Posted on 12/06/2003 11:04:55 PM PST by Wumpus Hunter
Pearl Harbor: Naples vets recall a fateful morning
Lemley, Sansevero, Smith relate what happened on Dec. 7, 1941
By ELIZABETH WENDT, ehwendt@naplesnews.com December 7, 2003
Elman Lemley was 21 years old on Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941. Carl Sansevero was 19. So was Paul Smith.
Now they are all in their 80s. There are 62 years, a continent and an ocean between them and that day, but they can still recall each moment of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
They have stockpiled material memories, too, books about the attack and newspaper clippings and photographs. They receive the Pearl Harbor-gram, a quarterly publication devoted to honoring the more 2,400 Americans killed in the attack. The Naples men want to keep the story circulating, and are happy to honor a request for a retelling.
There can be no forgetting for them. They wish to make that true for others, too.
"We're a part of history," Lemley said. "There's no doubt about that. And we will always remain in the history books."
An Air Force staff sergeant and crew chief, Lemley was in his bunk bed reading his newspaper when the attack began. Sansevero, a Navy a petty officer second class aboard the destroyer USS Bagley, was "sleeping so nice and quiet-like," he said. Distant rumblings -- he thought it was thunder -- roused him from his bed. Sansevero pulled on one sock; he would not have time to pull on the other.
Smith, a Marine sergeant, was already at breakfast. When he heard the noise of the attack, he ran outside with a grapefruit in his hand and saw smoke spiraling from the harbor to the sky.
Lemley saw the smoke, too, from his third-floor barracks.
All three saw the Japanese torpedo planes, flying so low the men could glimpse the faces of the pilots, dropping destruction as they passed.
"I could almost touch the wings when they went by," Sansevero said.
Smith ran to find a weapon and ammunition; the running would seem endless that day. At his barracks he grabbed his rifle, but there was no ammunition. Someone else ran to scavenge some. An hour and a half later -- the attack lasted two hours -- the ammunition was delivered, Smith recalled. It was the wrong kind for his gun.
He ached to go to the harbor and try to help. He could see the men aboard the Navy ships leaping overboard, trying to escape their fiery vessels only to splash into slicks of burning oil.
All the movies Hollywood has made about the attack don't depict Pearl Harbor properly, he said -- they don't show how disorganized and helpless the men were. The attack was such a perfect surprise, Smith said.
"They did it up right," he said dryly and laughed.
On the Bagley, Sansevero was alerted to the attack by the cries of a crewmate. That's when he dropped his second sock, slid his bare foot into his shoe and ran to see what had happened. The Bagley was not part of the ill-fated "Battleship Row," but was moored across the channel. From the destroyer's deck, Sansevero watched the wave of a torpedo as it plowed toward the USS Oklahoma.
He and his crewmates managed to shoot down five Japanese torpedo planes. But then came the dive bombers, soaring in from the direction of the sun, blinding him and his crewmates as they tried to fire on them.
A crewman's mistake spared them.
Aboard the Bagley, a fireman failed to put an atomizer tip in a burner barrel, releasing a stream of fuel into the boiler and creating great clouds of black smoke. The smoke obscured the view of the dive bombers and saved many lives, Sansevero believes.
After Lemley heard the attack's first explosion, he scrambled to his barracks window and looked over the harbor. He ran to the base's airplane hangars and taxied a B-17D onto the tarmac; many of the hangars were already swallowed by flames. Lemley looked up and saw Japanese planes firing at him.
He felt sure he was going to die that day, he said.
In the midst of the attack, Lemley remembers someone frantically trying to call roll. A sergeant desperately trying to learn who was still among the living, but who turned them into targets in the process.
Then, as quickly as the attack began, it ended. All that was left was smoke and water and loss.
The night before the attack, Lemley went to the nearby Waikiki Tavern and enjoyed a shrimp dinner. The base had been on alert for several weeks, and Dec. 6 marked the official end of that watch. The mood was high. Lemley lent his car to a friend who wanted to go visit his girlfriend. It was a good move, although Lemley didn't know it. Since the car wasn't on the base, it wasn't destroyed in the attack.
The night of Dec. 7, Lemley slept in the car.
