Haunted Heroes
Survivors call up memories of the attack so people will remember and
remain vigilant
By Michael Biesecker
JOURNAL REPORTER
On Dec. 7, 1941, Percy John Fulton woke up to another routine Sunday morning of Hawaiian paradise.
It was his duty that day to raise the flag on the USS St. Louis as a bugler played the call to colors at 8 a.m. He got to his post below the pole at the 638-foot cruiser's stern with time to spare, wearing a crisp khaki uniform and carrying a 48-star banner.
Many men were still sleeping off a Saturday night spent in Waikiki Beach, but Fulton, a 22-year-old Marine, had grown up on a farm in Belews Creek and was used to getting up early. He was accompanied by two other Marines, who stood with their M-1 rifles during the ceremony. Following peacetime procedure, they didn't have any ammunition.
| RELATED MATERIAL |
• JournalNow Home
• The Journal's front page from Dec. 8, 1941
• Pearl Harbor photo gallery
|
Life in 1941
• Population: 134 million
• National Debt: $47 billion
• Civilian Work Force: 56 Million (three fourths were men)
• Minimum Wage: 40 cents/hour
• Average Weekly Income: $40
• Movie Admission: 25 cents
• Less than half of homes had telephones.
• One fifth of homes were without electricity.
• More than a third of the nation's 32 million families lived below the poverty line ($1,500 a year).
• Between 4 and 5 million people were unemployed.
• A married man with two depedents paid no income tax unless he made $2,500; then he paid $6.
|
Waiting for the appointed time, Fulton took a moment to look out across Pearl Harbor. It was a warm, clear day with high, puffy clouds that hinted at rain. About a quarter-mile over the calm, turquoise bay was the pride of the U.S. Navy's Pacific fleet - seven massive steel gunboats, each named for a state, moored in a gray column appropriately called Battleship Row.
Suddenly Fulton heard the roar of a 14-cylinder Mitsubishi radial engine and turned to see an unfamiliar plane skimming across the water. A large red circle was painted between the wings and tail and a slender silver torpedo slung under its belly.
"We knew what that red meatball meant," said Fulton, now living in Winston-Salem. "We were so close we could see the machine gunner in the back of the plane smiling at us."
President Franklin D. Roosevelt would call Pearl Harbor a day that would live in infamy. But nearly 60 years later, veterans who survived the attack say that the nation has forgotten the lessons learned so long ago and half a world away.
During the attack, 19 ships were sunk or severely damaged, 347 aircraft were destroyed and 2,403 sailors, soldiers and civilians were killed. The Japanese lost 29 planes, six small submarines and at least 64 men.
The $135 million, star-studded movie that opened Friday will acquaint millions of young Americans with a Hollywood version of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Six North Carolina men who saw the attack fear that those watching the big-screen tale of a love triangle set against the special effects of computer-animated destruction will miss the point - romanticizing and glorifying what one called a "horror day."
John Loranger, then a 23-year-old pharmacist mate third class, was stationed at a Navy mobile hospital perched 800 feet above Pearl Harbor on Aiea Heights - about a mile from Fulton. He and a buddy had gotten up early to hike up to a radio shack at the peak with an antenna that could receive the stateside news.
The 6 a.m. broadcast was soon interrupted. The radio operator heard urgent-sounding chatter on the military frequency - something about an "unauthorized movement" detected in the restricted area outside the entrance to Pearl Harbor.
The destroyer USS Ward had sunk a Japanese submarine, but no warning was forwarded to the ships at Pearl. The squawking soon died down, and Loranger and his friend headed back down the mountain for some chow.
Just before 8, they were standing in line outside the mess hall, looking at the harbor spread below, when they saw a large number of planes appear over the ships.
"The remark was made, 'This is kind of a funny day to be having bombing practice,' " recalled Loranger. A series of explosions told the men that the planes weren't on a training mission. He remembers seeing two bombs hit the battleship USS Arizona.
"We saw the big red symbol on the side, and we knew it was the Japanese." Loranger said. "Mr. Sant, the warrant officer, said 'Boys hit the deck. This is real.' "
Minutes later, the men were standing on the ledge watching the attack when anti-aircraft batteries on the ships began returning fire. The guns lobbed explosive shells high into the air that burst into clouds of red-hot metal. A shell burst near the hospital, and shrapnel tore into the men on Aiea.
"The Arizona was firing toward us, even though she was going down," Loranger said. "I turned and got some in my back and shoulder. My friend, name of Eugene Thurman, he had his chest tore out. He staggered forward and said 'I'm hit,' but he was already dead."
Going through morning muster
Aubrey Gray, a 20-year-old seaman from Winston-Salem, was at the naval air station on Ford Island when the attack began. His unit, which belted the .50-caliber ammunition used in the navy's fighter planes, was going through its morning muster.
"We were standing in formation inside the hangar, and before they ever got to my name, we heard a plane dive and then a tremendous explosion," Gray said. "I thought a plane had crashed."
