Posted on 01/23/2007 9:38:22 PM PST by Mr. Silverback
Richard Poole raises the conch shell to his lips, positions it carefully and blows. The trumpet-like blast echoes off the nearest buildings, conjuring up images of warm Pacific islands on a chilly Midwest morning. The conch is his souvenir, not from a tourist junket, but from a pilgrimage to honor fallen warriors. Poole has shared his photographs and memories of the 65th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack with The Ink, and we discuss the attack and the state of the World War II generation with survivors of the attack and other veterans.
“You can’t imagine war ever being there.”
Poole, who has been active in the Marine Corps League for years, fulfilled a lifelong dream by traveling to Pearl Harbor. “I remember sitting in front of that big radio [in the family living room] listening to FDR’s speech on December 8th, the ‘Day of Infamy’ speech. I’ve wanted to go there ever since.” Subsequent events in the Pacific, such as the desperate defense of Wake Island and Corregidor and the Bataan Death March left a profound impression on him.
Poole’s own Marine Corps service was part of an earlier tradition. Family members in each generation have served since at least the Civil War, he said. Poole was inspired to choose the Marine Corps by an uncle who fought in the Boxer Rebellion in 1905. He joined during the Korean War and had orders to a combat unit there when he was medically discharged because of an previously undiagnosed injury received during basic training. Two of his vertebrae had been damaged and doctors believed he could be paralyzed if he remained in the Corps.
During his visit to Hawaii, Poole was especially impressed by the hospitality and respect shown to the Pearl Harbor survivors and others there to attend the ceremonies.
“I couldn’t have asked for better treatment,” he says. “They have a saying [in Hawaii]—‘On the first day you’re a tourist, but on the second day you’re family.’” Poole uses a four wheel walker for support on long walks and says that tour operators, Navy and Marine personnel and other hosts “practically fought over the thing” any time he needed it stowed or carried. He also noticed that there were no horns honking in traffic tie-ups on the island (“it’s considered rude”) and considered himself very lucky to have seen humpback whales from his hotel room. A tour operator he spoke to later in the day had lived in the islands for years and had never seen one. “It’s the kind of place that you can’t imagine war being there,” he said. “I’d say to anyone who wants to go there, get it done now.”
Of course, Poole hadn’t come to Hawaii to watch whales, but to honor those who served at Pearl Harbor. Many of the survivors were staying in his hotel and were glad to share their stories. One sailor had been taking a shower when the first of three Japanese torpedoes struck USS Oklahoma. He was blown away from the ship and landed in the water completely naked—even the soap suds had been blasted away. Another was a “plank owner”—a sailor assigned to a ship while she is still being built—on USS Tennessee. He survived her sinking at Pearl Harbor, helped salvage her and return her to duty, and was aboard her in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese signed the surrender treaty. Another man he spoke with had survived the sinking of USS Indianapolis, which was sunk by a Japanese submarine after delivering the components for the “Little Boy” atomic bomb. He was one of only 317 men who survived out of a 1,200 man crew: about 300 had gone down with the ship and about 600 had died from shark attack and exposure while they waited five days for rescue.
The formal ceremony included a speech by “Greatest Generation” author Tom Brokaw, a review by a Navy officer of each ship’s story, a blessing by a priest given in Hawaiian and a Marine rifle salute. Clad in Hawaiian shirts, the veterans of the attack were greeted with applause that went on for minutes.
Poole and other visitors were escorted by Marines as they attended a banquet for the survivors on December 6 and visited various sites connected with the attack—“I saw the pass where the Japanese planes came through,” Poole said—including the USS Arizona Memorial and USS Missouri. The surrender treaty was signed aboard Missouri and she is now a floating museum. The Arizona was sunk in the opening minutes of the attack with the loss of 1,177 crewmembers.
Perhaps the most poignant part of Poole’s trip was his visit to the memorial. He remarked to a Park Service official that he wished he had remembered to bring flowers to honor the dead. The ranger walked away and returned with a basket filled with orchids. “What do I owe you,” Poole asked, but the ranger refused any payment. A number of visitors to the memorial took pictures of him as he cast the orchids on the water nearby. Later in the “shrine room” inside the memorial he was reading the names of those lost and came to the list of 36 Marines killed aboard her that day. “That was too much, I teared up and had to leave,” he said. A ranger followed him to make sure he was alright.
