"It's just not going to happen. "The kids coming up now have never heard of it," he says, his voice tinged with sadness and dismay. 3 gun turret. He started chatting up a regular customer, a contractor, and got a job building houses. Haerry sailed on Navy ships through World War II and again during the Korean conflict. I don't think sharks go that far. From the Vestal, Bruner was taken to the USS Solace, a hospital ship in the harbor. They stayed composed as their stories were told, stories of bravery, of quick thinking. He met up with some of the guys from the turret crew and they hopped a boat to shore, where there was a call for volunteers to join the Navy's destroyers. Conter had made friends with a young lady in Honolulu. He had five brothers, including Jake, and four sisters, all grouped so close in age that paying for college wasn't practical for their folks. did sharks eat pearl harbor victimssig sauer minimalist folding stock. Hetrick was sent to the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier. I heard the general say, 'You're a remarkable guy.' Ray Jr. seems surprised. Joe proposed and Libby accepted. Her father was an engineer and a top executive for a dredging company with a big Navy contract. I asked the boss, 'how many hours is in a day for you?' At his request, he was assigned to the officer candidate school in Newport, R.I. Bruner looked each recruit in the eyes to determine the right job, but he wasn't testing their mettle, not yet. She tracked him to the Los Angeles area, then started a phone search. The strike climaxed a decade of worsening relations between the United States and Japan. They went out for coffee afterward. I think it was one of the proudest days of my father's life.". "I'd do it a hundred times more," he says. "In the service, if you didn't use nasty words, you weren't a good sailor.". According to the History Channel, the Arizona "continues to spill up to 9 quarts of oil into the harbor each day " and visitors often say it is as if the ship were still bleeding. He saw action across the South Pacific, patrolled areas where suicide bombers were attacking American destroyers. 9. . Ke awa lau o Puuloa, the bay and lochs that make up the complex most people know simply as Pearl Harbor, was once the home of the guardian sharks, Kaahupahau and her brother Kahiuka. But he kept most of it to himself until he started meeting up with other survivors, years after he retired from the military. And my co-pilot, Lou Conter, saved my life. The sky began to darken and the wind grew. "I was back here on leave before the war started and he was here too," Cook says. They will celebrate 65 years of marriage in April. He fiddles with the radio. His dad operated a livery stable and a small dairy and later earned money as an auctioneer. He stayed on the 17thfloor of a hotel on Waikiki Beach. Conter attended the same event and was seated next to Valerie. "I think my dad was one of the first American heroes of World War II.". Many have since died. Some even extend their consumption to seabirds. He kept the truck, held on to it through repairs, engine overhauls, new paint jobs. He wants to secure a proper medal for Joe George, the sailor from the Vestal who helped rescue the six men from the gunner's control tower. Redfish. He tries to abbreviate it: "We went to California and got married.". The Navy loaded 5,000 bunks on board, along with a row of portable latrines, and the Saratoga sailed to San Francisco, passing under the Golden Gate Bridge with toilet paper streamers and thousands of sailors who needed something to do. We got into a run-and-gun battle. Bruner keeps mementos of his time on the Arizona in the sitting room. He was assigned a battle station in the No. Photographing survivors of the battleship USS Arizona. Chile. When Anderson said he was, his old friend was incredulous. He called back a few days later. The steeple clock chimed and a statue of an angel wielding a sword emerged from an alcove and knocked Anderson off the steeple. They still had to climb onto the dock and then into a truck for a short ride to a Navy hospital. When they said, 'grab your sea bags and let's go,' I did.". With Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, William Lee Scott. '", "Some things," he says, "you don't know about what they'll mean until years later.". He half-swam, half-walked the 70 yards to Ford Island and manned a mounted machine gun. The job paid $700. 