Incidentally it is Pearl Harbor day. December 7, 1941 was also a Sunday. My dad was there. I have shared this article and these pictures along with this story many times but here it is again. He went out on a Saturday night, but he was kind of ornery. He was bad about going AWOL every chance he got and goofing off with the girls. So he snuck off on a Saturday night to have some fun. He got a bit tipsy and passed out on the beach. He was found by Shore Patrol and they put him in jail. He was still in jail when all hell broke loose. This probably saved his life because he was stationed aboard the USS Arizona which suffered the heaviest casualties in that attack. He lost many shipmates. And yes he carried a lot of survivors guilt. Back in 1941 they didnt have the same technology that we do today. The most advanced technology was teletype and telephones on party lines. My grandmother happened to be the operator in Delaware OK. She had a switchboard in her home. To make a call someone would have to contact her, and ask her to patch the call through to the party they wished to call. When she heard on the radio about the attack (they didnt have TV either) a few hours later she thought he was dead and fainted. I think she actually had someone who heard it on the radio get on the phone and ask her to turn her radio on. Dad managed to get away and send her a telegram and she fainted again when she received it, this time from relief. He was reassigned to the USS Blackhawk, a destroyer class ship, for the rest of his naval service. (He started out on the USS Bridge but was briefly assigned to the Arizona when he got an assignment in the Pacific Fleet.) The rest of his service was done in the Philippines. So thats how my dads ship went down in the attack on Pearl Harbor, but how he managed to survive.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 06:46:15 +0000
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