Stratton could not. The tender didn't want to be tied to the larger ship when the worst of the storm blew through. By the time they were back, the icicles were forming again and two more guys would go out.". In time, he felt no anger toward the Japanese, but he couldn't forget what they did. He says that decision was the best thing he could have done. Bruner was burned over more than two-thirds of his body. It was carrying parts of the Little Boy atomic bomb as a top secret mission and the Navy learned about its sinking four days after ot was torpedoed. He knew his brother hadn't made it off the Arizona alive, but he didn't know much else. A carnivorous shark diet usually includes fish, mollusks, and crustaceans. The Children of Pearl Harbor | History| Smithsonian Magazine In 1971, Stratton was working long hours with a diving outfit on a nuclear power plant project not far from Santa Barbara. During his voyage to Alaska, Cook remembers the flying fish, which stirred up the water like a torpedo wake. The unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor killed more than 2,400 Americans and struck a blow to the Navy's Pacific fleet, which had been based at Pearl Harbor. He and a buddy had been talking about their future in the Navy. by Pia Peterson. In late 1943, Conter flew a mission to rescue more than 200 coast watchers in New Guinea. Without them, Riel said, who knows where we'd be today. "In the Army you were crawling around in the mud and everything else and I didn't want to do that.". The paneled room behind the door in the living room of the Provo house is filled with trophies of almost any imaginable sort. Pearl Harbor Fun Facts - Things You Didnt Know About Pearl Harbor Cook was the gun captain on the Pringle at the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. "Three months later, I was in Korea.". Just another site did sharks eat pearl harbor victims "Well, I'd brushed enough paint on that damn ship, I figured I could do it," he says. They listened for their names and their service branch. His younger son believes the experience changed his dad forever. They struck up a conversation and, after a brief courtship, married. A stunt coordinator helped pull Anderson from the pile of cigarette crates that had broken his fall. Now, Bruner prepares for his next trip in the Captain's Quarters. He describes the store of booze they pulled out of safe and the money. "Sometimes they'd get shooting at you and you'd look at the shells and they looked like they were going to hit you. Marietta shakes her head. "You can't get a guy hungry in three or four days," Conter says. "A brush painter.". By early 1941, Langdell was one of the "90-day wonders" and drew his first assignment: The USS Arizona. Dec 12 2014. Kitchen patrol. "They were holed up behind sandbags, but they never got hit.". Among his responsibilities was overseeing the naval officers' clubs in the area. The Worst Shark Attack In History & The Sinking Of - warhistoryonline "I'm going to be back out there one of these days," Conter said, his voice wistful as he watches a foursome trying to stay on the greens. Fish, in general, are the most common prey for sharks. You don't fire guns in port, so I ran out real quick to see what was happening. He was assigned a battle station in the No. Japanese relieved at no Pearl Harbor apology - DW - 12/28/2016 "Mr. Langdell," he said, "when you're done with your breakfast, you'll report to the pier and you'll be met by a motor whale boat and a party of 20 enlisted men with sheets and pillow cases. Bruner was put in charge of the gun batteries. He was 20 when he escaped the burning wreckage ofthe USS Arizonain Pearl Harbor. Today, Lou and Valerie Conter live in a two-level house at the end of a winding road on a golf course in Grass Valley, a mountain town about 60 miles outside Sacramento. Jack shrugged. The family visited the Arizona memorial and toured other sites near the harbor. Cook was a gunner's mate on the Arizona. He started on a small station, playing organ music. "We had to have two crews, a regular crew and a stand-by crew lined up waiting," Bruner said. He would work in the port director's office, delivering sealed packets to the captains of Navy ships. USS Indianapolis was a Portland class heavy cruiser of the United States Navy. "It's one of the best actual memorials I've seen," he says. Hetrick was sent to the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier. There are over 470 species of sharks throughout the world. I couldn't.". He remembers when the order was given to abandon ship. He had