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. It was the first time Randy, his son, had seen his father cry. Sight-setters and pointers would locate targets visually and determine their distance and range. ", "Baloney," Conter replied. Trains run close enough to hear the horns during the day, but not close enough to make them a nuisance. "They played country music because the people here loved that," Anderson says. Cook made it to his battle station on Dec. 7, 1941, but the Arizona was moored in a cramped harbor and couldn't have fired the big guns even in a prolonged assault. He had stopped at Pearl Harbor more than a decade earlier, on his way to a posting in Korea. popeyes vs chicken express; do venmo requests expire Their ordeal . "Andy, you had 12 years of the damnedest fighting I ever saw. He returned after the war to his home along the railway in eastern Oklahoma. The ship steamed toward the Asiatic Pacific and soon Anderson was chasing Japanese forces again, only this time the United States was at war. After an initial run-in with the guard at the gate ("Three weeks ago, I was shooting at people and killing them and I didn't even know who they were," he growled at the guard. Anderson's road to the radio booth started in Hollywood, with a screen test at a studio where he had worked. Song's got some zip to it, he said. "We got halfway there and I told them to turn around," Conter said. He can tell stories about his years with the diving crews, but the truck has evolved into a reminder of another time. As a youngster, Anderson heard stories about the Navy from his uncle, a man named Ray Stokes. It never returned, crippled in the Battle of the Coral Sea and scuttled by the Navy to keep the enemy from salvaging her. 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. pearl harbor 1941. uss arizona. The band members had decided they wanted to honor survivors from that day. Haerry felt the entire ship life out of the water. With his experience running cranes on the Arizona, Potts figures he could have landed a decent job at the Geneva Steel operation, but he didn't want to work shifts, so he worked as a carpenter again and eventually went into the used car business with a friend. It took more courage on your part to present this wreath than it did for me to accept it.". Squid. Ray Jr. has arranged for his father's remains to be interred in the sunken Arizona, an honor accorded any of the sailors or Marines who survived the attack. by Pia Peterson. Colombia. The sea turned rough, tossing the ship with 40-foot swells, bouncing the vessel like a rubber ball in a washing machine. Nope. "The only people he would talk to were either very close friends or relatives," his son says. His ships steamed across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal to Africa. "That lumber was so damn green then, we used to kid we had to shoot the squirrels out of it.". Handout . A young sailor ran in, out of breath. He was soon flying one of the Navy's Black Cats, a squadron of long-range patrol bombers painted black for night missions. At 93, he is one of the last survivors ofthe attack on the Arizona. "We took off," Bruner said, "firing just as fast as we could. "I do as much as I can to keep his story alive," his son says. A pistol sits on top of his television at home. I wanted to know if you could do it for a couple of weeks.". He settled in Palm Springs and built a career as a real estate developer, buying up land for commercial and residential projects. "They paid everybody in two dollar bills back then. OAHU BOMBED BY JAPANESE PLANES", "That's one of the first extras that was put out that day," Potts says. When he first arrived at Pearl Harbor, Hetrick wasn't even old enough to buy a beer until he found a place where they didn't ask questions if a guy was in a service uniform. "They were very good days before the war. He jumped into the harbor, even though he had never passed his swimming test. He was nervous about volunteering for anything, but he raised his hand. Two deer racks (his wife shot one, his son the other). "If you can stand up and stay up while we change the linen on this bed, we'll see about it.". Bruner started as a painter, trained as a carpenter, then helped start a new sheet-metal department. This time the objective was clear. He survived, but was burned badly over two-thirds of his body. The Navy occasionally cuts away small bits of the wreckage for memorials. The six men stared straight ahead, almost as if they were back in line, at attention. Langdell was discharged at the war's end and returned to Massachusetts, where his wife, Libby, waited. The men, their charred skin peeling away, climbed hand-over-hand across the line to safety. When he reaches that part of his story, he stops. "Well, I'd brushed enough paint on that damn ship, I figured I could do it," he says. Though Conter turned around the first time he ventured toward the sunken Arizona, he has been back since, to see it with other survivors. As the boat heaved, the man with the ax missed and hit Haerry's hand, nearly severing it from his wrist. The first couple of trips back to Hawaii were