Robert D. West, who was among 32 men rescued from the bottom of the capsized battleship Oklahoma in Pearl Harbor at the start of the U.S. involvement in World War II and was aboard the battleship Massachusetts in Tokyo Bay when the peace treaty with Japan was signed, has died. He was 82.
Mr. West, a Chicago native who for many years owned a carpet and drapery business in West Covina, Calif., died Jan. 14 in his home in San Juan Capistrano, Calif.
He suffered from emphysema and died of probable lung cancer, his family said.
When Mr. West’s seven daughters were growing up after the war, their father never talked to them about the nearly 30 hours he spent trapped in the Oklahoma after it was struck by Japanese torpedoes and capsized on Dec. 7, 1941.
When he discussed his experience in a 1966 interview with Life magazine for an issue marking the 25th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, they understood why their father always slept with a small light on.
“They had been trapped in pitch darkness, and I think that [memory] never totally left him,” said one daughter, Diane.
At age 17, Mr. West dropped out of high school in Chicago and enlisted in the Navy. In 1941, he was a musician second class based in Hawaii. On that infamous Sunday, Mr. West and 21 other band members were assembled on the Oklahoma’s main deck preparing to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” for the 8 a.m. raising of the colors.
They never played.
About 7:55 a.m., as Mr. West recalled in a reminiscence he wrote for the USS Arizona Memorial, he noticed a swarm of planes coming in high off the port side of battleship row.
At first Mr. West thought the planes were doing maneuvers. When one of the planes dropped a bomb on Ford Island, Mr. West said to his shipmate, “That sure looks like the real McCoy.”
A voice came over the Oklahoma’s loudspeaker ordering all hands to battle stations.
Mr. West, according to the Life magazine account, only recently had been transferred to his third-deck battle station.
The transfer saved his life: Everyone manning his former battle station was killed in the first minutes of the attack.
The ship sank after it was hit by seven torpedoes.
Although 32 men who had been trapped inside the Oklahoma were rescued on Dec. 8 and 9, tapping from those who were unable to be rescued continued to be heard through Dec. 10.
In all, 20 of the ship’s officers and 395 enlisted men were reported either killed or missing.