turned down a promotion to ensign, preferring the camaraderie of the enlisted ranks. "They said what a wonderful place it was to live, with jobs and everything, so I bought a little place up in Spanish Fork," he says, "I'm still looking for that easy money.". Cook has returned to Pearl Harbor three times and he likes the Arizona memorial. That fateful day led the United States . The only question was how Langdell would send Libby word about his arrival from Pearl Harbor. dwayne johnson rock foundation contact. ages 2, 3 and 8, together with a 14-year-old cousin . "This went on for four straight hours. He returns his attention to the cranes and the catapults that flung the seaplanes into flight. There's a little air bubble. He has told her about his escape from the Arizona. "There's the battleships there's the Nevada, the Arizona, the Tennessee, the West Virginia, Maryland, the Oklahoma. A few years after that, they left for Las Vegas, where their son, Bob, and his family help them get around. There were: Cook and another crewman. UPDATE:John Anderson diedin November 2015, less than a year after this report. From Virginia, he went to Utah, to France and then to Albuquerque, where he retired in November 1961. "Would you like to listen to it?" As he recounts the experience, he rubs his hands together, then holds them out, turning them over. He got the west coast and I got the east coast. He fought cold and hunger on a ship nearly dead in the ocean off Alaska. USS Arizona: The men who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor After his second discharge, he knocked around Nebraska again, working in his dad's tavern, then on a beer truck, but he grew bored. By 1991, the 50thanniversary of the attack, the number of living Arizona crewmen had shrunk. His wife, Libby, who died two years ago. The treaty also gave the US Navy exclusive access to use Pearl Harbor as a coaling and repair station. "They were very good days before the war. Usually, sharks will prioritize eating: Smaller fish. A year later, he felt better, so he re-enlisted. It took more courage on your part to present this wreath than it did for me to accept it.". The next night, an American PT boat retrieved all 10 men. Bruner, who turned 94 in November, is now one of nine living USS Arizona crewmen who survived the ship's sinking. "I said, 'sure, I'll take it.' The ship was moored in the shallows of Pearl Harbor's . "Are there any officers from the Arizona here?" "We made so many landings," Anderson said. She returned, puzzled. "Talk about treating you like royalty," he says. The buddy wasn't home, but his son-in-law answered. He was able to visit the national cemetery at an area called the Punch Bowl. That was the end of it.". And he was allowed to visit a part of the Arizona few people ever see. Discipline seems less important than it was in his day. This time the objective was clear. He said, 'whatever I can get out of you.' June 12, 2022 June 12, 2022 0 Comments June 12, 2022 0 Comments And in the back corner, a real trophy. "They paid everybody in two dollar bills back then. WWII veteran, thought to be oldest survivor of Pearl Harbor attack He wanted to part of it. "We took all the bodies we could find.". One of our cruisers, the heavy cruiser, got hit and water got into the oil. Photographs hang on the walls of his room. We swept the decks and took the small bones. "The lesson I've learned from that experience is that the 1,177 men entombed on the ship right now will never know the love of a wife or the joy of grandchildren," he said. He weighed 92 pounds by the time he was sent to rehabilitation in Corona, Calif. But the war was over. The Worst Shark Attack in History - Smithsonian Magazine Williams was on deck, tuning up to play for colors, an early call after the previous day's fleet Battle of the Bands on shore. His mother had moved to Decatur, Ill., by then, so he followed and took a job at a hardware store. They stayed composed as their stories were told, stories of bravery, of quick thinking. Joe proposed and Libby accepted. It's the same place where the oil is leaking" oil stores aboard the ship that, even today, still seep to the surface "that's where I got out from below.". They still had to climb onto the dock and then into a truck for a short ride to a Navy hospital. "The Japanese were only a mile away. Salvage work would begin soon on others. Pearl Harbor Warbirds offers the best Hawai'i flight adventure tours available. He owns a chunk of the ship's burned deck, a reminder he keeps in a box with a few other items. At Kulangsu, an