difficult. So reads the telegram sent to the Mattituck home of Anna and Clifford Penny on Dec. 10, 1941. "We're were out and around. When the regular stuntmen returned and the studio cut loose the subs, Ladd hired some of them to work on his house in the Holmby Hills above Los Angeles. The day when they assigned him and a crew of divers to a motor launch and sent them to the Arizona to remove bodies of dead sailors. "Why do you like the hat, dad?" He headed east and landed in Paducah, Ky. From there, he worked jobs in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and back to New York, where he welded 20-inch gas lines going through Brooklyn. No one knew much about Bruner's years in the Navy, not the early years anyway. When he left Morris the first time in 1939 after high school, Cook wasn't sure where he'd end up. He has met many of his old friends and shipmates. The ones that gave him nightmares, the stories from the day he nearly burned to death, he kept to himself. He was 20 when he escaped the burning wreckage ofthe USS Arizonain Pearl Harbor. The United States declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941, the day following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Cook got the buddy's telephone number and tried to call him. Military Casualties. The Coghlan supported Army landings and Navy bombing runs. Stratton climbed to his feet and, biting back the pain, he stood and when his bed was ready, he collapsed back into it. "Are there any officers from the Arizona here?" He did not reach a hospital for several days, but doctors still saved his hand. He remembers when the order was given to abandon ship. The parties sometimes dragged into the early morning hours. Once a shark finds its prey, it needs to decide on whether to eat or not based on smell and appearance. The smell of burned skin filled the air. "Listen, all those men down there on that ship, a thousand of them, they wouldn't do it and I don't think they'd want me to do it," he says. You can't leave the Navy.". Just another site did sharks eat pearl harbor victims He waited for the result. Finally, the four U.S. destroyers were ordered to mount a torpedo run. UPDATE: Bruner died in 2019. Cook was the gun captain on the Pringle at the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. 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 would sail to San Francisco on one of the cruise ships refitted to move troops, the Lurline, or maybe the Matsonia. As he recounts the experience, he rubs his hands together, then holds them out, turning them over. For an hour or so, the two men talk. Three months before he would mark 30 years with the company, he was let go, bought out like a lot other older workers in those days. The Stratton men have taken up a more personal cause. They are reminders of a moment in time he can never escape, a moment he sees again and again. The flare exploded and started a fire, which forced the plane into the water. That led to a job in Roswell, the Sagebrush Serenade and Elvis Presley. He's not sure he'd have learned that lesson if he hadn't enlisted in the Navy. He was on Ford Island when the Japanese attacked, training for new assignment. The planes could fly at low altitudes, then buzz upward for a bombing run, confounding enemy gunners trying to calculate speed and distance. They found a way to take prints from the edges of his fingers, enough to satisfy the law. Usually, sharks will prioritize eating: Smaller fish. She likes the story of how they tied the knot. He had held on to it through the war. But Hetrick couldn't find work, so inside of six months, he signed up for the Navy Reserve. In the waters off Honolulu, he confronted his memories. It is about three feet tall, with a carved island figure on top and the silhouette of a Hawaiian warrior on a plaque. It turned out most of the regular stuntmen were still in the military. He wrote Libby a letter and suggested it would be a good idea if Libby visited her friend on or about a particular date. Conter fought on through World War II, scraped past a lot of close calls, then went to Korea. After his second discharge, he knocked around Nebraska again, working in his dad's tavern, then on a beer truck, but he grew bored. "We'd send two guys out to knock the icicles off the guns, then they'd high-tail it back in. Sometimes we never landed, but we kept the line, always watching out for kamikazes.". Conter was talking about survival, about coming back alive. He will meet three other survivors in Hawaii for their last reunion. For some reason I had always thought that the titanic had gone down way farther North. The next night, an American PT boat retrieved all 10 men. Debris from the Arizona showered the Tennessee's stern and started fires, but the vessel stayed