Time Thins the Ranks of an Exclusive Fraternity: Pearl Harbor Survivors

They are beginning to disappear now, the men and women who can remember with almost photographic clarity that day 47 years ago when the sky suddenly filled with rolling clouds of oily black smoke and the world changed forever.

Most of them are in their 60s or 70s today, and their numbers are finite and shrinking but still they see that bright morning through the clear eyes of old warriors for whom the bullets and bombs signaled the end of youth and isolation and safety. And today they are surrounded by generations of Americans who either have no personal recollection of Dec. 7, 1941, or who may even be ignorant of its significance.

The survivors, however, are of another era, when heroism was frequent, courage was commonplace, purposes were clear and war was just.

And when they remember Pearl Harbor, they do not recall it abstractly. They did not get the news later that day on the radio, or from a newspaper, or from the neighbor down the block. They got it immediately, out of the flashing gun ports of Japanese fighters.

They were there.

Today they continue to come together each month as members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn., one of the most exclusive veterans’ organizations in the world. On the last Sunday of each month, at the American Legion hall in Los Alamitos, the members of the Orange County area chapter gather, not to relive their common link with history but simply to keep in touch, for there is a bond among them stronger than mere friendship. The single fact that they lived through an apocalyptic event and went on to grow old together is enough.

“Yes, it still has a lot of meaning,” said Burt Holland, a Fountain Valley resident and the former chief warrant officer on the U.S. supply ship Castor, loaded with a cargo of ammunition when the Japanese attacked. At age 89, Holland is the oldest member of the Orange County chapter.

“We’re passing on now,” he said, “and when you go to others’ funerals together it brings back memories. Everyone’s story is different. Here, you hear a lot of things you never heard before.” Del Lacquement, the immediate past president of the chapter, called his fellow survivors “really special people. Other veterans’ organizations don’t have the kind of camaraderie we do. They have too many age brackets, with people who were in Korea or Vietnam. Here, we’re all about the same age, around 70. And there won’t be any more of us. When we’re gone, we’re gone.”

The exact number of Americans alive today who were present at the battle of Pearl Harbor cannot be pinpointed. However, the national membership rolls of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn., which was chartered in 1958, contain about 10,000 names. The largest number come from California, which is home to 30 chapters and nearly 2,600 members. There are 213 members in the Orange County chapter.

To qualify as a member, said Jim Facer, a former president of the chapter, a person must have been in a branch of the American military and been on or within a 3-mile radius of the island of Oahu during the 2 hours of the attack on Dec. 7, 1941. And, he said, because of the number of female Army and Navy nurses and other female noncombatants who were serving in the military on Oahu at the time, the organization welcomes women as well as men.

It is a light-hearted group, with much kidding and backslapping and handshaking. War stories are exchanged, but much of that talk centers on old acquaintances or locations rather than on the battle itself.

“We generally talk about it very seldom,” said Facer, who served as a gunner’s mate 1st class on the battleship California. “People claim they joined (the association) because they don’t want to fight the battle all over again.”

But if they are asked by an outsider, they will talk about it, particularly as another Dec. 7 approaches.

Pete Janovich, a jovial retired barber from Norwalk, said he actually saw the face of his attacker as bullets from a strafing fighter came stitching down the boat deck of his ship, the battleship Tennessee.

“Another guy and I were on the deck and we saw this plane come in and we just froze,” Janovich said. “If we hadn’t done that, we probably would have gotten shot because this pilot just machine-gunned all around us. I can still remember the eyes of that gunner. He was close enough where I could see his teeth, like he was laughing as he machine-gunned us.”

Fred Betts, who was a warrant gunner on the light cruiser Phoenix at Pearl Harbor, retired from the Navy with the rank of commander after 30 years of service.

“I’d just sat down to my first cup of coffee at breakfast when everything started,” he said. “The next time I had anything to eat was that night. In between times, I was kind of busy.”

Betts’ ship was undamaged in the attack and it put to sea early that afternoon to join two American task forces already at sea.