international settlement on an island off the southern Chinese coast, Anderson's unit ran into the French Foreign Legion, who had been cornered by Japanese soldiers on a high ridge. "I ain't seen 'em since.". They said, 'You should have been dead a long time ago.'". Similarly, the . "It gets your breath when you first see it," he says. "I was always wanting to learn more when I was younger," says Hetrick's younger son, Robert, who lives not far from his dad in Las Vegas. For a long time, Haerry never talked about his experiences at Pearl Harbor. Sailors found food and shelter wherever they could. Ray Jr. seems surprised. At dawn on December 7, 1941, more than half of the United States Pacific Fleet, approximately 150 vessels and service craft, lay at anchor or alongside piers in Pearl Harbor. Three days had passed since Japanese bombers had punched a fiery hole in the Navy's Pacific fleet. As he was packing, a buddy warned him that his possessions would be searched at the port in San Francisco. Whale Shark (Rhincodon typus) The whale shark is the largest shark species, and also the biggest fish species in the world. He was still adjusting to his new life in Colorado, hundreds of miles inland from his old home in coastal California and more than a mile higher in elevation. he said. He gazes at the picture. Conter told the admiral he was interested in flight school, but doubted he would earn admission. By 1991, the 50th . "Cut!" He liked teaching and liked the chance to instill discipline. He would become the final survivor to be interred in the ship. The United States was a neutral country at the time; the attack led to its formal entry into World War II the next day. Cook stood on a shelf in the gun mount with his big binoculars and watched the Marines raise the flag to mark the U.S. victory. Anderson had finished his first day as a Hollywood stunt man. The guns hit the periscope. "Knock it off. Occasionally, they head into Okmulgee for an evening out at the One Fire, a casino operated by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. A few weeks later, Conter and his buddy passed a flight test at sea and on Nov. 1, they got their orders: Report to Navy flight school in Pensacola, Fla. Two weeks later, the Arizona's captain called the two sailors in and told them the ship was headed back to Long Beach in early December. Hotline & WhatsApp : +971556212280 | Landline : +97143873596 , +97167499398 james reynolds obituary. Pentagon to exhume remains of 400 Pearl Harbor Marines and sailors "I just didn't want to. Yet in a place where you couldn't cross the street without running into a war vet, Bruner was not just another ex-sailor who made it home. ("Two of us with the same rank were up for the same kind of job," he said. He stepped off the deck into a motor launch as the ship was sinking. "These guys were the first heroes of the war, even though the war hasn't been declared," Ray Jr. says. The things I don't want to remember was the blood.". By Michael E. Ruane. "We saved people on commercial ships on the seas, we rescued missionaries in the interior of China, we shot up a bunch of pirates," Anderson said. 39 Interesting Pearl Harbor Facts | Pearl Harbor Warbirds "He was very military by then, very disciplined.". The burn ward filled with the injured. The Attack on Pearl Harbor - Pacific Atrocities Education The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service upon the United States against the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, just before 8:00 a.m. (local time) on Sunday, December 7, 1941. We had survival training on the job. The Macdonough had collided with another destroyer, the Sicard. If they found anything that belonged to the Navy or hadn't been approved, they'd take it. He went to work as a junior accountant for a prominent Boston firm. He was at a restaurant last summer and someone noticed his USS Arizona cap. "He remembers body parts in the water, charred burned bodies that he swam by," his son Ray, Jr., says. In May 1942, the Aylwin joined a task force in the Coral Sea with the USS Lexington, one of the Navy's early aircraft carriers. I still get to the point when I'm talking about it, first thing you know, I go to bed at night, wake up and can't sleep for a week.". He tries to abbreviate it: "We went to California and got married.". He waited for the result. "We had 10 or 12 sharks around us all the time," Conter says. He was on his own once again, he and his young family. "The new ones, they didn't know beans.". Guns. It had been shortly after midnight when their ship, the USS