When John D. Anderson reached his battle station on the USS Arizona on Dec. 7, 1941, he realized the mighty ship’s guns were no match for the swarms of attacking Japanese bombers.
His twin brother, Delbert “Jake” Anderson, was on deck, frantically firing an anti-aircraft gun.
“He needs help!” John Anderson told his turret commander, asking if he could join his brother.
But they would never meet up that Sunday morning. And only one of them would survive the attack that claimed the lives of 2,403 Americans.
John Anderson died last year at age 98, and his ashes were to be interred underwater Wednesday — the 75th anniversary of the Day of Infamy — finally joining his brother, whose body was never recovered from the ship after he was killed at age 24, the Washington Post reported.
The Arizona, which lost 1,177 sailors and Marines, was among 18 US warships sunk or crippled during the attack.
Only five of the Arizona’s original 334 survivors are left. They are among the roughly 1,500 remaining Pearl Harbor survivors.
The Arizona making its way out of the channel of Pearl HarborGetty ImagesHundreds of vets return to Pearl Harbor on Wednesday, and among them is Jim Downing.
When the families of 106 crew members on board the USS West Virginia learned their loved one was killed, they did so thanks to a letter, handwritten by Downing.
A sailor on board the battleship that was slammed by nine torpedoes on that morning, Downing, 103, also served as its postmaster.
Jim DowningAP So after he was done fighting fires and checking the name tags of the dead, he sat down to write personalized letters about how each of them had died.
“I thought that would give them more closure that just a cold note, ‘Your son was killed in action,'” Downing said from a hotel in Hawaii.
Downing remembers the fiery morning that forced the United States into World War II as if he were still in the thick of the hell storm.
He learned of the attack on the radio and rushed to the battleship — as imperial Japanese planes flew low and slow in his direction.
“When he got the right angle, he banked over, turned his machine guns lose,” said Downing. “Fortunately he didn’t bank far enough, so it went right over my head.”
The next pilot might have better aim, Downing recalled thinking.
And with nowhere to hide, “I was afraid,” he said. “We were sinking and everything above the water line was on fire.”
The West Virginia sinks after being torpedoed and bombed by the Japanese.ReutersA few hours before the attack, Ray Chavez was out on a minesweeper, the USS Condor.
He remembers noticing a mysterious submarine lurking off the harbor.
“At 3:45 a.m. on Dec. 7, I look out and spotted a submarine that wasn’t supposed to be in that area,” the 104-year-old said.
Ray ChavezAP The sailors reported the sighting and Chavez went home to sleep. He told his wife not to wake him because he hadn’t gotten any rest during the busy night.
“It seemed like I only slept about 10 minutes when she called me and said, ‘We’re being attacked!’ And I said, ‘Who is going to attack us?’ She said, ‘The Japanese are here and they’re attacking everything,'” Chavez said.
Chavez and other Pearl Harbor survivors are treated like celebrities these days, but he said it’s about those lost.
“I’m honoring them, not myself,” he said.
Some of the veterans fear the lessons of the attack, and of the war itself, are being forgotten.
“After World War II and all that the country and ourselves have been through, I thought we had accomplished a peaceful world, and peace for our nation,” Leonard Nielsen, 94, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “Today, 75 years later, I question any part of that being the truth.”
Nielsen, then a 19-year-old sailor, recalls watching in horror from the deck of a hospital ship as the attack unfolded.
“We couldn’t come to realize what was really happening. It was such a terrible thing before our eyes,” he told the Review-Journal recently at his Las Vegas apartment.
Smoke rises from Hickam Field in Hawaii during the attacks.ReutersEd Hall, one of the last presidents of the disbanded chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association in Las Vegas, said members used to give talks at schools “to keep the children updated on history.” That ended a few years ago when he never received a response from the school board to the annual offer.
“I think it’s a darn shame,” he told the paper. “I was very hurt by that.”
Hall, then an 18-year-old Army Air Corps soldier, stood near a mess hall at Hickam Field when a Zero flew at him, machine guns blazing.
“I’m staring at him in awe, not believing what I’m seeing,” he said. “He couldn’t have been more than 25 to 30 feet off the ground. He had to pull up to miss the building and telephone wires.”
Richard Hackett, another vet, was outside the naval station barracks when a plane flew so low over Honolulu, the 20-year-old sailor could see the Japanese pilot’s face.
“I thought he was lost,” he said. “We didn’t know what was going on until one of the officers told us Pearl was under attack.”
The Aichi dive bombers, Nakajima torpedo bombers and Mitsubishi Zero fighters were launched from six Japanese aircraft carriers beginning at 6:05 a.m. — 183 in the first wave and 167 in the second, military historian Bill McWilliams, a former fighter pilot and author of “Sunday in Hell,” told the paper.
The greatest number of casualties occurred on Battleship Row, where most of the Pacific Fleet was moored.
An aerial view of “Battleship Row” at Pearl HarborReutersAmong those who survived on the USS Arizona was Clarendon Hetrick, who ran to his battle station and started delivering shells for topside guns.
“We took a hit. It knocked us all off our feet. We started smelling smoke, and somebody said, ‘Get the hell out of here!’” he said in his last interview with the Review-Journal before he died in April at age 92.
The surrender of the Japanese aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, JapanEPAJack Leaming was 22 years old when he and Navy pilot Dale Hilton took off in a Douglas scout/dive bomber from the USS Enterprise shortly before the sneak attack.
He was manning the plane’s open-canopy machine gun while scouting for Japanese boats south of Pearl Harbor. The two aviators suddenly smelled smoke from the stricken USS Arizona.
As they drew nearer, Japanese planes opened fire on them.
“They missed,” Leaming, a Wildwood, NJ, resident who died in 2013, told the Review-Journal in 2010.
“Hilton put that thing in a diving turn. We leveled off barely over the top of the sugar cane.”
Of 18 scout planes from the Enterprise, Leaming’s was one of nine that landed safely.
Three months later, their plane was hit and he was captured shortly after the plane sank.
Leaming — who spent more than 3½ years in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps — was freed on Sept. 6, 1945, four days after representatives of the Japanese empire formally surrendered on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
With Post wires
