Survivor of attack dead at 106

RAY Chavez was the oldest US military survivor of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that plunged the US into World War II. He was 106.

Daniel Martinez, chief historian for the National Park Service at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, confirmed that Chavez was the oldest survivor of the attack that killed 2335 US military personnel and 68 civilians.

Hours before the attack, Chavez was aboard the minesweeper USS Condor as it patrolled the harbour’s east entrance when he and others saw the periscope of a Japanese submarine. They notified a destroyer that sunk it shortly before Japanese bombers arrived to strafe the harbour.

By then Chavez, who had worked through the early morning hours, had gone to his nearby home to sleep, ordering his wife not to wake him because he had been up all night.

“It seemed like I only slept about 10 minutes when she called me and said, ‘ We’re being attacked’,” he recalled in 2016. “And I said, ‘ Who is going to attack us?’

“She said, ‘ The Japanese are here, and they’re attacking everything.’ ” He ran back to the harbour to find it in flames.

Although never wounded, he left the military in 1945 suffering from post- traumatic stress disorder that left him anxious and shaking. Returning to San Diego, where he had grown up, he took a job as a landscaper and groundskeeper, attributing the outdoors, a healthy diet and a strict workout program that he continued into his early 100s with restoring his health.

“He loved trees and he dearly loved plants, and he knew everything about a plant or tree that you could want to know,” his daughter said.

“And he finally retired when he was 95.”

Still, he would not talk about Pearl Harbor for decades. Then, on a lastminute whim, he decided to return to Hawaii in 1991 for ceremonies marking the attack’s 50th anniversary.

“Then we did the 55th, the 60th, the 65th and the 70th, and from then on we went to every one,” his daughter recalled, adding that until Chavez’s health began to fail, he had planned to attend this year’s gathering next month.

Born March 12, 1912, in San Bernardino, California, to Mexican immigrant parents, Chavez moved to San Diego as a child. He joined the navy in 1938.

In his later years, as he became well known as the attack’s oldest military survivor, he’d be approached at memorial services and other events and asked for his autograph or to pose for pictures.

He always maintained that those events were not about him, however, but about those who gave their lives.