WITNESS TO HISTORY
Pearl Harbor vet who had close view of attacking planes dies
Virgil Lee Ward, a veteran of Pearl Harbor and a former San Antonian, died Sunday night at his home in Grand Prairie. He was 102.
“He passed away here in his bed,” said his wife, Merry Lux Ward.
Tall, thin and strong, Ward lived in the Alamo City for years, but when the couple attended the annual Dec. 7 reunion lunch of the local chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association in 2016, it was the only time he met its shrinking band of veterans.
Virgil and Merry Ward later moved to the Dallas area. He was hospitalized in January as he battled pneumonia, an illness he’d beaten before, and eventually entered hospice care.
Services are pending. Ward will be buried in Houston National Cemetery.
There was a world before Pearl Harbor and one after it. The transformed world began at dawn on a sleepy Sunday on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, when waves of Japanese
planes stunned America by destroying much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
An Army private, Ward was at the post exchange before dawn to collect newspapers he delivered as a side job. Just before 8 a.m., he saw the fighter planes.
“They were flying in a formation when they first came in, and then they split up, of course, and they were diving in the air where I was at, and I was pretty close,” he recalled in a 2018 interview.
Dumbfounded, he instinctively took a longer route off the main highway to get to his duty station so his car would draw less interest from the Japanese pilots.
He reached his station: a phone exchange he helped run as a Signal Corps soldier on Diamond Head, a volcanic height above Honolulu.
“They were strafing and bombing,” he said. “And I was close enough to see all the planes up there.”
The attack by a Japanese strike force of 353 aircraft, launched from four aircraft carriers, took just 75 minutes. It left 2,403 Americans dead, including 68 civilians.
Eight U.S. battleships and numerous smaller craft were sunk or damaged, and the Americans lost 169 planes to 29 Japanese. All four U.S. aircraft carriers were at sea, however, and they would alter the course of the Pacific war within a few months, at the Battle of Midway.
But first, the Empire of Japan would make World War II truly global in scale. The day after the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese forces landed near Singapore and invaded Thailand. They seized Guam and invaded the Philippines on Dec. 10 and Burma on Dec. 11. They swept into British Borneo and Hong Kong, and they took Wake Island just before Christmas.
Ward was a communications specialist assigned to the 16th Coast Artillery and had just been trained on what then were called “self-dialing” telephones. The new rotary devices had not been installed in his office, so he took a steady stream of calls the old way, from soldiers — including some commanders — speaking into a mouthpiece and asking an operator to connect them manually, with wires and plugs.
The callers were trying to make sense of the chaos, but “I couldn’t tell them much more than they were being attacked,” Ward said.
The Pearl Harbor group in San Antonio had 64 members in 1992, but it has dwindled since to just three now: William St. John, retired Air Force Tech. Sgt. Kenneth Platt and retired Navy Chief Petty Officer Gilbert Meyer.
Abner James “A.J.” Dunn, who died Nov. 23 at his home in Floresville at 98, was a regular at Pearl Harbor commemorations in Corpus Christi.
Ward, the son of a moonshiner who preached on the side, was 15 when he joined the Army out of a small town in Tennessee. He thought he was 17 because that’s what his dad had told him. He had worked on the family farm starting in fifth grade.
A friend who suggested they join the Army in 1935 flunked the entrance exam, but Ward was sent to New York and made a muleskinner because of his experience.
“There wasn’t a lot of words. There were a lot of bullets, though.”
Virgil Lee Ward, speaking in 2016 about his unit’s experience during the attack on Pearl Harbor
“I told them I wanted to go overseas, and you know where they sent me?” Ward said, chuckling. “Hawaii.”
He stayed there for the next 13 years.
Ward retired as a major in 1965 after a 30-year Army career. He liked to celebrate his birthdays on Feb. 2 at an Asian restaurant on the West Side. He stayed healthy for most of his old age, with a strong recollection of the battle that changed his life, but in the past couple of years, his short-term memory had begun to fade, Merry Ward said.
Ward had some close calls in the Korean War, where he got a battlefield promotion and saw a nearby soldier get killed by a mortar shell close enough to spray him with shrapnel, and in Vietnam, where the Saigon hotel he stayed in was blown up while he was out.
But Pearl Harbor was his most haunting experience. In this new kind of war, his coastal artillery battery never fired a shot, but those in his unit quietly went about their jobs as the attack unfolded.
“There wasn’t a lot of words. There were a lot of bullets, though,” Ward said in 2016.
“I can tell you he still has some nightmares about that,” Merry Ward said. “He’ll rise up in bed, ‘Get down! Get down!’ Because he’s afraid of somebody shooting something, and so I know when he’s running from bullets at night.”