The men broke formation and ran outside to see a flight of Japanese dive bombers. A plane swooped down, and the tail gunner opened fire toward Gray. He saw a bullet shatter the concrete inches from his foot and ran back into the hangar to start handing out ammunition. Surrounded by explosives, he could hear enemy fire rattling through the hangar's roof.
"Across the runway I could see the Arizona," Gray said. "I saw a Japanese plane coming from the northeast. He pushed over into a 45-degree angle dive. I could follow that bomb as it fell and hit between the forward smokestack and bridge."
The bomb crashed through the Arizona's deck and hit in the ship's forward ammunition magazine.
"There was an explosion that wasn't that loud, a pause of maybe three or four seconds, and that's when it (the Arizona) literally blew up, all to pieces. It was a tremendous explosion," he said. Of the nearly 1,400 men on the ship, 1,177 died.
Across the harbor, the crew of the St. Louis struggled to get underway and make a run for the open sea. After seeing the torpedo plane, Fulton quickly raised his flag and ran to his battle station in a turret with twin 5-inch guns. He started slamming anti-aircraft shells the size of a two-liter soft-drink bottle into the gun's breach.
Fulton's ship was tied up between two other cruisers, the USS San Francisco and the USS Honolulu. Ignoring procedure, the captain of the St. Louis didn't wait for official orders to get his ship moving.
"Normally it took two tugs to maneuver us out into the channel," Fulton said. "The skipper backed the ship out and used the screws to turn us toward the mouth of the harbor."
Every now and then, Fulton would stick his head out the turret door. The air was thick with the smell of burning fuel oil and gunpowder.
"There were bodies floating in the water," he said. "Men were swimming in oil, covered with oil, and it was on fire."
The Japanese didn't limit their attack to the Navy base at Pearl. Bombers also hit the U.S. Army Air Corps' fighter squadron at Wheeler Field, about 11 miles north toward the center of the island of Oahu.
Leo Sienkiewicz, a 22-year-old staff sergeant from Erie, Pa., was sleeping off a wild night in Honolulu. He was awakened by the sound of diving airplanes.
Figuring that it was some Navy flyboys buzzing his base as a prank, he turned over to go back to sleep. Seconds later, the barracks was rocked by a loud explosion. He leapt out bed and ran to the window to see a plane flying so low that he could see the pilot and the telltale insignia on the plane's fuselage.
"There was a big red circle on it. I said, 'That's the goddamn Japanese. What are they doing here?' '' Sienkiewicz said. "I told my bunkee, 'Hey, something's going on out there. I think we're at war.' He said, 'Naw, can't be. That's just the Navy.' "
A bomb hit next to their barracks, and the concussion blew the windows out. The heavy door was blown off its hinges, flew across the room, and landed on the bunk where Sienkiewicz had been sleeping.
He ran outside to ready his planes, but fire from the strafing Japanese gunners drove him back under cover. He and the other airmen, most still in their underwear, huddled in the building for several minutes before the shooting died down.
Finally, Sienkiewicz was able to slip on some coveralls and a pair of shoes and run toward the hangars a few hundred feet away. Men were running around with blood coming down their faces and torn clothes.
The day before, Sienkiewicz and the other mechanics had wheeled out 50 brand-new P-40s and lined them up on the tarmac for inspection.
"We were lined up like ducks, nose to nose, and the Japanese had a choice target," he said. "I cried like a little kid when I saw all those burning airplanes."
Guns locked away for the weekend
At the Army's Schofield Barracks, next to the airfield, 22-year-old combat engineer Robert L. Welborn was looking for cover. His unit had been sent to Oahu the month before to build gun emplacements and strengthen the island's defenses, but so far they had been confined to base for a mandatory quarantine.
He was heading back from breakfast when several Japanese planes swooped down over the lush mountains and started bombing the base. Though then men quickly realized that hey were under attack, their rifles and ammunition were kept locked away in the armory for the weekend.
"We had men who liked to drink," Welborn explained. "Usually, it was best for all concerned that the guns were locked away for the weekends."
The Japanese planes started strafing the scattered American troops. As bullets tore through the roof of the barracks, the unarmed men searched for safety.
"I got under the bathroom where the concrete floor was," he said. "When I come back out, everybody was covered up. They had all found places under the building."
At the cargo docks near Pearl City, 25-year-old Seaman James O. Harbin was aboard the supply ship USS Vega, which had sailed in just the night before.
"A lot of the guys were fixing to go to church," Harbin said. "We were getting ready, shining our shoes and putting on our whites."
When the alarm sounded, he ran to his battle station at the ship's bow. From there he could see the planes bombing the battleships moored around Ford Island. The crew of the lightly armed freighter could do little more than watch.
"We saw the Arizona blow up, the planes coming in and all," he said. "We couldn't do nothing …. It was just a horror day."
At 9:45 a.m., nearly two hours after the attack began, the 324 surviving Japanese planes headed back to their fleet steaming 200 miles north of Oahu. In a decision that baffled many pilots who were eager to attack again, their admiral turned his six aircraft carriers and 14 support ships toward home.