“It got a little close in there, with all my buddies,” Poole told him. “We understand that, sir,” the ranger replied.
The only people who could understand better are those who were there, such as Ed “Dutch” Gaulrapp and Dean Garrett, both of Freeport.
“It was mass confusion.”
“Sunday was supposed to be my day off,” Gaulrapp said. He had joined the Navy in December of 1940 and was serving as a baker at the harbor’s submarine base. Not far to the northwest was “Battleship Row,” where USS Oklahoma, Maryland, West Virginia, Tennessee, Arizona and Nevada lay at anchor. USS California was moored a few hundred feet southeast and USS Pennsylvania was in a drydock nearby. A narrow channel of water known as the Southeast Loch was southwest of the sub base, making a rough right angle with Battleship Row.
Gaulrapp was playing pinochle with other sailors on the roof of a building at the sub base. It was about 7:55am. They barely noticed the first few aircraft winging in toward Battleship Row, though the planes were passing relatively close to them and American planes seldom came in from that direction. There were fleet maneuvers schedule for Monday, Gaulrapp recalled, and he thought the planes might be part of a drill. Then the group spotted the “meatball” insignia on the fuselage and wings of the attacking aircraft, and realized (before the first bomb fell and long before almost anyone who saw the planes come in) that they were now at war.
Historian Walter Lord described the Southeast Loch as “a narrow arm of water that led like a bowling alley straight to the battleship moorings.” It was the perfect place for a torpedo run, and the Japanese pilots were bringing their Nakajima B5N “Kate” bombers in only 50 feet above the water to make their drops. Some of their tailgunners had already begun strafing targets of opportunity, including a small launch carrying sailors ashore for church services. Still, most of the servicemen at the base either couldn’t see the planes or didn’t realize what was going on. For example, as one Kate pulled up from her attack run on the Arizona, it streaked over the stern of the Nevada, where the ship’s band was still playing “The Star Spangled Banner” as part of the morning flag-raising ceremony. The tailgunner sprayed machine gun bullets at them, but strangely, he hit no one and no one broke formation. Meanwhile the first torpedoes were slamming into the hulls of the Oklahoma and West Virginia and “Val” dive bombers were making their runs on the battleships and the Army’s Hickam Field on Ford Island. Most of the Vals attacking the battleships were carrying bombs made from 15 inch armor-piercing shells usually fired by battleships, each one weighing almost 1,800 pounds.
With these explosions, the harbor began to awaken, with ship after ship going to “general quarters.” At the sub base some of the submarines had gotten their anti-aircraft guns firing, but a sailor ran up to Gaulrapp and his friends and handed out .30-30 rifles to shoot at the Japanese. “It was mass confusion,” he said.
At 8:10, USS Arizona was hit near her forward guns and her forward magazine exploded. The blast was so immense that it shook the whole harbor, flung men off nearby ships and caused the plane of strike commander Mitsuo Fuchida to “tremble like a leaf” far above the base. It’s believed that the vast majority of those lost aboard Arizona were killed instantly by the explosion.
Later, Gaulrapp and other sub base sailors were given a more effective task. “We were sent out in lifeboats to recover swimmers, and we also brought back bodies and sometimes just body parts. We were just doing what we could,” he said. The work was dangerous and even without the gore, messy. Battleship Row was filled with fuel oil, much of it on fire. USS Arizona alone had spilled about 700,000 gallons of it. The oil stuck to everything it touched. After-action reports from the base’s medical units report it was so difficult to clean off that they began treating burn victims as if the fuel wasn’t there, slathering on whatever treatments were needed and then putting bandages on right over the oil.
After hours of often grisly rescue duty, Gaulrapp was ordered to report back to his kitchen, and had to delay reporting there because he was coated with oil. There was a reason the young baker had been pulled from such important duty. The ovens on almost every ship that had taken hits were damaged and unsafe to use, and fixing them would probably stay near the bottom of the priority list for awhile. “We found ourselves baking bread for the whole fleet” Gaulrapp said. “For seven days we would only sleep while the bread dough rose, 30 minutes, then we’d put it in the oven and make a new batch.” This continued until a group of cooks and bakers sent from the West Coast arrived to relieve them.
Not long after that, Gaulrapp transferred to the submarine USS Pompano, and headed out on his first war patrol. He would also serve aboard USS Haddock and USS Runner and complete a total of eight war patrols between the three ships. His Navy career would last 20 years.
