PEARL HARBOR SURVIVORS MARK ANNIVERSARY
Ira “Ike” Schab had just showered, put on a clean uniform and closed his locker aboard the USS Dobbin when he heard a call for a fire rescue party.
He went topside to see the USS Utah capsizing and Japanese planes in the air. He scurried back below deck to grab boxes of ammunition and joined a daisy chain of sailors feeding shells to an anti-aircraft gun up above. He remembers being only 140 pounds as a 21-year-old, but somehow finding the strength to lift boxes weighing almost twice that.
“We were pretty startled. Startled and scared to death,” Schab, now 103, said. “We didn’t know what to expect and we knew that if anything happened to us, that would be it.”
Eighty-two years later, Schab returned to Pearl
Harbor Thursday on the anniversary of the attack to remember the more than 2,300 servicemen killed. He was one of five survivors at a ceremony commemorating the assault that propelled the United States into World War II. Six of the increasingly frail men had been expected, but one was not feeling well, organizers said.
The aging pool of Pearl Harbor survivors has been rapidly shrinking. There is now just one crew member of the USS Arizona still living, 102-year-old Lou Conter of California.
Schab, the oldest of those who attended this year’s ceremony, arrived in a wheelchair with his son, daughter and other family.
A crowd of a few thousand invited guests and members of the public joined them in holding a moment of silence at 7:55 a.m., the same time bombs began falling decades ago.
Thursday’s ceremony was held on a field across the harbor from the USS Arizona Memorial, a white structure that sits above the rusting hull of the battleship, which exploded in a fireball and sank shortly after being hit. More than 1,100 sailors and Marines from the Arizona were killed and more than 900 are entombed inside.
David Kilton, of the National Park Service, noted that for many years survivors frequently volunteered to share their experiences with visitors to the historic site. That’s not possible anymore.
“We could be the best storytellers in the world and we can’t really hold a candle to those that lived it sharing their stories firsthand,” Kilton said. “But now that we are losing that generation and won’t have them very much longer, the opportunity shifts to reflect even more so on the sacrifices that were made, the stories that they did share.”
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs doesn’t keep statistics for how many Pearl Harbor survivors are still living. But department data show that of the 16 million people who served in World War II, only about 120,000 were alive as of October and an estimated 131 die each day.
Schab never spoke much about Pearl Harbor until about a decade ago. He’s since been sharing his story with his family, student groups and history buffs. And he’s returned to Pearl Harbor several times since.
The reason? “To pay honor to the guys that didn’t make it,” he said.