East Lyme man plucked sailors from burning water
Now 96, he has returned to Hawaii, met a fellow USS Maryland crewman
The 96-year-old veteran was anxious to find a fellow survivor.
Specifically, Floyd Welch was hoping to find someone who’d served on his battleship, which had a crew of about 2,000, and who’d also traveled to the site of the devastating attack that killed 2,403 Americans.
“Oh, that was something,” Welch said by phone Tuesday from Waikiki Beach in Hawaii — where he used to come annually to “practice gunnery and so forth” — of connecting with a fellow USS Maryland crewmember, whom he’d never met before. The two men traded stories and talked for “quite a while,” according to Welch’s son Brian.
“That was one of the main things I wanted to do when I got here, was to see how much of my crew might be here,” the elder Welch said.
Welch, of East Lyme, and his son arrived in Pearl Harbor on Saturday to take part in events commemorating the 75th anniversary of the attack there. He also attended the 50th anniversary with his wife, Marjorie.
He is one of about 150 survivors who are expected to attend the 75th commemoration events, Air Force Capt. Candice Dillitte, a spokeswoman for the committee in charge of many of the events, said by email.
Welch had just finished showering and was getting ready for the church service on the USS Maryland when just before 8 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, hundreds of Japanese fighter planes began bombing Pearl Harbor.
Although it was part of the so-called “Battleship Row” — seven U.S. battleships located along the eastern side of Ford Island that suffered the brunt of the attack — the Maryland was “more or less protected from the torpedoes,” Welch said, because it was moored alongside the USS Oklahoma, which was “right in the perfect spot where the Japanese planes attacked her first.”
As many as nine torpedoes reportedly hit the Oklahoma, which capsized. The torpedoes opened the fuel tanks on the sides of the ship, spilling large amounts of oil into the water.
“They wanted to dive off the ship and every small boat that we could get our hands on were going around picking them fellows out,” Welch said of the scene that followed. “They dove off and when they came to the surface, they had a few inches of burning fuel to come up into. You had to be right there to get them out of the flames.”
Everything from the admiral’s barge to the trash barge was used to pull the survivors out of the burning fuel, said Welch, who helped to pull Oklahoma survivors from the fiery water.
Almost half of those who died that day were on the battleship USS Arizona, which lost 1,177 men. The Oklahoma lost 387 men.
Four men from the Maryland died, and Welch, a 19-year-old electrician at the time, reportedly could have been one of them.
A few weeks before the attack, Welch was re-assigned from the compressor room, one of the areas damaged by torpedoes. Repair crews were not able to pump all of the water out of the room following the attack, so it wasn’t until several weeks later that they finally did and found the body of Welch’s replacement, according to an article on the Department of Defense’s blog.
The exact number of Pearl Harbor survivors left is unknown. Last year, the number was estimated to be 2,000 to 2,500. The oldest known survivor is 104 years old.
For years, Welch would speak at local schools about his Pearl Harbor experience, but he finds now that “a lot of them disregard that.”
“That is one of our main objects, to keep the memory going. That’s what school is for. They shouldn’t abandon it,” he said.
During a roughly 30-minute phone interview, he mentioned his declining health and expressed frustration at having to stop mid-sentence to remember his train of thought.
Asked why he made the trip, he joked, “You might say that everybody that got wind of it, got behind me and made me.”
But coming back to Pearl Harbor has been “a great surprise,” he said, noting the trip has helped to make him feel better.
“A few more days here and I hope to be in perfect shape by the time I leave,” he said. “It’s amazing what memories can do.”
He recalled one memory that’s still vivid. The Maryland was one of the first ships to leave Pearl Harbor after the attack. As it was leaving Ford Island, the sounds of horns blowing in support filled the air.
“Everything that had a horn, they were all blowing steady. It was quite a noise,” Welch said. The ships leaving — Maryland, the USS Tennessee and the USS Pennsylvania — was “one of the first things that had made them happy after (the attack) happened.”
As for the sound of those horns blowing, Welch said he can “still hear it.”