Pearl Harbor veteran shares story of survival
SAN ANTONIO — We are sitting in the lobby of a La Quinta Inn near Lackland Air Force Base, the desk clerk on a slow afternoon swabbing the floor around us with a mop, and I’m trying to imagine Gilbert Meyer, the elderly man sitting across the table, as a fresh-faced young sailor on a grand morning seven decades earlier.
The date is Sept. 2, 1945, and the 21-year-old fireman first class from Texas, a Pearl Harbor survivor, is standing on the crowded deck of the USS Detroit. Watching through binoculars, he’s witness to the conclusion of the calamitous events the Japanese attack had set in motion nearly four years earlier. One of several thousand sailors aboard the 250 ships at anchor in Tokyo Bay, he trains his glasses on the nearby USS Missouri. He sees crowds of sailors, photographers and spectators leaning over superstructure railings, peering down at the momentous proceedings taking place on the main deck. Above them, the ocean breeze is whipping the flags of the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and China.
Through the glasses, Meyer sees sailors in their dress whites in formation and helmeted soldiers with rifles at “present arms” forming an honor guard, as Supreme Allied Commander Douglas MacArthur, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz and other American and Allied dignitaries come aboard. The Americans are wearing their informal khakis or “suntans,” collars open, no neckties, ribbons or sidearms. They are followed by the tophat-wearing Japanese foreign minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, and General Yoshijiro Umezu, along with other members of the 11-man Japanese delegation.
He watches as Shigemitsu
steps forward and sits at an ordinary mess table, where he signs the Instrument of Surrender for the emperor and the government. Umezu, who had threatened hari kari a few days earlier, signs for the armed forces. MacArthur and Nimitz then lead 10 Allied signatories in turn. The formalities last 18 minutes. As they end, the sun breaks through lowhanging clouds.
Meyer is one of the few surviving World War II veterans who both lived through the Pearl Harbor attack and was witness to the surrender. He’s one of six surviving veterans of the USS Utah, hit by torpedoes and sunk at Pearl Harbor. The oldest is 100; he’s the youngest at 93.
A widower since 2003, the slender, occasionally cantankerous, old salt lives with his daughter near Lytle, south of San Antonio. He still drives, is still opinionated — journalists are liars, he told me; Trump is bad, but Obama is so much worse — and still stays in touch with the rapidly dwindling number of men and women who experienced firsthand “the day which will live in infamy.” He’s participated in Pearl Harbor anniversary ceremonies every year for the past 15 and will be in Hawaii again next week for the 75th.
When the torpedoes hit
Meyer was born in 1923, in Pelly, now a part of Baytown, where his dad worked for Humble Oil and Refining. He dropped out of school at 17 (although he graduated 20 years later) and in 1940 got his folks to sign his enlistment papers.
On the evening of Dec. 6, 1941, he was aboard the Utah, after being promoted the day before to fireman first class. The Utah, a target ship for bombing practice — flour bombs were used — had moored at Pearl Harbor the day before but not with the Arizona, the Oklahoma and the other vessels clustered at Ford Island that were sitting ducks for Japanese bombs and torpedoes. On that Saturday night Meyer remembers listening to the “Lucky Strike Hit Parade;” “Elmer’s Tune,” by big-band leader Dick Jurgens, was numberone that week. Later he watched a movie, drank coffee in the fire room and then stood watch from midnight to 4 a.m.
“I was dead tired,” he said, “and when I got off, I went to bed.” The galley stayed open until noon on Sundays, so he planned to sleep late and then have breakfast. At 8:01, he was still in his berth a couple of decks below when the first of two torpedoes slammed into the ship. He was on the starboard side; the torpedoes hit on the port side. The noise, he said, was like an electrical transformer being struck by lightning.
“The first torpedo hit, and I didn’t think much of it,” he said. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I tried to get back to sleep, but just a few seconds later another torpedo hit, and I knew then I’ve got to get the hell outta there.” The lights went out, the Utah was beginning to list to port and Meyer and his shipmates were trying to scramble up to the main deck. “You couldn’t walk; you sort of had to climb,” he said. “People were in front, and they wouldn’t get outta of the way. There was a big, husky machinist’s mate — I’ll never forget him — and he just cleared ‘em all out, and I followed him. Got topside and she had rolled so far you couldn’t climb over the side.”
‘Loved the Navy’
He and two shipmates paused on the precariously listing deck and stared around them as ships exploded, black smoke billowed into the blue morning sky and desperate men jumped off sinking vessels into flame-shrouded water. It seemed unreal. “We were watching the war. It was funny for a young kid,” he said. “I’d never seen anything like that — airplanes flying around dropping bombs, torpedoes. Then they started strafing us, and when the projectiles from the strafing hit the deck, they made a helluva noise.”
It was time to go. Wearing only his skivies, Meyer slid down the hull into the water. “A lot of people in their diaries later on said there were barnacles, but I didn’t encounter any barnacles,” he said. “If there had been, I would have had a tore-up rear-end too.”
A finger cut by shrapnel his only injury, he swam the 400 feet or so to shore. For most of the next two hours he watched the attack from a trench. He didn’t know it at the time, but among the 2,403 Pearl Harbor casualties were 58 of his Utah shipmates, including his friend and fellow fireman’s mate, John Reeves Crain. Chief Watertender Peter Tomich remained below decks and made sure the boilers didn’t blow up, so his crew could escape. He received the Medal of Honor posthumously for his actions.
On the 10th, Meyer signed on with the USS Detroit, a light cruiser that had escaped serious damage. For the rest of the war, the Detroit was a convoy escort between Pearl Harbor, the South Seas and the West Coast and also saw action at Attu Island in the Aleutians, the first battle on American soil since the Civil War. He stayed in the Navy for 22-and-a-half years, seven ships in all, and then worked for the Air Force at Kelly Field in San Antonio, repairing guidance systems for planes carrying atomic bombs.
“I loved the Navy,” he told me earlier this week.
He also loves seeing his old shipmates, said Houston nephew Al Peoples, who’ll be accompanying his uncle to Hawaii. “He loves to talk,” Peoples said. “Plus, they treat him like a rock star there.”
‘Values rubbed off ’
Meyer told me his only child, a daughter nearing 70, isn’t all that interested in his stories, his memoirs and his memorabilia. He blames Patty Hearst. They went to school together, he said. “Even though my daughter’s conservative, some of those values rubbed off,” he said.
I stared into his pale blue eyes to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. He does have his opinions, I was thinking.
I had another thought: This is a guy who fought a war for the right to say what he thinks.