Pearl Harbor survivors: keep memories alive
SAN DIEGO — Pearl Harbor wasn’t a defeat, Stuart Hedley insists. It was an eye-opener.
Hedley, the president of a Pearl Harbor survivors group in San Diego, turned 95 in October, which means he was 20 when the West Virginia, the battleship on which he was stationed, was hit by a torpedo and badly damaged. He still remembers a lot of the details and shares them regularly in talks at schools and in front of civic groups.
“Let me tell you,” he said. “The majority of people today don’t even have the slightest idea what happened there.”
Wednesday marks the 75th anniversary of the Japanese aerial attack that pushed the United States into World War II. Except for Hawaii, where the surprise attack happened — and where more than a week of anniversary events are planned this year — few communities have cared as much as San Diego about keeping the memory of that horrific day vibrant and relevant.
San Diego is a place — maybe the only place — that still has an active local chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. San Diego is where the USS Midway Museum holds an annual Pearl Harbor Day ceremony.
And it’s where the dock landing ship Pearl Harbor — the first Navy vessel to be named after the attack — is based. San Diegans helped persuade military brass to swallow their pride and use the moniker.
The Navy doesn’t like naming ships after lost battles. But Pearl Harbor over the years has come to represent something more than loss.
On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, the first wave of a strike force of 350 fighters, torpedo planes and bombers launched from six aircraft carriers that had travelled 12 days across the Pacific Ocean, undetected, to get within striking distance.
They zeroed in on Battleship Row, destroying or damaging 19 U.S. battleships, cruisers, destroyers and auxiliary ships, including the Arizona, which blew up when a bomb crashed through the deck and detonated in a powder magazine. Hedley, who was on the West Virginia docked nearby, remembers seeing dozens of bodies fly through the air.
Fifteen other ships were damaged or destroyed, and the water surrounding them was soon covered in burning oil. Hedley said he dove under the building-high flames toward shore. “I knew how to swim, but not underwater,” Hedley said. “I swam underwater that day.”
Roused on a sleepy Sunday morning, their ammunition locked away in storage sheds, U.S. service members fought back as best they could.
Gordon Jones was at Kaneohe Bay that day. Now 94 and living in Chula Vista, the former aircraft instrument technician recalled how angry everybody was in the aftermath. “We hadn’t heard anything about any war starting,” he said.
The attack lasted about 75 minutes.
It killed 2,400 Americans. A day later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt got Congress’ approval to declare war, famously calling what happened in Hawaii “a date which will live in infamy.”