War and Remembering

On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, soldier Francis Ford was in the Army barracks about 10 miles from Pearl Harbor when he first heard bombs exploding in the distance.

“I was standing there in my skivvies with no idea what was going on,” said Ford, now 77. “A guy came up to me and said there was an airplane coming our way. We ran over to look and there was a fighter coming over. I could actually see the machine gunner, firing the whole way.”

Ford, who was uninjured in the attack, had one other detail of that airplane firmly etched in his memory.

“When it flew by, I could see that ‘meatball’--the rising sun on the side of the plane. That’s when I knew we were going to go to war with Japan.”

Ford, a nephew of famed film director John Ford, was one of about 50 veterans and their spouses who gathered Monday at Van Nuys-Sherman Oaks Park to mark Pearl Harbor Day, the anniversary of the attack that marked the United States’ entry into World War II.

Several who attended the brief ceremony sponsored by the Van Nuys post of the American Legion had served in World War II, but Ford was the only one there who had witnessed the attack.

A number of others were reportedly attending a convention of the Pearl Harbor Assn. in Las Vegas. And many veterans of the attack 57 years ago have since died.

“My wife watches the obituaries every day to see who has gone,” said Bill Shannon, 74, an American Legion member who served on a minesweeper in the Pacific during the war.

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One of the deceased was Walter J. Peterson, who was on a Navy supply dock in Pearl Harbor when the attack began. But he was not forgotten Monday. His widow, Shirley Peterson of Valley Village, sat in a folding chair and quietly watched the ceremony. In her hand she held her husband’s commemorative “Pearl Harbor Survivor” cap, stored in a clear plastic case.

“He was very active in the survivors’ association,” she said of her husband, who died last year at the age of 81.

“I just wanted to be here,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “I wanted him represented.”