Veterans Recall Attack on a ‘Day of Infamy’ : Pearl Harbor: Orange County survivors relive Dec. 7, 1941, as observances to mark 50th anniversary begin.

“We were coming back toward the barracks when we spotted the first Japanese plane,” remembers Tony Iantorno.

“I saw the face of the . . . tail gunner on a torpedo bomber, coming in about a hundred feet off the ground. And he looked down at us and I looked up at him and we were eyeball to eyeball. I can still today see that rear gunner’s eyes. . . .

“He swung his machine gun around and fired down at us. . . . I raced into the barracks and picked up the rifle I had and some ammo.”

The date was Dec. 7, 1941. The place was Pearl Harbor. Tony Iantorno was 21.

A half-century later, Iantorno is president of the Orange County chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn. and finds that this year the memories are especially strong and the listeners especially attentive. Fiftieth anniversaries are like that.

Today, Veterans Day, starts what Iantorno calls “one heck of a busy month” marking the attack half a century ago. In Sacramento he joined other California National Guard members called to active duty in 1940 and 1941, as America mobilized for war, for a three-day convention that ends today.

The next ceremony is Nov. 27, at the Los Alamitos Armed Forces Reserve Center, where Iantorno expects 500 to 600 veterans of the attack on Pearl Harbor or their next of kin to turn out and receive commemorative medals authorized by Congress.

And in December, about 150 of the chapter’s 250 members will head for Pearl Harbor itself, many bringing spouses and children; Iantorno’s own entourage comes to 19 people.

“This will be the last time for most” survivors to make the pilgrimage back to the place where they witnessed history, Iantorno said. “I don’t know if I’d make the 55th” anniversary. The youngest of the attack survivors are around 70, he said; some are in their 80s.

The featured speaker at the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7 will be President Bush, a naval aviator shot down by the Japanese and rescued by an American submarine during World War II.

The onetime sailors, soldiers, Marines and airmen will remember the “Day of Infamy” that propelled the United States into World War II and changed the country forever. A relatively isolated nation until then, America emerged from the fighting as a superpower, viewing itself as a global keeper of the peace--and wager of war when necessary.

Japan the enemy gave way to Japan the manufacturer of cheap goods and then to Japan the rival of America. The cars that were laughingstocks became bestsellers.

Orange County changed too. An agricultural enclave of 130,000 people in 1941, it grew to today’s 2.4 million, with factories and homes replacing the orange groves and bean fields. More than 400 Orange County residents were killed in World War II, according to county historian Jim Sleeper. Two of them died at Pearl Harbor: George Tyler of Huntington Beach, who was aboard the battleship West Virginia, and Robert Morgan, stationed on the mine laying ship Oglala. Both were 18.

The memories of that historical day 50 years ago will be especially strong for those who witnessed the attack, people like Iantorno; Jim Vlach of Anaheim, who was stationed aboard the USS Arizona but off the ship at the time of the attack; and Lenore Rickert of Laguna Hills, a Navy nurse who will speak at the Dec. 7 ceremonies.

Iantorno now is a thickset man with a strong voice and wavy hair more gray than black. At Pearl Harbor he was an Army sergeant in the 251st coast artillery. It was a National Guard outfit with some units based in San Diego and others in Long Beach, where Iantorno still lives. In September of 1940, the Army called the 251st to active duty and shipped it to Hawaii.

Vlach was one of 11 yeomen on the battleship Arizona whose battle station was the conning tower. Vlach’s wife, Jeanne, was in Hawaii then, so the sailor spent Saturday night Dec. 6 in their Honolulu apartment and was there when the Japanese attacked. The other 10 yeomen in his group died aboard the Arizona, as did 1,167 other men.

By the time Vlach got from his apartment to a point on the naval base where he could see his ship, “she was a blazing inferno.” Motor launches were plucking sailors out of the oil- and fire-covered waters and bringing them to shore. Vlach and others helped lift the injured onto the docks. “One person recognized me and he asked me to help him out. . . . I grabbed him by his arm and his skin came off in my hands.”

Lenore Rickert saw the dead.

She was a nurse in the naval hospital, opposite Ford Island, where the Japanese attacked “battleship row.” Sailors carried injured shipmates into the hospital. Others swam up to the hospital dock. The old nurses’ quarters at one end of the hospital became the morgue, with hundreds of bodies covered by blankets.

“Anybody that had any nurse’s training at all, like some of the officers’ wives, came in and helped out,” Rickert said. “Especially on the burn ward, because they were helpless. They wanted to be fed and needed water so badly. Whenever anyone says ‘water’ now, I remember. When you hear 100 people say, ‘Water, water.’ . . .” Buddies of the burned spurned treatment themselves, grabbed water-filled buckets with rubber tubes and provided drinks to the wounded. “It was a terrible time, but it was a wonderful time because for a while there people didn’t think of themselves, they thought of other people. I’ve never run into it since.”

Rickert, a 77-year-old widow, lives in Leisure World in Laguna Hills. Before enlisting in the Navy in 1938 she trained as a nurse at the Orange County General Hospital, the facility known today as UCI Medical Center.

Iantorno said that as the attack went on, he remembered the intelligence briefings he had received: The Japanese fleet had been spotted in the South China sea a few weeks earlier, with battleships, transports, cruisers, destroyers, but no aircraft carriers.

