Reader Report: On the 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, a veteran speaks the stark truths of war

William C. “Bill” Schultz was a 14-year-old high school freshman in Sheboygan, Wis., that terrible Sunday 75 years ago when 353 Japanese fighter, bomber and torpedo aircraft decimated the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.

“But I didn’t hear about the Pearl Harbor attack until the following day,” said Schultz, 89, a former Irvine resident who has lived in Tustin with his daughter, Janet Clenshaw, since the death of his wife, Jean, in 2014.

“When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, my family and I were visiting friends who owned a farm outside Sheboygan, and we were helping with their horses and cows and all that good stuff. There was no television in those days, and we didn’t have the radio turned on.

“We got home real late, I went straight to bed and only learned about Pearl Harbor early the next morning when I picked up the Milwaukee Sentinel from the front porch and saw the headlines,” added Schultz in an interview at the Lyon Air Museum, where he serves as a senior docent.

Schultz escorted this writer on a tour of the museum, which is located on the west side of John Wayne Airport, and we passed a variety of U.S. aircraft until halting before a World WarII Army Jeep, one of several military vehicles displayed among the galaxy of airplanes.

“Take a good look at this Jeep. The Jeep, like the Pearl Harbor disaster, also is 75 years old this year. There were 647,343 built by the Ford and Willys Overland motor companies,” he said, noting that the Jeep was designed in 1940, and went into production in 1941, after the Army tasked U.S. automakers to build a general-purpose cargo and personnel vehicle as a quarter-ton, four-wheel-drive small truck, which would have a crew of three.

Jeeps also were used by the Navy and Marine Corps during WWII, Schultz said, and the 2,430-pound, 54-horsepower “go-anywhere, do-anything” vehicles soon became known for their reliability and capacities to carry command personnel, reconnaissance teams, wounded troops on litters and pull heavy artillery pieces.

“Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general and president, said the Jeep, along with the C-47 transport and cargo plane, the bazooka and landing craft were the critical tools that helped win World War II,” Schultz said.

How did the Jeep get its name? There are two prime theories, he stated.

One says the Jeep was named for “Eugene the Jeep,” a small, nimble animal featured in the Popeye comic strip of the 1930s and 1940s. The other says it got its moniker from soldiers who declared “jeepers” when demonstrating the vehicle’s multiple features while driving a Jeep up the U.S. Capitol steps during a test ride before congressmen and reporters, a feat that resulted in a newspaper headline which declared, “Jeep Creeps Up Capitol Steps.”

As for Bill Schultz’s own military career, four years after the Pearl Harbor attack and, by now, a 17-year-old high school senior, he joined the Army Air Corps as a private after receiving the Army’s assurance that he could remain in school and pursue his goal of becoming an Army pilot after graduating and completing flight school.

“But things didn’t work out as I planned,” he said. “By then, the war had ended in Europe, it was soon to come to an end in the Pacific with the impending defeat of Japan, and the Army didn’t need any more pilots. I was never issued an Army uniform, did no military training and received an honorable discharge after only eight months in the Army.

“I still wanted to be in the military, so I joined the Navy and was ordered to duty aboard the aircraft carrier USS Philippine Sea, which was longer than three football fields. My military specialty was aviation electronics technician, and our carrier was sent to patrol duty in the Caribbean. Following three years of service, I left the Navy in 1948 at the Norfolk Navy Base in Virginia as a petty officer second class.”

He enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, where he received bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering, got married, taught several years at his alma mater and Cornell University, became the father of two daughters and grandfather of five and eventually moved with his family to Southern California, first settling in Huntington Beach, and then relocating to Irvine and, later, to Tustin.

Retired and with free time on his hands, Schultz became a Lyon Museum docent and also joined the Freedom Committee of Orange County, a nonpolitical and nonprofit volunteer organization founded in 1988 by Jack Hammett, a former mayor of Costa Mesa who had been a Navy chief warrant officer and survivor of the Pearl Harbor attack.

When Hammett died two years ago at 94, Schultz became one of the group’s leaders, and today, along with the committee’s more than 100 members, who are military veterans representing all the services, he gives lectures and slide shows at elementary and high schools about the “Greatest Generation” and the wars in which they have fought and died.

“War is hell. No one hates war more than our men and women in uniform,” he said.

Take Pearl Harbor, for example. More than 2,400 American service members and civilians were killed and 1,178 were wounded that infamous day. The Japanese aircraft, which were based aboard carriers off the Hawaiian coast, sank or heavily damaged five U.S. battleships and many other warships and destroyed 188 aircraft.

The attack was well-planned. The Japanese lost only 29 airplanes, five midget submarines and 64 personnel, Schultz said.

The Freedom Committee of Orange County, according to Schultz, also arranges Lyon Museum tours for students enrolled in Newport-Mesa Unified schools and other county districts, and its members describe the histories of the aircraft and vehicles on display “to keep our military heritage alive, to point out to our visitors that freedom is not free and comes at a high cost, and that future generations must pave the way for peace.”

Schultz, who figures he has spent between 1,500 and 2,000 hours as a Lyon senior docent and also serves as a docent at the Richard Nixon Museum and Library in Yorba Linda, emphasizes that “those who don’t know history are bound to repeat it.”

As Americans prepare to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Schultz said he and his fellow Freedom Committee members will continue to speak about the stark truths of war and the sacrifices Americans in uniform have made from the Revolutionary War to the present.

“We must think peace and work for peace. I repeat: War is hell,” he exclaimed.

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DAVID C. HENLEY, a Newport Beach resident, is a longtime newspaperman and foreign correspondent and a member of the board of trustees of Chapman University in Orange.

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PEARL HARBOR COMMEMORATION IN Huntington Beach

People killed in the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor will be honored at a ceremony at 2 p.m. Wednesday — the 75th anniversary — at the veterans memorial on the east side of Huntington Beach City Hall, 2000 Main St.

The city of Huntington Beach and American Legion Post 133 are presenting the event.