“…from one to the next to the next…”
Dean Garrett of Freeport had also joined the Navy in 1940 and was serving as a corpsman at Pearl Harbor’s Navy Hospital. On the morning of December 7, he was at the nearby mess hall getting a cup of coffee when he heard explosions. Looking out a window toward Battleship Row, he saw a plane with a “meatball” climbing away. It was practically the only part of the attack he saw. He raced to the hospital and was soon in an operating room ready to assist with the wounded. He worked there for 72 hours straight.
When asked how he and his team managed to keep operating for such a long stretch, he replied, “What else was there to do? The wounded were there and kept coming. We just went on to the next to the next to the next.” Garrett said those who have watched the sitcom “M*A*S*H” have an inkling of what it was like. The show often portrayed surgical sessions lasting for days at a time, but he says that neither the show nor he himself can accurately portray the harshest realities. “How do you describe such things briefly?”
Despite his grueling stint in the OR, he couldn’t sleep when he went back to his. After the three day marathon, the hospital was on twelve hour shifts for many days afterward.
To get an idea of how many casualties there were one can consider how much other medical support was available. As the number of personnel stationed at Pearl grew during the pre-war military buildup, the Navy Hospital had become overcrowded by 1940 and another one was being built. Eventually the Navy’s 2nd Mobile Base Hospital was sent to Pearl Harbor to help, and the hospital ship USS Solace was also in port on December 7. In addition, there were dispensaries at Bishop’s point (which cared for many Army casualties from Hickam Field) the Marine barracks, the submarine base and the Naval Air Station. There were several impromptu aid stations set up during the attack and almost every ship that was still afloat had a sickbay ready to heal the wounded. At the hospital itself, all the ambulatory patients had been moved out, and a large number of the casualties had flash burns from the heat of bomb and torpedo blasts that could be treated easily. Yet at midnight, the 250 bed hospital had 960 patients on its census and Garrett and his colleagues in the four operating rooms had 56 more hours of work ahead of them.
After being hit by a torpedo and some bombs, USS Nevada got underway but was beached near the hospital when she was struck again by the next attack wave. Fortunately, the Japanese left the hospital itself alone. Garrett could hear the noises of the attack and the lull between the two attack waves. Still, the relative isolation of the hospital staff led to some strange “scuttlebutt.” Walter Lord reports that one rumor had USS Pennsylvania leading a task force that had defeated and captured two Japanese carriers, despite the fact that the Pennsylvania was in drydock within sight of the hospital. Before the end of the day the main rumors revolved around just how soon the Japanese would invade Hawaii, which Garrett calls a “logical conclusion.” Some sailors even believed the reason the Japanese had left the base’s fuel tanks untouched was so they could use it for their own vessels after conquering the islands. Ed Gaulrapp wondered whether America would have to fight Japan from the West Coast.
Sometimes patients could provide information directly. Garrett had a childhood friend on USS Oklahoma, and he asked sailors from that ship if they had seen him. Finally he found one who had. The sailor told him that as the Oklahoma capsized, he was the last man out of his compartment, climbing out through a porthole just before it was submerged. Garrett’s friend had still been inside. For many days Garrett held out hope as men were rescued from the Oklahoma’s hulk, but his friend is still listed as missing.
Richard Poole reports that the bodies recovered from the Oklahoma when she was salvaged in 1943 could not be identified, but the Navy hopes to be able to do so with new DNA testing.
Garrett continued to help heal the wounded and identify the dead, as long as he was needed. Soon he transferred to USS Minneapolis, a heavy cruiser that was involved in almost every major Pacific battle. The ship carried two doctors, a dentist and several corpsmen to care for the 1,200 crew. Garrett said his job was like working in a doctor’s office some days and like working in a trauma center on others. He left the ship after the liberation of the Philippines and finished the war as a Chief Pharmacist’s Mate at Naval Air Station St. Louis.
After the war he became a speech and debate teacher and held various posts in the Freeport schools before retiring as an Assistant Superintendent. He has attended USS Minneapolis reunions and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s annual dinner for veterans of the attack; he was the featured speaker at the 2006 dinner. He’s never communicated with any of the Japanese pilots who participated in the attack (a number of whom have apologized or made other measures of reconciliation) but says he would welcome the opportunity.