afloat. queensland figure skating. On one mission, Haerry's tender was tied to a larger ship as the crew delivered supplies and completed maintenance tasks. Anderson had finished his first day as a Hollywood stunt man. alain picard wife / ap calculus bc multiple choice / did sharks eat pearl harbor victims. Some even like to dine on smaller shark species! After the war, Langdell returned to the family auction business in Massachusetts, but after all those years in Hawaii, the Philippines and in the tropical South Seas, he couldn't readjust to the cold. He tried to keep his thoughts on the work in the office. He and his father chat a little. The primer went in last, before the end of the gun was sealed shut. June 12, 2022 June 12, 2022 0 Comments June 12, 2022 0 Comments They would be married in San Francisco, before the Frazier set sail. Hotline & WhatsApp : +971556212280 | Landline : +97143873596 , +97167499398 james reynolds obituary. More than 20 years earlier, he had earned his real estate license in California and had maintained it. ", "Fine," the worker said. A while later, he and Marietta were on the road again, to a missile base in Sturgess, S.D., to gas lines in Wisconsin and North Dakota. But when Ka'ahupahau realized that the girl actually did die, she regretted her rash order and instead said that sharks should never attack humans in the Pearl Harbor region. "It's always been my fear that people are going to forget that day, that people are going to forget the sacrifice that was made that day.". Maybe next time. He clashed with the station manager of the radio station and finally quit. It fit in that location. Cook was a gunner's mate on the Arizona. 11 Oldest Pearl Harbor Survivors (Updated 2021) December 7, 1941 is a date that everyone in America has committed to memory. Hetrick thought about it. They spoil their granddaughters and can now move on to a new great-granddaughter. Someone had stacked the boxes too high and in the humid environment of the island, the cardboard had grown damp and weak. It sits today in the carport outside his home. "We had to have two crews, a regular crew and a stand-by crew lined up waiting," Bruner said. What do great white sharks eat in Hawaii? He heard the same stories from his grandmother and his aunts. He keeps a photo from that tournament on a bookshelf in an alcove off the kitchen. Ted asks. Cook asked. It is dated Dec. 21, 1941. At 100, he is the oldest. did sharks attack titanic survivors. After so many years of travel, the Cooks have settled into a more tranquil pace. It was Sunday and some of the crewmen with liberty wanted an early start. "The nights up there were already short, so I didn't get much sleep," Cook says. The Coghlan's crew battled just to keep the guns free of ice as they headed toward their next target. He spent long months on a tender, a vessel that carries equipment, parts and other supplies for ships at sea. Or got fired. He finished his stint in the Navy in Shanghai, working shore patrol the way he did back in Honolulu. He was still active, so would report to the Navy Pier each morning to check a list for the names of sailors who had been given duties for the day. For Haerry, McBride had a the state's highest military honor, the Rhode Island Cross. The six-year Pentagon project identified nearly 400 who died on the USS Oklahoma in 1941. The shock of jumping into a harbor knowing he couldn't swim. The Hirasaki family suffered some of the worst losses that terrible morning. In U.S. history the name recalls the surprise Japanese air attack on December 7, 1941, that temporarily crippled the U.S. Fleet and resulted in the United States' entry into World War II. "Cover the decks, anywhere you can find them up to the top of the masts.". We had survival training on the job. "Would you like to listen to it?" Yes, some of them were his friends. Anderson spoke to one of the tanker's crew about towing the Macdonough. "Sure, let's see it." Japan and China were at war again and America was trying to protect its interests without getting involved in the conflict. dwayne johnson rock foundation contact. They wouldn't send her over so I didn't re-enlist.". Seabirds. Not war stories, usually, not unless one of them has had it out with a doctor or a pushy clerk. They were having trouble reading his prints, she told Stratton. When she says anything, I tell her I'm catching up from the war.". His fingers were almost smooth, lacking all but a few of the swirls that create an identity. Only a few hundred people lived there then. Joe Langdell found a table in the wardroom of one of the ships moored in Pearl Harbor and sat down with his breakfast. He built a reputation as a guy who could bring in the harvest on time. He handed the microphone to his son, Raymond Haerry, Jr., who spoke of his