JOHN ANDERSON, 1917-2015
John Anderson, who was the oldest survivor of the 1941 attack on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, dies at age 98. After World War II, Anderson served another 23 years in the Navy.
The oldest remaining survivor from the USS Arizona, one of the American battleships lost in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, has died in Roswell, N.M. John Anderson was 98. He died Saturday at Eastern New Mexico Medical Center surrounded by family members and, according to one of his sons, was “fully cognizant and a fighter to the end.”
Less than a year earlier, Anderson had returned to Pearl Harbor with three other USS Arizona survivors to toast their fellow sailors and Marines aboard the memorial to the ship. He appeared frail, but participated in the toast and a bell-ringing ceremony afterward.
With Anderson’s death, there are just seven known survivors from the crew of about 1,500 assigned to the Arizona at the time of the attack on Dec. 7, 1941. Of that number, 1,177 died on that Dec. 7.
Anderson was well-known in his adopted home of Roswell, where he made a name for himself — the name Cactus Jack, to be precise — as a radio disc jockey (he met a young Elvis Presley before the singer was famous) and, later, as a television meteorologist.
He would talk about his experiences at Pearl Harbor over the years, sharing the pain and horror of that morning, the anger he felt as he realized what was happening, the grief of losing his brother. But he kept some of it to himself and was uncomfortable at the suggestion he was a hero.
“I was just doing my job,” he said in an interview with The Arizona Republic in September of last year. “I did what I had to do.”
Anderson was born Aug. 26, 1917, and grew up in the Red River Valley of Minnesota with his twin brother, Delbert “Jake” Anderson, four other brothers and four sisters. He used to listen his uncle, Ray Stokes, talk about his experiences in the Navy, and in 1937, the Anderson brothers decided to enlist.
John Anderson reported to Bremerton, Wash., where he was first assigned to the Arizona. He was transferred soon after and sailed aboard an aircraft carrier and a destroyer before finding his way back to the battleship in 1940, joining Jake at the ship’s home port of Pearl Harbor.
On the morning of the attack, John Anderson was eating breakfast below deck when he heard the first explosion.
“A bomb hit the island!” one of the mess cooks yelled.
“My god, those sons of bitches are here,” Anderson remembered saying. He ran out onto the port side of the deck and saw the bombers headed down Battleship Row.
He headed for his post and began to look for his brother. He searched, helping injured crewmen along the way. Finally, as the ship sank farther into the harbor, a senior officer shoved Anderson into a boat, which took him to Ford Island. Once there, he found another boat and returned to the Arizona, determined not to abandon Jake.
He never found his brother, but would later learn Jake almost certainly perished in the early moments of the attack.
Almost immediately, Anderson joined another ship, the destroyer McDonough, and fought battles across the Pacific until he was discharged in 1945. As he pondered his future, he landed a gig as a movie stuntman, hanging out with actors like Orson Welles and John Wayne. At night, he took classes in meteorology, but soon, an old buddy talked him into rejoining the Navy as a reservist.
He remembered his buddy’s passion about signing up again. “He said, ‘Andy, you had 12 years of the damndest fighting I ever saw. You’re the bravest man I ever know. You can’t leave the Navy,’ “Anderson said last September. He would serve another 23 years. In New Mexico, he got a job on the radio, playing mostly country music as “Cactus Jack.” Listeners loved him. Later, he joined a local television station as its meteorologist.
Anderson returned to Pearl Harbor several times over the years and met other survivors, sharing stories, casting friendships.