Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Arkansan remembers attack on Pearl Harbor
Naval vet aided comrades injured on infamous day
Seventy-nine years later, William Chase can still remember pulling his burned comrades out of the oily water at Pearl Harbor.
The Garland County native had just finished breakfast at the base hospital when a nurse shouted, “Oh, my god, we’re at war,” as he heard the roar of Japanese fighter planes and the booms of dive-bombers dropping their payloads on American ships in the harbor.
Chase was escorted to an underground area but then was ordered to report to the “receiving ship” and began helping men, many of them burned out of the harbor.
“They tore us up pretty good,” Chase, who lives in Pearcy, remembered in an interview last week.
Chase had only been at Pearl Harbor for about a month before the infamous Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base. A 96-year- old
World War II naval veteran, Chase is perhaps the last living survivor of the attack on Pearl Harbor from Arkansas and is among just a few nationwide who can still recall that day, according to those who have studied the attack.
Chase spent the day of the attack picking up men from
At Pearl Harbor, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, much of the American Pacific fleet was badly damaged, and more than 2,300 servicemen and civilians were killed.
the harbor and the night on guard duty next to the receiving ship.
“We picked up bodies; we picked up 11 people that were burned bad,” Chase said.
When the bombs began falling on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Chase was in the hospital recovering from a case of German measles. Only 17 years old at the time, Chase said, he joined the Navy because “I thought, you know, it would be place to learn a trade and make some money.”
This year, during the pandemic, many Pearl Harbor commemorations have been canceled. Chase will spend the 79th anniversary of the attack like most days, with his wife, Pauline, whom he has been married to for 76 years.
“You go through a depression, then you go through a war, you get pretty smart on how to do things and do them right,” Chase said.
North Little Rock is home to the USS Hoga, a tugboat that helped rescue sailors during the Pearl Harbor attack. The vessel has become a hub of Pearl Harbor commemoration in Arkansas for the past few years. But with the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, there are no events scheduled at the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum, and many public events commemorating the day have been canceled, with a few exceptions.
The preemptive strike by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor was part of the Pacific-wide offensive in which Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands, Guam, British-held Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, prompting the U.S. entry into World War II. Just seven months after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy won the decisive Battle of Midway, putting the allies on the offensive in the Pacific.
At Pearl Harbor, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, much of the American Pacific fleet was badly damaged, and more than 2,300 servicemen and civilians were killed in what President Franklin D. Roosevelt would call “a date which will live in infamy.”
In November, officials returned the remains of an Arkansan, Samuel Cyrus Steiner, a sailor who died during the attack. Steiner was a sailor on the USS Oklahoma, one of the eight battleships the Japanese sank during the attack. He was buried as an “unknown” until new technology was able to identify Steiner, and his remains were returned to his family and laid to rest in Winthrop.
Lyle Grisham, a curator at the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum, said he laments the fact that there are fewer World War II veterans every year who help bring a personal perspective to history.
“It’s important in the fact it gives a perspective that’s not normally talked about in history books,” Grisham said. “That’s why especially oral interviews and video interviews of veterans are so important because they give a different perspective.”
The state of Arkansas issues official Pearl Harbor survivor license plates to veterans of the attack, and there are still three active plates in the state, according to Scott Hardin, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration. But the number of plates is not an indication of how many survivors of the attack are still alive, as spouses often hold on to them after their loved ones die, Hardin said.
Even into his 90s, Paris, Ark., native O. Harold Mainer still drove his Dodge pickup, proudly displaying his Pearl Harbor survivor license plate.
Mainer, who died in August, was known as a fun-loving man who was proud of his service in the Navy during World War II. But for much of his life, Mainer rarely talked about what he witnessed during the attack, his son Mark Mainer said.
It wasn’t until America came under another sudden attack on Sept. 11, 2001, that O. Harold Mainer started to open up to his children about what he went through as a veteran.
“After that, he would tell us more things about it, but growing up and stuff he never said much about it at all,” Mark Mainer said.
On the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, O. Harold Mainer was heading to shore to celebrate a friend’s birthday when he saw Japanese bombers dropping torpedoes. Mainer witnessed both the USS Oklahoma and USS Arizona, prized battleships of the U.S. Navy, get hit, his son said.
“Everything was happening so fast that he wasn’t scared,” Mark Mainer said.
O. Harold Mainer spent much of the war serving on the USS Helena, a light cruiser that was sunk at the Battle of Kula Gulf in 1943. Mainer was pulled out of the water by a fellow sailor, his son said, and he felt lucky to have survived the battle with only some loss of hearing.
After the war, Mainer worked as a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service and would travel to Pearl Harbor survivor conventions to meet with the other veterans who were there that day. Today will be the first anniversary of the attack since he died.
“We will definitely be thinking about him and missing him,” Mark Mainer said. “And there are a lot of people missing people.”