Or tried to sleep. No one really nodded off that night, he said. Instead, he listened to random rounds of ammunition being shot off in the dark, and stared up at the stars. He wondered if they were Japanese parachutes, another ambush.
Two days before the attack, the Bagley had put into Pearl Harbor for repairs to its bilge keel. On the evening of Dec. 7, the ship and Sansevero were back to sea, patrolling the waters off the smoldering harbor.
Sansevero served aboard the Bagley for four years and seven months. He was in a dozen battles, and earned a star for each. Now, he wears the stars on a hat that identifies him as a Pearl Harbor survivor.
To him, that battle still seems the most tragic of all.
And every anniversary, there are fewer who remember it, Sansevero said.
"You can talk to these kids and they don't even know what Pearl Harbor is or was," Lemley said. "And of course, the Pearl Harbor survivors, I don't know how many we're losing a year or a month."
In each issue of the Pearl Harbor-gram, there is a list of those who have died since the previous publication. In the November 2003 issue, there are 127 names.
"A lot of guys are missing out of Pearl Harbor now," Sansevero said.
Smith, Lemley and Sansevero know they are a part of the past. They are proud to be -- although, as Lemley explains, it is a bittersweet boast.
"I'm glad I got to see it if I had to," he said. "But I wouldn't go through it again."
They are pleased to share the story of Pearl Harbor, even as it passes from an oral account into history book fare. People want to hear about it, too, they believe. When they tell their tale and are thanked by the listener, it gives them a warm feeling. Now, as his life is drawing to a close, Sansevero said those thank yous are especially appreciated. People shouldn't feel shy or embarrassed to thank a veteran, he said.
"I don't mean to brag about it," Lemley said, "but it makes me feel good that people recognize what we have donated or sacrificed."
Every year there are less and less of these men left. If you know a vet, tell them thanks!
Ya know what? You have SOME balls worrying about "racism" on a thread about a sneak attack by japs that killed 2500 or more Americans!
Piss off.
1) It wasn't meant to be a 'sneak' attack.
2) The US has repeatedly used real 'sneak' attacks since then, including in Iraq. So what's your beef on this count with the 'japs'?
3) 'Japs' isn't a racist term, of course, it just means your brain turns off and you foam at the mouth when you think about those little yellow bastards of sixty years ago.
So yes, let's remember our veterans... but let's also let the dead bury the dead.
There is nothing you can do about it. Some very very small group of sad people show their class and their ignorance by hating a whole race and nation of 125 million people, nearly 60% of them now having not even been born before the now-defunct raving mad Imperial Japanese leadership's attack on America in the Pacific.
Some people just prefer to use a shotgun when a fine bore rifle is all that is needed, i 'spose. "Hey, they are Asians and they all look alike, so what's the big deal?"
I dont know if there are any Freepers like that in previous posts on this thread, but they will show up later for sure. They hate all the "japs", and clearly write it. And JR and/or/moderators seem to give it a pass and let it stand, whereas they would stumble over their shoelaces to take off from FR a statement of hatred of "all the niggers?" or "all the beaners".
Then some dolt will show up and start countering my comments by throwing up photos of dead Chinese in Nanjing, little knowing he is preaching to the choir and that I even did some critical (of fascist Tokyo) academic theses on Nanjing Rape and visited there many times to the Chinese sites of the atrocities. We usually just end up talking past ourselves. Its OK. It will be January soon enough.
The Japanese Ambassador was supposed to hand FDR Japan's declaration of war before H-hour at Pearl, but delays in decoding the message from Japan kept him from doing so. This is absolutely established.
I don't even have to "turn my brain off". Ever heard of the rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, or any of the countless other atrocities they perpetrated?
You are either fairly young, very stupid, or both.
If you really think you can equate the US in Iraq to "...those little yellow bastards of sixty years ago", you're on the wrong board.
Go try the DU.
That's funny - I didn't see anything on here about hating anyone. All I saw was someone worrying about "racism".
Golly, I'm sorry you guys had to whine. I totally forgot who the REAL victims were, and what we should REALLY think about on December 7th.
Actually, I'm as stupid as I am young.
Sure - slow typists in the Japanese Embassy. The fact that the declaration wasn't turned in until after the attack upset a lot of the military including the pilots who made the attack, and even Yamamoto himself.
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