Indianapolis, was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine in the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, some 500 miles east of the . Now, stateside again, Hetrick reported to a Navy station in San Diego, where he met the woman who would become his wife, Jeanne. Did he know anything about meteorology? Hetrick, who is 91, has outlived most of the men he knew on the Saratoga. Each of the six men were at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese planes swarmed the Navy fleet in an ambush that would provoke war. Before the end of the war, he went to San Diego for gunner's mate school. Farther down the paneled wall hangs a painting of the USS Arizona, the battleship Navy recruit Potts boarded in December 1939. As they walked toward it, Langdell reeled at an odor. "I said goodbye and left.". On a recent fall afternoon, Stratton ambles down the driveway and fires up the engine. He started chatting up a regular customer, a contractor, and got a job building houses. He cleaned and painted day after day, but he also operated the motor boats used to ferry crew members to shore, a job that let him leave the ship periodically. Only 335 men survived the bombing of the USS Arizona, the mighty battleship whose loss at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, inspired a nation to go to war. Smoke rises from the battleship USS Arizona as it sinks . Sharks hunt fish by using sensory receptors located on their sides. Coast watchers were military intelligence operatives who gathered information about enemy activities on islands across the South Pacific. "It's hard to explain." Finally, they made their way to Salinas, Calif., just inland from Monterey on the central coast. He will meet three other survivors in Hawaii for their last reunion. No one seemed to be in charge on Ford Island, where Cook had spent the night. December 5, 2021 at 11:21 a.m. EST. Anderson would serve another 23 years before finally retiring once more. A second telegram, dated Jan. 6 reported that Conter was alive and would contact his family. Langdell's ship, the USS Arizona, lay dead in the water where she sank 14 minutes into the attack. The job wasn't what he expected in September, when he was discharged from the Navy. "I bought it at the receiving station in Pearl Harbor. No sharks did not eat Titanic passengers. "That lumber was so damn green then, we used to kid we had to shoot the squirrels out of it.". "Remember Pearl Harbor!" became a rallying cry for the U.S. during World War II. Crustaceans. The attack was devastating for the Americans, though the Japanese . "If you can stand up and stay up while we change the linen on this bed, we'll see about it.". . Langdell says only this: "It took two days to take all the bodies. "The stuff he likes.". Conter's doctor has sidelined him for now for health reasons, but he is certain he will return soon. A sign over the arched door marks the room as "Captain's Quarters.". On Oct. 12, Langdell celebrated his 100th birthday with with his older son, John, who flew in from Spearfish, S.D. Conter's crews flew missions across the South Pacific: New Guinea, Borneo, New Britain, the coast off Perth, Australia. Military Casualties - Pearl Harbor National Memorial (U.S. National An aerial view of "Battleship Row" at Pearl Harbor, photographed from a Japanese aircraft during the the bombing. He knew he was near release the day an officer came by and launched into a pep talk about the war and the Navy's role in it. He had escaped the USS Arizona, the battleship whose losses surpassed any other. He's more like family than just a friend.". The survivors' group that found him was right, he has concluded: The stories of the Arizona should not die with the men who lived them. "Next thing you know, I'm in a movie with John Wayne," Anderson says years later. She nods and smiles. ", "Fine," the worker said. LaRocque asked. They generally prefer the shallows in temperate, tropical regions, which is usually where divers and surfers come into contact with them and potentially become the victims of shark trauma. "One of the last ones" He talks about going aboard the Frazier. He built a reputation as a guy who could bring in the harvest on time. Haerry felt the entire ship life out of the water. A young sailor ran in, out of breath. "We wouldn't get much fire back and by the time they sounded general quarters, we were on our way," Conter said. A framed painting of the Arizona, the repair ship Vestal next to it. Tall pines tower over the house. McBride reached the last man, Raymond Haerry, a 