For weeks headlines told of increasingly confrontational meetings between Japanese diplomats and American envoys. The last prewar edition of the Los Angeles Times, on the morning of Dec. 7, bore a main story on negotiations with the headline: “Roosevelt Sends Note to Mikado,” the term for the Japanese emperor. “Final Peace Move Seen,” the paper said.

Thus Iantorno “wasn’t that surprised” by the Japanese attack, though he thought the target would be the Philippines, not Pearl Harbor.

The normal station for the $54-a-month sergeant and his men was guarding the battleships from aerial attack. But when the attack came, his unit was in training at Camp Malekole, miles outside Pearl Harbor.

By the time members of the 251st got to their positions, the attack was over, but the jitters went on. Sunday night was “chaos,” Iantorno remembers, filled with rumors that the Japanese were landing on the north coast of Oahu and paratroopers were landing at Barbers Point. “That night was terrible; I think the Army was shooting at the Navy and the Navy was shooting at the Army and the Marines were shooting at everybody.”

That night, when American planes flew over Pearl Harbor and were mistakenly shot down by American firepower, “it was just like sitting there and reading a newspaper during the night, there was so much light” from the gunfire.

By the time Vlach finished helping pull sailors from boats and head them toward the base hospital, his white uniform was so soaked with blood and oil the master at arms turned him back from the chow line until he got a clean uniform.

“I went to the issue room and they gave me some dungarees. They were too big. They couldn’t find a belt so they gave me a piece of rope to tie around them to hold them up.”

Heading back to an administrative headquarters, Vlach helped sort out who was alive and who was dead. In the chaos, a number of relatives were told that their kin had died, only to get a telephone call later from the “dead man.” That night an exhausted Vlach crawled under a pool table and slept on the cement floor.

At home, Jeanne Vlach and the wives of Vlach’s Arizona shipmates “stuck together like glue” in the succeeding days. “When we heard a plane, we’d all get together in one apartment,” she said. They shared apartments at night because: “We just didn’t want to be alone. We didn’t know what was happening to our husbands. We didn’t know for three days.

“We pooled our money, all five of us, and went to the commissary and got what we could. We took the bus home.”

Finally, Vlach managed to send word via a yeoman that he and all the others who lived in the apartment building were well.

At the naval hospital, Rickert said, sailors admitted before the attack with minor illnesses got out of their beds and started heading back to their ships. The 29 nurses and 40 doctors started getting empty beds ready for the casualties they knew would come.

“I was proud of the efficiency of that particular hospital,” Rickert said. “We worked very hard.”

The wards filled up quickly, with doctors and nurses deciding who needed immediate care and who could be shunted aside for attention later. The 700 or so beds in the main hospital building and two temporary wooden structures filled up quickly. Nurses grabbed an hour or two of sleep on mattresses on the floors.

Many of the dead from the attack had no identification, no clothes. “Many of the men who were killed were burned, covered with oil and had no dog tags. After that we all wore dog tags, expecting we would have to have them some day so we could be identified.” Sailors also made doubly sure not to wear clothes with someone else’s name stenciled on them, lest they die and the wrong person be counted dead.

With no cold storage available, the Navy buried the bodies as soon as it could, taking fingerprints of the corpses to identify them later. “Identification of bodies was a really trying thing,” Rickert said. “They had a whole crew that did nothing but try to identify the dead.”

Iantorno, Vlach and Rickert stayed on at Pearl Harbor for months.

Iantorno and the men of the 251st shipped out to the South Pacific, starting in Fiji and working their way through Guadalcanal and Bougainville as American troops battled the Japanese from island to island. After the war, he returned to Long Beach and worked as an electrical superintendent before retiring in 1979.

Vlach worked on the “Arizona detail” until April of 1942, helping identify the dead, reconstruct the records of the living, overseeing transfers, pay records and the welter of administrative needs.

In 1943 he was commissioned an ensign and served in Pacific posts throughout the war. Afterward he stayed in and retired in 1960 as a lieutenant commander, going to work later for North American Aviation and, later, Rockwell International Corp.

Rickert spent another year at Pearl Harbor, helping to train men as hospital corpsmen. Then she was transferred to Long Beach, and next to the South Pacific island of New Caledonia for two years. There was another Long Beach assignment before she reported to Bremerton, Wash., arriving the day the Japanese surrendered, Aug. 15, 1945.

A Marine she met at Pearl Harbor before the bombing, who had been captured at Wake Island and imprisoned by the Japanese in Tokyo, found her at Bremerton and they were married.

Afterward, she left the Navy and raised two children, because “at that time women stayed home and took care of the children.”

Thinking back on the response of the doctors, nurses and sailors to the attack at 7:55 a.m. on a sunny Sunday, Rickert remembers it as a “highlight of my life and my career.”

--- UNPUBLISHED NOTE ---

On November 11, 1991, The Times Orange County edition reported on page A12 that two Orange County residents, George Tyler of Huntington Beach, and Robert Morgan, died at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Tyler was said to have been aboard the battleship West Virginia and Morgan aboard the mine- laying ship Oglala. Questions have been raised about whether the two men, in fact, were killed in the attack.

--- END NOTE ---