2 Arizona survivors tell harrowing tale of rescue from flaming battleship

It was 8:06 a.m. when death raced through the USS Arizona.

Don Stratton, then a seaman 1st class on the battleship, describes it in his new book, “All the Gallant Men,” as a “great sucking sound, like a whoosh” that rocked the ship with concussive force.

In the Pearl Harbor attack, a 1,760-pound Japanese high-altitude armor-piercing bomb had penetrated the Arizona’s decks 40 feet from the bow, igniting a million pounds of gunpowder for the ship’s massive 14-inch guns.

The explosion blew apart the forward decks, collapsing turret No. 1 some 28 feet and sending a fireball 500 feet into the air. Stratton, 19, and several other men were in a metal box 70 feet off the water — the port side anti-aircraft “director” — where they were in danger of being cooked to death.

“The flames swallowed the foremast where we were,” Stratton, now 94, says in the book. “As they shot through the two openings of the enclosure, we shielded ourselves by taking shelter under some of the equipment, our hands covering our mouths and eyes. But the flames found us, catching us all on fire, burning off our clothes, our hair, our skin.”

Six men, Stratton included, were saved by climbing hand-over-hand on a rope thrown at the last second by a sailor on the adjacent repair ship USS Vestal in one of the most dramatic rescues of the day.

Just two of those six men are still alive — Stratton and Lauren Bruner, 96. Both offer painful details of the day in writing — Stratton in “All the Gallant Men” and Bruner in his new book, “Second to the Last to Leave,” so-called because only one man, Alvin Dvorak, shimmied across that rope after Bruner.

Bruner and Stratton are in Hawaii for the 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, along with two other Arizona survivors — Lou Conter, 95, and Ken Potts, 95. Just one other crew member also survives, Lonnie Cook, 96.

Bruner, who lives in California, relates in his book, written with Edward J. McGrath and Craig O. Thompson, some of the moments from the day that have been hard for him to cope with for 75 years.

The visions of dead bodies caused post-traumatic stress disorder and decades of nightmares. “Despite all this, Lauren Bruner, by sheer determination, survived,” the preface says.

Bruner also describes the anticipation of arriving in Hawaii in 1940 to “chase some girls in grass skirts,” holystoning the deck and drills on the Arizona, nickel beer on base, and shore patrol duty on Hotel Street. His pay was $21 a month.

But in those horrific moments in the port side anti-aircraft director the two sailors’ lives converged in history; fate spared them — while taking 1,177 from the Arizona.

Bruner was waiting to get off the ship on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, for a beach date with a Japanese bartender named Nikki when he heard a “whump!” that shook the teak-clad steel deck, followed by the staccato of machine guns.

“With each explosion, Arizona shook like a dog shedding water,” Bruner’s book states.

On the way up to the anti-aircraft director, Bruner, then 21, took a machine gun bullet to the leg, but he’d soon have much bigger problems.

Several bombs struck the Arizona, some exploding and some not, before the gunpowder stores blew. “Men stumbled around on the deck like human torches, each collapsing into a flaming pile of flesh. Others jumped into the water,” Stratton says in his book, written with Ken Gire.

The metal floor in the anti-aircraft director had heated up to the point that the men were hopping from foot to foot. In the now claustrophobic environment of smoke and heat, two men bolted out the door — never to be seen again.

“I looked at myself, surveying the damage the blast had inflicted,” Stratton, who now lives in Colorado, writes. “My T-shirt had caught fire, burning my arms and my back. My legs were burned from my ankles to my thighs. My face was seared. The hair on my head had been singed off, and part of my ear was gone.”

Stratton received burns over 65 percent of his body; Bruner, 73 percent. Salvation for the remaining six men appeared in the form of Joe George, a sailor and boxer on the Vestal who frequented the brig for drunken brawls.

George was using a fire ax to cut the lines to the burning and sinking Arizona when the men got his attention. It took him several tries, but George finally was able to throw a “monkey’s fist” ball attached to a line to the trapped men.

George and an officer “were engaged in some kind of debate, a heated one” that conveyed to Stratton that “we didn’t have a chance.” As Harold Kuhn made the first crossing over burning fuel oil on the water below, the officer “barked an order, but George stood defiant, glaring at him,” Stratton says.

The officer had threatened to court-martial George if he didn’t cut the line to the burning ship, he says.

Within 15 feet of the Vestal, Bruner’s hands and arms tired, but he hung on and made it aboard. Despite their burns, all six managed to cross. Dvorak, the last to leave the Arizona, died on Christmas Eve that year.

Stratton and Bruner have lobbied for a Navy Cross or other medal for George, who died in 1996, but to no avail.

“The biggest reason is that the Navy doesn’t want to honor someone who disobeyed his superior officer,” Stratton writes. “But had he been a more compliant person, more respectful of authority, I wouldn’t have lived to tell the story.”