At the age of 102, Harry Chandler returned to Pearl Harbor for the first time since he survived the infamous surprise attack on the base on Dec. 7, 1941.
He’d been a Navy corpsman assigned to Mobile Hospital No. 2 in Aiea Heights when the Imperial Japanese Navy’s attack began. He recalled that “the attack started, first thing you know they took us corpsmen and put us in a truck and trucked us down to the harbor while everything was going on.”
As bombs and bullets from Japanese planes rained from the sky, Chandler and fellow corpsmen worked to treat the wounded.
“We worked to save a lot of people, a lot of our sailors,” he said. “It was tough — the Arizona was blowing up, the Oklahoma was capsizing, the Nevada grounding itself, the Utah on the other side getting sunk — what can I say?”
Chandler visited Hawaii once in the 1990s for a vacation but ultimately found it too emotionally difficult to actually make his way to the harbor itself. This year he was determined to attend the 82nd anniversary of the attack and flew in from his home in Florida.
But even as he’d finally returned to where it all happened, it brought mixed emotions.
“It feels good and then it feels sad,” said Chandler. “When I looked out at the harbor, it kind of hurt.”
He was one of a handful of World War II veterans and Pearl Harbor survivors in attendance Thursday at this year’s anniversary commemoration at Pearl Harbor National Memorial. The annual ceremony in previous years had rows of survivors in the audience, but the numbers have dwindled to just a few in the front row.
During remarks at the ceremony, Thomas Leatherman, superintendent of the Pearl Harbor National Memorial, told attendees that “as each year passes we say goodbye to more and more of our friends who served here on Dec. 7, 1941.”
The death of USS Arizona survivor Ken Potts in April left Lou Conter of Grass Valley, Calif., as the only known living survivor of the Arizona. Of the 2,390 Americans killed in the attack, 1,177 were members of the Arizona’s crew. Conter had planned to attend but was unable to make the long journey across the Pacific this year.
But his grandnephew, currently serving Marine Capt. Ray Hower, was present to deliver the keynote speech for the ceremony.
“Our nation came together as never before or since, and the greatest generation was born. Our country was united in purpose and with the help of our allies was ultimately victorious,” said Hower. “But they weren’t done; after years of war our nations and the world needed healing. Those that fought for freedom returned home and threw themselves into that task with the same determination.”
For many of the survivors, healing from the trauma of the attack and the war that followed has been a lifelong process.
Ira “Ike” Schab, 103, was a sailor aboard the USS Dobbin docked at Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. He wasn’t trained to operate the ship’s weapons — he was a Navy musician who played the tuba. But he began ferrying ammo for machine gunners as Japanese forces dropped bombs around them. He also pulled survivors out of the water.
The Dobbin wasn’t hit during the attack, but from it Schab witnessed the moment the USS Arizona exploded into flames.
“You never forget these things because they’re historic and because they shouldn’t have happened,” said Schab.
Schab flew from Portland, Ore., with his son Karl. This trip to Pearl Harbor is the first time all of Ike Schab’s living children traveled to Hawaii with him. Karl Schab said this trip was particularly memorable for him.
“This is the first time I went on the veterans’ harbor tour and got to see all of the sights and really understand what the guys were going through,” he said. “There’s a historian on that tour that painted a really good picture of what these guys were subjected to — really, the brutality of it.”
Karl Schab said the trip was also special because his own daughter came along.
“Dad and I talk a lot about this, about how right now it’s firsthand,” Schab said. “He shared with me, and pretty soon I’m going to be the one that’s going to have to help people not forget. And I’m sharing it with my daughter because someday soon she’ll be the one that will have to say, ‘I had a grandfather who was in Pearl Harbor, and we should never forget.’”
The surprise attack wasn’t confined to Pearl Harbor; Japanese forces attacked military installations across Oahu. Herb Elfring, 101, was a California National Guardsman stationed at Camp Malakole in the Barbers Point area when the attack began. His unit had been activated and sent to Oahu amid rising tensions in the Pacific between the U.S. and Japan at the time.
He had the day off and was walking when he heard booming sounds in the direction of Pearl Harbor. He thought little of it, assuming it was a training exercise — until a Japanese Zero fighter flew overhead and strafed him and his comrades with bullets, coming within just feet of him. He survived and went on to fight in Fiji, Bougainville and the Philippines.
“People shouldn’t forget it,” Elfring said, adding that people need to also “appreciate how strong the United States became to fight the war. … Our ability to produce material and ships and raw material was invaluable of course, because we supplied our allies a lot that were in the war, too.”
After the attack Chandler was assigned to 3rd Marine Division, taking him on island-hopping campaigns that defined the war in the Pacific. He treated injured Marines in the thick of battle in tropical combat zones. After the war he went into the Reserves, serving until 1979 and leaving the military at the rank of senior chief.
Chandler said that after all he’s seen and done, the biggest lesson he wants to pass on to future generations is that “you gotta love people. That’s the whole thing in a nutshell. I always say, ‘Love, don’t hate,’ (because hate) is what causes all the trouble.”
