Archive’s accounts of attack ‘are gold’
The adjutant general sent the Western Union telegram to the York family in Columbus at 1:02 a.m. on Dec. 11, 1941: A. Phillip York wired back on Dec. 16 to find out more
about his son, asking, in part:
It wouldn’t be until Dec. 19, however, that the family heard from Pvt. York himself in a one-sentence telegram arriving at 5:35 a.m.:
A few days later, a handwritten letter arrived at the family’s East Long Street home from York, who had graduated from Ohio State University in 1937 and enlisted in the Army out of Fort Hayes in June 1941. He served with a coastal antiaircraft artillery unit at Fort Kamehameha on Oahu.
Writing in curlicue cursive on Army & Navy stationary, York begins: He continued.
Such was the agony of the Pearl Harbor attack and its aftermath. The waiting. And waiting. And waiting some more. The not-knowing back home.
As more time passes since the attack that launched the U.S. into World War II — 76 years ago today — and as so few veterans from that day remain alive, the worth of every letter, telegram, diary and written or recorded firsthand account from that time grows.
“There is a tangible effect from holding such a piece of history in your hand,” said Emmy Beach, public relations manager at the Ohio History Connection on 17th Avenue, where York’s personal papers — formal Army correspondence, handwritten letters, telegrams, photographs and news clippings — from his military career are part of the war-history collection at the Ohio History Center.
“There’s life in holding a letter that doesn’t exist in the first Google entry when you pull up ‘Pearl Harbor,’” Beach said. “Letters and diaries are gold. Personalities come through, and someone becomes real to us.”
York was awarded a Purple Heart for his wounds. Newspapers in Columbus and elsewhere featured his story partly because, after he recovered, he went on a radio tour to raise money for government war bonds. York, who had studied theater and was an actor, told publications that he fired probably 60 rounds from his rifle and 300 from his machine gun that morning. He shot down a Japanese plane before being hit by enemy fire.
“I got him. Sure, I felt good,” he told one newspaper. “It was him or me. I guess I yelled ‘dead bird.’”
York died in Columbus in 1972 of natural causes.
His file is just one of several Pearl Harbor-related items the museum has in its collection and makes available to the public, said manuscript curator John Haas. Other firsthand accounts from Dec. 7, 1941, also exist in the form of oral histories collected by the Columbus World War II Roundtable.
Among them are the recollections of Navy veteran
John R. Thomas, who was aboard the USS Oklahoma, one of the ships sunk on Battleship Row in the attack, which began before 8 a.m. Hawaii time.
Like so many other sailors that morning, Thomas had just finished his breakfast. He was on the ship’s quarterdeck when he saw an officer running for an intercom. He recalled:
His account says he made it below deck to man his gun turret, but the ship was already taking on water and had lost power. It listed quickly. Thomas’ account says he outran and outclimbed the rising water and made it to the upper deck even as the ship was on its side. The walls became floors, and they were oily and slick.
Within eight minutes, it as all over for the Oklahoma. The ship had capsized, trapping about one-third of its crew below deck. He recalled: