Brothers in arms
In the haze of a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, he searched frantically for his twin brother. 75 years later, they rest together.
PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII — When John D. Anderson reached his battle station in the USS Arizona’s No. 4 turret that morning, he realized the gigantic guns could do nothing against the swarms of attacking Japanese airplanes.
But his twin brother, Delbert (Jake) Anderson, was manning an anti-aircraft gun out on deck, and was in the thick of the action. “He needs help,” John told his turret commander, and asked if could join his brother.
Both men were 24. The sons of a judge, they were born in Verona, N.D., in 1917. Both had joined the navy in 1936. John was a boatswain’s mate second class; Jake, a boatswain’s mate first class.
Both wound up on the Arizona, which at that moment on Dec. 7, 1941, was a maelstrom of fire, smoke and explosions.
They would never meet up that Sunday morning, and only one would survive the day.
Wednesday, 75 years later, John Anderson’s ashes were interred underwater in the remnants of his old turret, rejoining Jake, whose body was never recovered from the ship.
Their reunion, on the anniversary of the attack, brings together one twin who enjoyed a long and varied life, and one whose life stopped at Pearl Harbor.
John lived through the rest of the war. He settled in Roswell, N.M., became a local TV personality and died last year at age 98, one of the Arizona’s last survivors. Only five of the original 334 are left.
Jake is eternally 24, still “aboard” the Arizona and one the first Americans killed in the Second World War.
John’s family said they believed they should rest together.
“He talked all the time about his brother,” John’s son, John D. Anderson Jr., said in a telephone interview last month. They “wrote letters back and forth to each other when they were on different ships. And Jake really wanted him to get on the Arizona with him.”
During the attack, while searching the inferno for his brother, John was ordered off the battleship by an officer.
“I’m not leaving,” he told the officer, according to a 2011 oral history recorded by videographer Don Smith. “My brother’s here some place. I’ve got to find him.
“He couldn’t have made it,” he said the officer replied, and shoved John into a rescue vessel.
But after they reached shore, John grabbed an empty boat and went back to the Arizona in the midst of the attack, nearly losing his life in the process.
“He just kept saying: ‘I’ve got to find my brother, I’ve got to find my brother,’” his son recalled.
The Arizona interment likely marks the last major anniversary of the attack attended by survivors.
Seventy-five years later, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor remains one of the most wrenching and intimate events in American history.
The cost of the attack was stunning: On the Arizona, 1,177 sailors and marines were killed. More than 900 of them were never recovered.
Thirteen hundred more people died on other ships and elsewhere around the harbour.
One survivor recalled that the sky “rained sailors.” Another remembered dozens of navy hats floating on the surface of the water. Eleven hundred men were wounded, many horribly burned.
“Flames from the inferno leapt up the metal steps and barred our escape,” Arizona survivor Donald Stratton, now 94, wrote in his new memoir, “All the Gallant Men.”
“My T-shirt had caught fire, burning my arms and my back,” he wrote. “My legs were burned from my ankles to my thighs. My face was seared. The hair on my head had been singed off, and part of my ear was gone.”
Eighteen U.S. warships were sunk or crippled, along with hundreds of planes destroyed and damaged. The Arizona went down, as did the battleship USS Oklahoma, entombing hundreds of sailors when it capsized.
The Japanese, gambling that they could cripple U.S. forces as they expanded their Asian empire, launched the daring attack with 31 ships, including six aircraft carriers, and more than 350 airplanes.
Their armada sailed in secret across the stormy northern Pacific Ocean to within striking distance of Hawaii. Its only encounter was with a lone Soviet freighter, which steamed by in silence.
The Americans, although forewarned, were overconfident, dismissive of Japanese capabilities, and did not expect the blow to come at Pearl Harbor, historians say.
The first U.S. servicemen killed in the Second World War were three soldiers in two Piper Cubs shot down while on a sightseeing flight as the attack began about 7:55 a.m.
Some Americans threw tools, potatoes and binoculars at the enemy aircraft. Others could only shake their fists.
A frantic radiogram went out: “AIRRAID ON PEARLHARBOR X THIS IS NO DRILL.”