“We keep on plugging away.”
As a result of Pearl Harbor, sixteen million American men served in the armed forces. Members of “The Greatest Generation” are legion, but they are passing away at a rate well over 1,000 per day. In a way, the Pearl Harbor survivors are the leading edge; even the youngest survivors, 17 year old seamen in 1941, are 82 years old today. Dean Garrett noted that there were only 11 Pearl Harbor veterans from northern Illinois attending Daley’s banquet this past December 7. He said some were in Hawaii that day, but their numbers have been dwindling steadily.
Frank Henry is the quartermaster of Freeport’s Veterans of Foreign Wars Post, and on December 7 he was with his father and brothers, pulling turtles out of a creek. “I was the bag boy,” he said. When the Henry men got in their car to go home, they turned on the radio to tune in the Bears game and heard the news of the attack. His brothers joined the Marine Corps and he joined the Navy. He served on an LST landing craft and by 1945 was in the Phillipines “conveying the last group of guys for the invasion of Japan.”
“I didn’t see any real action,” he said. “We had some Japanese survivors up in the hills around our operating area that would come down sometimes, but they were so starved they didn’t know dip from dap.” After the war he used the GI Bill to pay for barber school and cut hair for 26 years before serving as city treasurer for 16 years.
Henry says that one effect of the aging of the WWII generation can be seen at the VFW as membership dwindles. “I know some people call the Post ‘The Old Folks Home,’” he quipped. “After the war you could find all the vets at the VFW post. The club was full by four in the afternoon, with everybody shooting the bull.” Recruiting younger service members has been an obstacle. “It’s hard to get younger people; they’re not joiners. We used to bring in younger veterans by giving them a membership and paying their dues for the first year, but they usually didn’t come back for the second year.” Henry feels the gap between generations may have left the younger veterans feeling they had no place in the organization despite the shared experience of combat.
John Mathews fought his war on the other side of the world from Pearl Harbor. Enlisting on the same day he graduated from high school in 1943, he was a flight engineer on 8th Air Force B-17 bombers. His crew had already flown 25 missions and could have gone home, but they volunteered for ten more. Their 35th mission was a raid on a ball bearing plant in Germany and they were flying a brand new B-17G named “Hair’s Breadth.” Shot down in flames near the target, all ten men managed to bail out and landed in and around the town of Wexlar. Mathews landed on (and fell off) a church roof and was promptly taken prisoner. He saw the rest of his crew when he reached the prison camp that would be his new home. Between then and his liberation, the Germans marched him and his comrades across Germany for 27 straight days to keep them from being rescued by Soviet troops. When Mathews bailed out of his stricken plane he weighed 160 pounds; when he was liberated by the 13th Armored Division he weighed 117.
Mathews has been the announcer for Freeport’s Memorial Day parade for twenty years, and in 2005 he was presented with the Distinguished Flying Cross, the third highest Air Force award for valor. He wonders if subsequent generations really understand how dire the situation was in WWII. “I hope they grasp how it would have been if we had not won…it took an exerted effort by everybody in the entire country.”
He has returned to England and his base several times since the war, and the last two visits provided a pointed reminder of the aging of WWII veterans. “When I went [several] years ago we needed two buses to get us to the airfield. Last year we all fit on one bus.”
Richard Poole points out that although many of the veterans of WWII and Korea are elderly those who survive are some of the healthiest and optimistic, traits that lead to long lives. “We just keep plugging away,” he said. One Pearl Harbor veteran he knows is a 94 year old woman, “a wiry old girl” and a number of the veterans he met in Hawaii were “wiry and full of fun in their nineties.”
“Lots of them will be there every year,” he said. “A lot of them told me ‘We will have one of these again five years from now.’”
Glad to do it.
What a great story. Your grandfather helped save the world.
Glad to do it.
Aw crap...can you correct the spelling in the title?
Glad to do it, and thanks for your support of vets.
Thanks Ronnie, he was a hero proved, and so are you.
That's amazing that those two in the foreground lived to sail on.
Yankee ingenuity rocks.
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Thank you for your kindness, Mr. Silverback.
But I'm merely blessed to be a lifetime...
..'Witness to the Heroism of Many'..
http://www.ModernDayHeroes.com/aloha
See: 'Rescource Center
See: 'Aloha Ronnie'
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