father's courage and resilience. After high school, Langdell enrolled at Boston University, working nights to pay for his classes, and in 1938, he earned a degree in business administration. Crippled ships still floated around the mooring posts along Ford Island. They met at a dance at the YWCA on North State Street. The planes flew up the Sepik River from the northern coast of New Guinea. "I had to help my father out of his seat. "I'd already sent word, even before the first one got there," he says. They ran Joe and Libby Langdell's Village Mart for more than 20 years until they retired. He sits in his wheelchair as his son recites the narrative, keeping his father's story alive. ", He stops in front of a newspaper, the front page of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin with the headline: "WAR! Lou Conter is telling the story of the night his patrol bomber was shot down seven miles off the coast of New Guinea, dumping the seaplane's 10-man crew into the Pacific Ocean. "Sometimes they'd get shooting at you and you'd look at the shells and they looked like they were going to hit you. On December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy bombed the Pearl Harbor Naval base in a surprise attack. Before the attack, many Americans were reluctant to become involved in the war in Europe. LaRocque asked. Cook never got a chance to catch up with his buddy, but marveled at the connections he seemed to make from his short stint aboard the Arizona. Over the course of nearly two hours during the morning of December 7th, 1941, a fleet of Japanese fighters and bombers assaulted the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in hopes of crippling the US Navy for the duration of World War II. He wanted to interview Langdell for his project. As he waited, he had a feeling he knew what would happen, but he didn't say anything. He struggles to speak at times (though when he's feeling good, he likes to flirt with the nurses). Just stay together, hold hands and kick slowly 'cause there'll be sharks around. He visited the memorial and was relieved to see the builders got it right. Before the end of the war, he went to San Diego for gunner's mate school. Almost imperceptibly, he sways. And he has watched with dismay the changes in survival training. He worked his way up to crew chief on a squadron of B-26 bombers, After 18 months overseas, he returned to Langley Field in Virginia. Langdell was an ensign, an entry-level officer, not yet a year in the Navy. "I had to start training the new recruits on every machine," Bruner said. In 1971, Stratton was working long hours with a diving outfit on a nuclear power plant project not far from Santa Barbara. Haerry nods and like a good sailor taking orders from the chief, he pulls himself up with a walker and shuffles off to lunch. He keeps the mementos from his experience the maps, the photos, the clippings, the medals, the painting in a room behind a door on the side wall of the living room in the house where he has lived for 54 years. He keeps up with what the military does, and some of it irritates him. The ship provided fire support for the Marines going ashore. "I never talked about it much then," he says. For a lot of people, meeting Elvis and playing one of his first records on the air might sound like one of life's truly unforgettable days. 4 gun turret, with the men who died there and survivors who had died since. The Lexington sailed out of Pearl Harbor not long after. He doesn't need to say which Saturday night by now. A tale of war and romance mixed in with history. Pearl Harbor was a United States Naval base on the island of Oahu, located west of Honolulu. He went out to the floating memorial. "Hi," he said, introducing himself. Except the cap. "It ain't worth a damn if it ain't loaded," he says. He had chased Japanese soldiers along the coast of China three years before America declared war on Japan. "Would you like a job?" "Sometimes, we'd come back, eat, then sleep on the beach.". The Frazier patrolled the South Pacific at first, but in early 1943, steamed northward toward Alaska, where Japan was trying to secure positions in the Aleutian Islands. The Navy wanted to keep him in Idaho, working with new recruits at a boot camp, but he pushed for a seagoing assignment and wound up on the destroyer USS Stack as a gunner's mate. In order to produce enough energy to hunt and keep their body temperatures up, they have to feed on high-fat animals like seals and large tuna.The sharks have good eyesight, and they have electromagnetic sensors on their snout where they can tell the difference between a seal and a human from over 100 yards away. There are over 470 species of sharks throughout the world. "That's what I want to remember. No one seemed to be in charge on Ford