“Pearl Harbor absolutely shattered Americans’ image of themselves,” said historian Steve Twomey, author of “Countdown to Pearl Harbor.”
The country saw itself as having a fine army and navy, and the protection of two oceans. “The wars were always ‘over there,’” he said.
But within hours that Sunday “millions of families knew … that their sons and their brothers and their fathers were going to go war … and many of them were not going to come back,” he said.
The attack would bring nine million Americans into the war, and create the powerhouse United States of the 21st century, said historian Craig Nelson, author of “Pearl Harbor, From Infamy to Greatness.”
“Almost every aspect … of the United States and its international position in the world … comes from the reaction to Pearl Harbor,” he said.
It also gave history President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legendary “A date which will live in infamy” speech, delivered to Congress the next day.
It produced the slogan, “Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition,” uttered by Lt. (JG) Howell M. Forgy, a chaplain on the embattled cruiser USS New Orleans.
And it provided the story of the heroic African American sailor Dorie Miller, a 22-year-old mess attendant on the USS West Virginia who manned an anti-aircraft gun and opened fire on enemy planes.
Miller was decorated for valour, but was killed in the sinking of a ship he was on later in the war.
Many of the sailors, soldiers and marines at Pearl Harbor were children of the Depression and the Dust Bowl who had joined the service to escape poverty and starvation.
The 1,500-man crew on the Arizona was similar in size to the population of some of the small towns the sailors had come from. Now they had hot meals, a hammock to sleep in and a steady paycheque.
John (Andy) Anderson had just made the arrangements for church services on the Arizona’s fantail that Sunday and had gone to the mess hall to get some breakfast. Suddenly, he heard a loud explosion.
“I thought, ‘What in the dickens is that?’” he said in his video account. He went out on the deck, “looked up and saw this plane dipping … and it had red balls on its wings,” he said.
“I said a cuss word and said, ‘The Japanese are here,’” he remembered.
He hurried to sound the alarm. Before he could, a bomb fell nearby and “knocked me silly.”
He got up and ran to his battle station in the turret, which had huge 14-inch guns to fire at enemy ships. “I was a gunner,” he said. “I got into the seat and said, ‘Manned and ready.’”
But he hadn’t seen any enemy ships or enemy shell fire. “There’s all bombs and machine gunfire,” he said he told the turret captain. “We can’t do any good in here. We need some gunners on the anti-aircraft batteries.”
“I’d like to get out there and get on a gun with my brother,” he said. The Andersons were among 26 sets of brothers on the ship, but the only twins. The turret captain gave him the OK.
Anderson left the turret, and started up a ladder to the anti-aircraft guns.
“I got to the top of the ladder and an enormous explosion occurred,” he said. “People were blown all over the place, all kinds of body parts … and tremendous fires broke out.”
He was driven back toward the turret. “On my way back, I grabbed a guy by the hand who was on fire, and I held on to him,” he said. “He was from Greenfield, Ohio. I never forgot that. I saved him. I got him out of there.”
Meanwhile, officers were ordering survivors off the doomed ship, as more bombs struck. Anderson refused to go until he was forced. Reaching Ford Island, in the middle of the harbour, he looked back at the Arizona.
It was still on fire, but his brother and others were out there. He spotted a small boat floating by with nobody in it, and with a buddy swam out, got in and headed back to the ship.
There, he gathered three wounded men into the boat. There was no sign of Jake. “We had to take what we could get,” he said, and they headed for shore. As they did, the boat was hit and blown apart.
After the attack, he was assigned to another ship, became part of navy raiding parties and fought his way across the Pacific — “in so many scrapes and fights that I forgot the names of the places.”
Anderson said his buddy and the three wounded sailors were lost. “I was the only one left alive,” he said. He made it to shore and collapsed on the beach.
At first, he heard nothing of Jake, but he was told later that someone had seen him felled at his post by gunfire.
“That was the last anybody ever had on my brother,” he said.
Wednesday afternoon, about 40 members of his family gathered at the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor and returned Anderson to what is left of turret No. 4, and to his shipmates and his brother.
‘I’ve got to find my brother, I’ve got to find my brother,’