Though the Japanese had destroyed eight battleships, the heart of the fleet, the American aircraft carriers were out to sea during the attack. Later, those ships and their planes would prove pivotal in Japanese defeats at Midway and the Coral Sea.
The cruiser St. Louis escaped the burning harbor and dueled with Japanese submarines off the coast, sinking one. The ship, the only one to make it to sea during the attack, was credited with shooting down three Japanese planes, though many of the crew thought that they got more.
P.J. Fulton, the Marine, went on to fight at Bougainville, Iwo Jima and Guam - among the most horrific battles of the war. He was training for the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands when two atomic bombs forced the empire's surrender on Aug. 14,1945.
He returned to Winston-Salem the next year as a master sergeant and intended to go back into the service, but met his future wife at the Forsyth County Register of Deeds office as she filed his discharge papers. Fulton went on to work in the office, retiring as the assistant register of deeds. He is state president of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association and regularly visits area schools to teach children about the attack.
Pharmacist mate John Loranger, slightly wounded by shrapnel, carried his dead friend's body to the Aiea hospital's morgue and then went down to a boat landing by the harbor. Even as Japanese planes strafed the pier, he pulled injured and oil-soaked sailors from the water.
"I didn't realize I had been hit until someone told me," Loranger said. "We took what sailors we could out of the drink. Some of them were alive and some were dead. You tried to get the live ones to the hospital, and we had to put those that were dead aside in pile."
He shipped back to states in 1944, got married and had three children. He retired from the Navy in 1964 to take a job at the state mental hospital in Butner, where he now lives.
In the days after the attack, Aubrey Gray was assigned to guard duty along the shore of Ford Island, near where several battleships had sunk or capsized. Dozens of sailors were left alive, trapped below decks in watertight compartments. They called for help by banging hammers inside the overturned hulls.Gray watched welders cut holes in the bottom of the USS Utah and rescue soaked and shaking men wearing little but their underwear. As they were brought ashore, Gray went to his barracks and collected what clothes could be spared. Discharged in 1946, he is now retired and living in Mocksville.
Helped get some P-40s into the air
Leo Sienkiewicz, the army sergeant at Wheeler Field, helped get three P-40s into the air during the attack that shot down six Japanese planes. Later that afternoon, a flight of American B-17s from the mainland appeared over the airfield, unaware that there had been an attack. Anxious airmen opened fire on the planes, thinking that the Japanese had returned. Sienkiewicz, who had seen the new four-engine bomber while stationed on the mainland, ran around screaming that they were friendly planes.
He fought at the Battle of Midway before heading back to the states in November 1944, where he went to work for the predecessor of NASA researching ways to keep ice out of the engines of high-altitude airplanes. He was discharged from the Army in 1952, but stayed on to work for the space program before retiring and settling in Pfafftown with his wife. He is the state chairman of the Pearl Harbor Survivors.
After the attack on Schofield Barracks, combat engineer R.L. Welborn's unit broke out its tools and went to work repairing the damage. He stayed on Oahu helping building gun emplacements and railroads until 1943, when he shipped out for the invasion of Saipan. He came home to Trinity in May 1945, and he and his wife live in the farmhouse he grew up in.
Seaman James Harbin was transferred from his supply ship to an old oil tanker converted to ferry airplanes to Australia. On the way back, his ship was attacked by a Japanese submarine but escaped without being sunk. He soon transferred to an American sub, the USS Plaice, figuring that he would be better off underwater.
On Aug. 9 1945, the Plaice was patrolling a few miles off the coast of the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
"We heard a big noise," he remembers. "Sound travels a long ways underwater. We raised up the periscope and looked out and saw this big mushroom going up." After witnessing firsthand the beginning and end of America's involvement in World War II, he was discharged and now lives in Mocksville with his wife.
These men's lives were irreparably changed by the events of Dec. 7., as was the nation. For decades, most of them didn't talk much about Pearl Harbor, even to family.
Several said they are talking now because it is the duty of those who were there that day to educate younger generations about the attack and pass on the values it taught them.
Gray said that the central lesson of Pearl is that the nation's interests don't stop at its shores.
"We've got to be vigilant, keep up with what's going on in the world and be prepared for anything that might happen," Gray said.
"The nation's leaders must keep our military at a high state of preparedness, so if we are attacked by surprise again we can do something about it."
More than anything, Sienkiewicz said, we can never be caught sleeping again.
Though it's been 60 years since he was the baby-faced sergeant frozen in an old black-and-white photo he keeps framed, he still has vivid nightmares of Wheeler Field that wake him in the uncertain hours before dawn.
"I dream the bombs are exploding but I can't get away because my legs don't work," he said. "There's no glory there."
• Michael Biesecker can be reached at 727-7338 or at mbiesecker@wsjournal.com
Archives | Business | Classifieds | Corrections | Entertainment | Front Page | Living | Local News
Obituaries | Opinion | Search | Site Map | Special Reports | Sports | Weather
NOTICE: Use of this Web site is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
We may collect personal information on this site, as described in our Privacy Policy.
© Winston-Salem Journal. The Winston-Salem Journal is a Media General newspaper.
|