Island, where Cook had spent the night. He would become the final survivor to be interred in the ship. Seventy-three years later, he is one of just nine survivors of the attack on the Arizona. "Three months later, I was in Korea.". His mother had moved to Decatur, Ill., by then, so he followed and took a job at a hardware store. In early January, Conter visited his young lady friend again and again, Admiral Calhoun was there. The band would cover all expenses for him and Doris. We were going to have a date the next day. Using its sonar equipment, the ship fired depth charges and eventually sank the enemy submarine. He's more like family than just a friend.". He looks forward to his time with the guys from his years in the Navy. I couldn't.". On the other end of the line is an old shipmate from the USS Saratoga, the aircraft carrier where Hetrick worked as a mechanic through most of World War II. If the shark feels like a dead fish isn't worth its time, it will leave without wasting more energy. Fish, in general, are the most common prey for sharks. His mother suggested Hills Business College in Oklahoma City. "They said, 'If you re-enlist, we'll send her over.' "I didn't have any speaking parts, but I was working for the studio and they paid me.". He helped rescue some of his shipmates. A platform marked the wreckage of the USS Arizona. View of "Battleship Row" during or . "You," the fellow said. He was assigned briefly to the Arizona, then to the Saratoga, an aircraft carrier, then, as the Navy tinkered once more with its troop alignment, back to the Arizona. "I witnessed your attack from Ford Island. Jack shrugged. "She went to California and I followed her," Lonnie says. "From down inside, it wasn't too bad when they fired it," Cook said. Haerry would come home on those days with cigar boxes full of the coins. As the USS Arizona burned and sunk into the harbor, Stratton and five other men had been trapped on an anti-aircraft gun control platform on the ship's foremast, burned in a fireball when below-deck ammunition exploded. what is florentine milan straw. OAHU, Hawaii (NEXSTAR) On the day that will live in infamy December 7, 1941 2,403 U.S. personnel were killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor. He eases the truck out of the carport, far enough to show it off. I think that's what kept me living to this day.". Eighty years later, many of those killed are finally returning home and being laid to rest. About a year after he boarded the ship, he ran into a young recruit named Clyde Williams, a fellow from Okmulgee, Okla., a few miles down the road from Morris. When, on July 30, 1945, USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine, the Navy didn't realize the ship had been lost until four days later - after which hundreds of men floating in the ocean for days had been eaten by sharks.. Toward the end of July 1945, the Portland-class heavy cruiser USS . Whale Shark (Rhincodon typus) The whale shark is the largest shark species, and also the biggest fish species in the world. Everything was taken ashore and properly taken care of.". This list and the accompanying graphics do not include encounters in which a shark does not actually bite a person or board (e.g. On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Cook was changing clothes at his locker, savoring the thought of a day in Honolulu with the $60 he'd won in a craps game the night before. The man told him later he had broken both his hips in one of the explosions and had survived only because Hetrick was there to urge him on. He agreed to play it on his show. @webtv.net wrote in message. "He said, 'I had survival training in the ocean. "This went on for four straight hours. And that's what he told every soldier and airman who took his courses.*. "We'd patrol at night. All but one of the Pacific fleet's battleships were in port that morning, most of them moored to quays flanking Ford Island. Three days later, he and his buddy were on a ship to San Francisco and then a train to Pensacola. The Japanese military had established strategic outposts in the Aleutian Islands and had its eye on Alaska. Uncle Ray was nearing the end of his career in 1937 when John and Jake both decided to enlist. He knew his brother hadn't made it off the Arizona alive, but he didn't know much else. 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. Haerry says he wants lunch delivered to his room, but the nurse says no. "Randy, come and turn on the music box." The Saratoga sailed across the South Pacific, to Guam, the Philippines, around New Guinea. Many veterans who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor have met over the years and become friends, particularly at the annual Dec. 7 gatherings at the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.