Posted on 12/06/2001 7:36:09 AM PST by Come And Take It
HONOLULU (AP) -- Just eight minutes passed from when the duty officer woke Clark J. Simmons from his bunk on the USS Utah until the ship sank from Japanese torpedoes on Dec. 7, 1941. In that time, the 20-year-old mess attendant scrambled to the deck, jumped into Pearl Harbor and swam to safety on Ford Island.
Nearly 60 years later, Simmons watched from the living room window of his Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment as a hijacked jet flew into the second tower of the World Trade Center.
"It was 100 times worse," Simmons said of the Sept. 11 attack, which left a friend's son - a firefighter - missing.
"It had civilians - it wasn't aimed at a military facility. It was aimed at a building that has 50,000 people who worked at it during the day, plus the people who came to help."
As they prepare to mark the 60th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor bombings, the men who survived have special perspective on the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. And for many, what happened on Sept. 11 resurrected memories of that December day in 1941.
"Nine-eleven just kind of stirred up my emotions all over again," said Ed Chappell, 77, of Lake Havisu City, Ariz., who was aboard the USS Maryland. "The same feeling as Pearl Harbor, all kind of emotions - hatred, fear, anger. It rekindled the whole damn thing."
Bill Hughes, a survivor from the Utah, found his reactions on Sept. 11 were even stronger than in 1941. One difference: The Pearl Harbor bombing "was a military attack on military targets."
As for the Sept. 11 attack, "I don't have the descriptive adjectives to use - and you couldn't print them if I did - to describe how I feel," said Hughes, 79, of Grand Prairie, Texas, the webmaster for the USS Utah Association's Internet site.
The attacks at Pearl Harbor killed 2,390. More than 4,000 are presumed dead in the attacks on New York and Washington.
The Pearl Harbor 60th anniversary is being marked by several ceremonies. Some 800 survivors are expected at a reunion, and many will gather at the USS Arizona Memorial at 7:55 a.m. - the time of the attack - on Dec. 7 for the Navy's annual service. Later that morning, the survivors will conduct their own service at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl, and will gather for a banquet that evening.
Survivors from individual ships are holding ceremonies throughout the week leading up to Dec. 7, including some 20 of the 55 remaining survivors of the Arizona.
Many survivors also were here in May for the premiere of Disney's "Pearl Harbor" movie. Even then, said John H. Earle, 86, of Honolulu, he felt embarrassed walking up the red carpet aboard the USS John C. Stennis aircraft carrier where Disney screened the movie, as young servicemen called him and other Pearl Harbor survivors heroes. Now, he says: Save that for the police and firefighters in New York.
Still, after 60 years and a lifetime of other experiences, the images, sounds and smells of Dec. 7 remain vivid for many Pearl Harbor survivors.
"The waters all around the ships were on fire and people were falling off the boats and being cremated in the water," said Irvin Obermeyer, 82, of Littleton, Colo. "The smell was this black oil stench - it was everywhere."
Another Colorado survivor, Wayne Martin of Federal Heights, recalls being without ammunition and unable to get back into his barracks for four days.
"We all smelled and looked pretty mangy by then, and the minute we got a hot shower we heard we were being shipped out to war," he said.
After Pearl Harbor, many survivors went straight to war, not stopping to phone or write the family back home.
Kyle Christensen, at 19 the youngest sailor aboard the Arizona, was standing on the deck waiting for his brother, Edward, when Japanese planes filled the sky. Edward was the reason Christensen had joined the Navy, and he had been on the same ship as his older brother for about two weeks.
He managed to escape, and without knowing what happened to his brother, he went back to sea. It wasn't until February, when the mail ship was approaching, that an officer told him to write his parents back in Kansas to tell them he was alive.
They had received word late in December that his brother was one of the 1,177 men killed aboard the Arizona.
On Sept. 11, "you had the same old feeling: 'Here they come again,'" said Christensen, 79, who is undergoing chemotherapy treatments and won't make it to Hawaii this year. His last visit was in 1995, when President Clinton addressed V-J Day ceremonies at the Arizona Memorial.
"They let me get on the memorial when no one was there and stay as along as I wanted," Christensen said. "It seemed like a big old load just left me."
Some survivors retain a lingering animosity toward their former enemy, and still say it isn't appropriate for Japanese to come to Hawaii for the anniversary.
But 82-year-old Clinton Westbrook - a USS Arizona survivor who in 1945 was aboard the ship that escorted the USS Missouri into Tokyo Bay and its place in history as the stage for Japan's surrender - has made his peace.
In 1997, he, Joe Campbell and two other World War II veterans went to Japan on a friendship tour and talked, through an interpreter, to one of the 30 pilots who had sunk the USS Arizona.
"It was very illuminating, the last thing he said before we left," said Westbrook, of Sanford, Fla. "He pointed at me and said: 'You have come. I have talked to you. Now I can go up.' And he pointed to the heavens."
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On the Net:
Pearl Harbor Survivors Association:http://members.aol.com/phsasecy97/
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