“It was confusing,” said Betts, who lives in Long Beach, “because we were getting so many erroneous reports about things from all around the island. I still remember things pretty vividly, but sometimes I forget their sequence and can’t put a time on things.”

Today, Betts said, when reunions of former Phoenix sailors are held, three conversational groups tend to emerge: those who sailed on the Phoenix before and after Pearl Harbor and those who were present during the attack.

Holland, who joined the Navy in 1917 and retired in 1947 to operate ferries and tugs for the Los Angeles Harbor Department, said the surprise of the attack was nearly total.

“I was having a cup of coffee with the gangway watch when the planes started to come in,” he said. “And we thought they were ours until one of them flipped over on its belly and we could see the sun painted on the wings. We got machine-gunned, but we didn’t have any casualties and I think we got credit for one plane.”

Janovich remembered that his ship, the Tennessee, was moored inboard of the battleship West Virginia.

“That saved us from the torpedoes the planes were dropping,” he said. “And even though we couldn’t get away from the dock, we kept our engine going all the time to keep the oil in the water away from the ships.”

Though he was a motor launch coxswain, Janovich ended up manning a 5-inch deck gun during the attack.

“It was one day when I said to myself, ‘If I get out of this, I’m gonna get married and have kids and try to make the most of my life,’ ” he said.

Facer’s immediate thoughts on hearing the alarm were less prosaic. He was stowing his bunk in the powder room of his gun turret--where he and other gunners slept--at the time.

“I first thought was, ‘What s.o.b.’s sounding general quarters on Sunday morning?’ ” he said.

While the majority of the members in the association are former Navy men, there are members from every branch of the services. Lacquement, for instance, was a Marine sergeant stationed at the time of the attack at the Marine barracks inside the Navy yard at Pearl Harbor. He remained on Oahu after the attack and worked in the base plumbing shop until 1943. He later was transferred to Marine combat units in the Pacific and fought in the battles for Guam and Okinawa.

“I was there when the war started and I was there when it ended,” he said.

Now, 47 years after what was one of the most pivotal events in 20th-Century history, the members of the association find themselves in the positions of custodians of memories. They are acutely aware of their place in history but recognize it as a transient one.

“Everything would have been different if it hadn’t happened,” said Betts, “if the Japanese hadn’t done it. It got the American people into the fight real quick. You know what Yamamoto said about waking a sleeping giant? Well, that’s what happened.”

(Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto commanded the Japanese fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor. After the attack, he was quoted as saying that he feared that the attack had merely succeeded in “waking a sleeping giant and filling him with a terrible resolve.”)

“They don’t teach about Pearl Harbor in the schools anymore,” Facer said. “When my granddaughter was in fourth or fifth grade, I went to talk about it at her school. None of the kids really knew anything about it. I was supposed to talk for about 20 minutes, but I ended up talking for 2 hours. The kids were really interested.”

Still, he said, the name Pearl Harbor can still transcend generations.

“We get a warm welcome wherever we go, really,” he said. “Every year we march in the Huntington Beach Fourth of July parade in our uniforms (Hawaiian shirts, white slacks and white shoes, and a blue-and-white campaign hat) and we get a standing ovation all along the way.”

The association sponsors state conventions each year and national conventions every 2 years. And every 5 years, many of the members return to Pearl Harbor for memorial services, a kind of modern St. Crispin’s Day where old fighters gather to remember the event that shaped the lives of Americans forever. The next such trip will be made in 1991, 50 years after the attack.

This Dec. 7, the Orange County chapter will hold a memorial service at the Naval Weapons Station at Seal Beach beginning at 9:30 a.m.

“Do I think about it often? Oh, yeah,” Janovich said. He laughed. “It was my birthday that day, that’s why I remember it. I never did get to go ashore and celebrate.”

But, he said, today there are compensations.

“These people here,” he said, gesturing around the room at the Orange County chapter’s recent Christmas party, “all these people went through the same thing. And now we’re close buddies because of that.”