20-year-old coxswain on the day of the assault. Only a few hundred people lived there then. It was constructed to comply with the 1922 Washington Naval . What Do Sharks Eat? - American Oceans In 1967, Conter retired from the Navy. Hetrick took a motor launch to the receiving station on shore, where he and other survivors were allowed to shower and given a change of clothes. The Pentagon said Tuesday it would exhume and try to identify the remains of nearly 400 sailors and Marines killed when the USS Oklahoma sank in the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. He was thrown into the ocean and waited 57 hours to be rescued while shipmates around him were eaten by sharks. "We worked with a crane barge capable of lifting 700 tons," he sys. Only 335 men survived the bombing of the USS Arizona, the mighty battleship whose loss at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, inspired a nation to go to war. "We'd leave at 5:30 in the evening and stay out 12 or 14 hours, then return in the morning," Conter said. "They told me the team was already picked," he said. "On the day I swore into the Air Force, I was still in my Navy uniform," he said. They hopped in a Jeep and head up the hill toward one of the Quonset huts, the one where liquor for the officers' clubs was stored. "He wanted the east coast, I wanted the west coast. When they sent me my discharge, I just stayed here.". pearl harbor 1941. uss arizona. His name was Cactus Jack and to his fans in southeastern New Mexico, he was the dulcet-voiced host of Sagebrush Serenade, a program of country music on KSWS radio. He joined the USS Arizona Reunion Association and stays in touch with a few of the remaining survivors. He played a lot of golf, but missed California. Joe saved six lives and he didn't get crap. There are a few personal photos on the table, but nothing from his years in the Navy. They moved to Santa Maria, not far from Santa Barbara, to be near their oldest son, then to Colorado Springs to be near Randy. Ted asks. Schenkelberg was no stranger to hardships . They trade stories. Tensions between Japan and the U.S. simmered throughout the early 20th century and came to a boil in the 1930s as Japan attempted to conquer China, even . Joe had met Elizabeth McGauhy in Chicago half a decade earlier. On a fall day in 1945, John Anderson teetered on the base of a church steeple 110 feet above the ground. Not war stories, usually, not unless one of them has had it out with a doctor or a pushy clerk. "I motioned to crane operator what we needed, what tools to send down." He half-swam, half-walked the 70 yards to Ford Island and manned a mounted machine gun. Seven decades later, he is one of nine living survivors from the Arizona. Servicemembers stationed in Hawaii took care of the memorial during the 2013 government shutdown: Servicemembers stationed in Hawaii treat Pearl Harbor as a living . Cook and the other men stayed below deck until the smoke from a fire forced them to leave. Potts stayed in Honolulu until the end of the war. Seabirds. The Coghlan's crew battled just to keep the guns free of ice as they headed toward their next target. For 30 years, Lauren Bruner punched a clock at a manufacturing plant south of Los Angeles, a World War II veteran in a landscape crawling with them. Lonnie finally retired from welding in 1982 and in 1994, the Cooks moved back to Morris. "We were told to watch out for them, these guys were assassins," Anderson said. amc gremlin for sale washington state did sharks attack titanic survivors. "I think my dad was one of the first American heroes of World War II.". Explosions rocked the vessel and fires burned into the evening. In 2006, Hetrick returned to Pearl Harbor for the 65thanniversary of the Japanese attack. He called back a few days later. The United States declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941, the day following the attack on Pearl Harbor. And he still likes to talk about that other young fellow from Oklahoma, the one who didn't make it home. He helped rescue some of his shipmates. He has been telling his story to an author, Ed McGrath, who is working on a book and a film about Bruner's escape from a collapsing tower on the ship. That led to a job in Roswell, the Sagebrush Serenade and Elvis Presley. "They were saying, when it first started, some of the ones whose station was up here ", He traces his finger up onto the main forward mast, to the crow's nest and the bridge. Alcohol. He could see the band was sincere. He wasn't ready to see it all again, to sharpen the memories he'd tried to dull.