Navy diver recovered bodies after Pearl Harbor
Seabee proud of war service but never talked about grim task of searching wrecks
SAN DIEGO— Ken Hartle, who as a navy diver during the Second World War had the grim task of retrieving bodies from ships sunk by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, has died. He was 103. Hartle died Tuesday afternoon at an Escondido, Calif., centre for people with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported Friday.
Hartle may have been the oldest surviving Pearl Harbor salvage diver, said David Ball of San Diego, an officer with the Navy Divers Association.
Hartle and his fellow Seabees worked in the days before scuba div- ing equipment was commonplace. His heavy canvas diving suit and brass helmet weighed more than 90 kilograms.
Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941, surprise attack on Pearl Harbor sank or beached 18 ships. Among them was the battleship Arizona, which went down with 1,177 crew members.
Hartle was working as a civilian shipfitter at a navy yard in the San Francisco Bay area when the war broke out but he wasn’t allowed to enlist until 1943 because his job was deemed too important to the war effort.
Hartle was proud of the work he performed over the next two years, his children said. He risked death by towing away unexploded torpedoes and salvaging ships and planes, first at Pearl Harbor and later from Maine to the Philippines. But he avoided mentioning one task: recovering the long-submerged bodies of sailors who went to the bottom at Pearl Harbor.
“He just didn’t like talking about it,” said his son, Ken W. Hartle, 64, of Montana. “He would only say that the hardest part of the job was ‘bringing up our boys.’ ”
Ambert Kenneth Hartle was born in 1913 in Bakersfield, Calif. His mother, a brother and a sister died from illness or accidents before he was 10 and his father was sent to a tuberculosis sanitarium in 1916, according to Hartle’s children.
His son said Hartle managed to cheat death several times, beginning at age 3 when a mule kicked him in the face and knocked him unconscious for 20 hours.
At 9, he was stabbed in the neck during a schoolyard brawl. In college, he was flung hundreds of feet when his car was crushed by a truck.
He was bitten by a rattlesnake and a scorpion while working alone at a mining camp.
He had colon and prostate cancer, six heart bypass surgeries and broke his shoulder falling from a ladder while trimming trees when he was 97.
“He was from a generation of people who were amazingly tough,” said his daughter and longtime caregiver, Karen Dahl, 66.
After the war, he settled in Buena Park, Calif., and later became a chicken breeder in Valley Center in northern San Diego County.