On Pearl Harbor Day, I think about my friend who survived the attack
Lest we forget our heroes. When Emmaus Pearl Harbor survivor Vince Reinsmith succumbed to leukemia in November 2000, a part of
Lehigh Valley’s history died with him.
Reinsmith was at ground zero when
Japanese naval and air forces launched their sneak attack on U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 77 years ago on Dec. 7, 1941.
Nineteen-year-old Reinsmith was the Lehigh Valley’s first reported casualty of World War II as his family received a Navy telegram, Dec. 16, 1941, that the young seaman had been lost in action at Pearl Harbor when the battleship USS California was sunk.
Reinsmith told me years later that his mother refused to accept that he was dead, and she prayed through the holiday season that that was not really the case.
On the day after Christmas in 1941, the grieving family received a letter from Reinsmith, dated two days after the attack, telling them he was all right. The Navy confirmed on Dec,. 31 that the first cable saying he had been lost in action had been in error.
Reinsmith had been on deck on the California when the Japanese aircraft descended on the fleet on that quiet Sunday morning. He was at first puzzled why “our flyboys” would be out in such numbers on a Sunday morning
Then the first bomb exploded near the hospital on nearby Ford Island.
Japanese torpedo bombers came in at eye level as Reinsmith scampered to his general quarters assignment on one of the ship’s big gun turrets — so close he could see the pilots shaking their fists at those on board.
Sustaining explosion after explosion, the California was sinking out from under him. After safely swimming to Ford Island, Reinsmith found a change of clothes — tennis whites — because that was all that was available.
He was given a rifle and ammunition and sent to the north end of the island to resist what was feared to be a follow-up invasion.
He spent two days there before being relieved and getting back to his unit for muster. It would take several days for everyone to be officially accounted for in the confusing days following the attack. One of the first things he did was to write home and assure his family he was alive and well.
Not all of Reinsmith’s comrades were as fortunate. One hundred and one were killed on the California, and more than 2,200 lost their lives on other ships and at the land facilities ringing the harbor.
Why should we even bother remembering what happened nearly 80 years ago? Our country was again attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, and a lot of comparisons were made that “more people died than were killed at Pearl Harbor in 1941.”
To me, it’s personal. My parents were married in 1940, and the uncertainty of a new world war was the impetus to think about starting a family. I was born 11 months later.
For everyone else born in this country since that time, everything we have, everything we are, we owe to the more than 400,000 U.S. military personnel who gave their lives for their country in World War II.
If that does not qualify as heroic, nothing else would.
I was able to visit my friend at his Emmaus home shortly before his passing. We prayed together, and shed a few tears together. It was him, though, who consoled me. He was a Christian, and he said he was sure where he was going.
Not a Dec. 7 comes and goes, though, that I don’t think of him. Lest we forget, he was one of our heroes.
Jim Marsh, who lives in Salisbury Township, is a freelance writer.