Vivid memories of a dark day in history
102-year-old Warren Upton, of San Jose, is among the last remaining Bay Area survivors
At 102, Warren Upton’s memories of the attack on Pearl Harbor 80 years ago are still vivid.
There were the two torpedoes that rattled his ship, the USS Utah, as he reached for a shaving kit. The sounds of gunfire and the sight of a Navy destroyer ramming an imperial Japanese submarine in the harbor. But one thing that still sticks out in his mind is a simple question: “Can you swim, Red?”
“I happened to have red hair in those days,” said Upton, a veterans cap covering his now silvery gray hair, recounting the Sunday morning surprise attack in 1941 that marked the beginning of the United States’ involvement in World War II.
The man asking the question was a fellow sailor who couldn’t swim and needed help getting to shore flailing in his life jacket as the battleship careened into the Pacific Ocean. “You’re really frightened but your body reacts,” said Upton. “We knew we had to do something — it’s self-preservation.”
The Japanese attack killed 2,403 Americans, including 58 sailors on the USS Utah, the majority of whom remain entombed in the sunken ship. Upton, a radioman, towed his partner ashore and took cover in a trench as the bombing continued.
He is among the few remaining Bay Area survivors of the Dec. 7 attack on Pearl Harbor, and eight decades later the last person in San Jose able to speak firsthand about the moment that plunged the U.S. into war, shaped a generation, and ultimately led to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Upton is now able to recount the event peppered with his good-natured chuckles, but he is straightforward on the horrors of the attack: “One thing I have to say is that war is hell.”
Upton has watched the community of Pearl Harbor survivors dwindle; there are about seven in the Bay Area and 50 to 75 nationwide, although there is no official tally. For years, Upton was responsible for notifying the now-disbanded Pearl Harbor Survivors Association of every death in his district. “To tell you the truth I’ve seen so many gone,” said Upton. “We gave up having reunions because there weren’t that many of us.”
This 80th anniversary is particularly significant for Upton as he and his small group of fellow survivors weathered the COVID-19 pandemic for nearly two years. This global health crisis is not Upton’s first. He was born in El Dorado, California, in October 1919 in the thick of the influenza pandemic. But the last months have been particularly hard on him. “I had to live 100 years to see a disease like this,” Upton said. His advice for fighting through the health crisis is simple: “I wouldn’t hesitate to receive a vaccination.”
Last year, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the annual Pearl Harbor commemoration in Hawaii went remote. This year the event was back in person — despite torrential storms on Oahu — and some California survivors, including 102-year-old Michael “Mickey” Ganitch of San Leandro, planned to be in attendance. “A lot of these guys felt they would never be living to see this come to fruition,” said Kathleen Farley, the California state chair for Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors, who is in Hawaii for today’s ceremony. “They figured if they were breathing, they were coming.”
Upton last attended the Hawaii ceremony in 2019 and did not have plans to return to the island. Instead, he is gathering with a small group of survivors and others for a brunch in Cupertino. Survivors were set to speak at an annual event taking place on the Concord campus of California State University East Bay on Dec. 7.
“There are people in the Bay Area that have never met a Pearl Harbor survivor. They’ve maybe seen them on TV, but they’ve never had the opportunity to walk up and shake their hand,” said Farley, whose father, John J. Farley, served on the USS California, which was hit by two torpedoes and a bomb. “Absorb any knowledge that you can firsthand because after the survivors go, you’re going to only read about it in a history book.”
Upton lives in a modest house with a gray cat rescued by his youngest daughter Barbara, and walls covered with photos of his five children, five grandchildren and his wife of 60 years, Gene Upton, a former Navy nurse who died in 2018. He takes a walk around the block every day and exercises with small weights. An acutely positive person, Upton flashes a large grin that often punctuates his sentences.
“I try to look on the bright side,” said Upton, who after the war worked for Mackay Radio in San Francisco and served again in the Korean War. As a Navy radioman, he was responsible for receiving and transmitting radio communications. “And remember that bad things do happen.”
Upton’s quick thinking and optimism surely aided him on that Sunday morning in 1941, when the USS Utah was hit by two torpedoes in the first minutes of the Japanese attack. The 22-year-old was below deck, lounging with plans on swimming in Waikiki that day. He quickly ascended two floors to arrive on the main deck and look upon a scene of all-out warfare. By 8:12 a.m. the mooring lines holding the docked ship snapped and the Utah rolled over. In total 461 sailors aboard the Utah safely swam ashore; today Upton is one of three remaining survivors from the ship.
Once onshore he huddled in a trench as gunfire rained down, and heard the thundering boom of the USS Arizona exploding under torpedo fire, which caused the majority of the deaths that day at 1,177 people.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Upton did not receive a break. After years of the U.S. isolating itself from world affairs, the country declared war on Japan and the Axis powers. Upton was reassigned and continued to copy Morse code as a radioman during World War II.
He does not have plans to return to Pearl Harbor. But he does have the option of eventually being interred on the battleship with an urn placed on the sunken vessel by Navy scuba divers, an honor only available to survivors of the wrecked ships that remain at the bottom of Pearl Harbor — the Utah and Arizona. But 80 years later, Upton knows that an underwater burial is not for him.
“I got off there once,” he said. “I’m not going back.”