Every night, I`d take a blanket roll topside,” Triolo says. ”I never slept below decks again. I couldn`t forget all those poor guys who`d been trapped down there.”
Yet over the years, Triolo and other veterans note, the nation`s wartime resolve to ”Remember Pearl Harbor” seems to have been quietly abandoned. Indeed, a sense of being unwelcome reminders of a part of history other Americans want to forget has left some survivors concerned about this year`s 50th anniversary reunion.
It`s not that they expect a hero`s welcome. They think of themselves as just ordinary Joes who happened to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The real heroes, they like to say, sleep in rusty hulls at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
But Barchenger recalls the reaction he and other Pearl Harbor survivors got when they gathered at the Arizona Memorial five years ago to mark the 45th anniversary of the Japanese attack.
”There was a football game on, a big marathon race was being held and lots of other tourist hoopla too,” Barchenger says. ”We were made to feel like we were infringing, kind of getting in the way, or maybe throwing a wet blanket on the fun.”
Triolo says it is ironic that a younger generation seems preocuppied with the moral question of how the war ended but virtually oblivious of how it began.
”Every Aug. 6, college kids demonstrate (on the anniversary of) the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Yet we never see them marching on Dec. 7,” Ferri says. ”Sometimes I wonder: Do kids today even know the story of Pearl Harbor?”
