Seventy-three years after Japanese warplanes attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, a 94-year-old Mobile resident is still telling the story of how he survived it.
The veteran, a longtime Mobile-area man who grew up in Pass Christian, Mississippi, before moving to Mobile as a child, joined the U.S. Navy as a young man and arrived at Ford Island in Hawaii in October 1941, just weeks before the attack. He was assigned to kitchen duty in the base’s mess hall.
On the morning of December 7, 1941, he had planned to attend church services but never made it there. Japanese fighter planes descended on the naval base, and from his position near the barracks he recognized the insignia beneath the wings of the incoming aircraft. Bombs fell across the base, striking ships and buildings, while his own unit’s photographic reconnaissance planes were spared and able to get airborne to document the attack.
In the chaos that followed, he worked to help wounded sailors reach medical care, moving through debris and carrying the injured on stretchers alongside a fellow serviceman. As he carried a stretcher out of a dispensary, he heard a bomb whistling toward the building. He shouted for his partner to jump clear seconds before the bomb struck — but it failed to detonate. Family members later credited that stroke of luck with saving both of their lives.
Knocked unconscious by the blast, he came to amid wreckage and made his way to the base’s mess hall, which had been converted into a makeshift morgue. The sight of the dead overwhelmed him, and he blacked out again, waking later in his own bunk.
Family members who have heard the story recount that he and another sailor, both ill at the time, had been transported to Ford Island earlier than planned aboard the aircraft carrier Lexington. Because the two men needed to reach the island in October rather than December, the Lexington missed what would have been a scheduled stop at Pearl Harbor on the morning of the attack, sparing the carrier from the bombing that sank or damaged much of the Pacific fleet.
The attack killed more than 2,000 Americans and thrust the United States into World War II. The Mobile veteran remained stationed in Hawaii for roughly three more years before serving in various posts around the world during a Navy career that spanned about two decades.
Now in his 90s, he lives in Mobile, where he recently celebrated another birthday. He spends his time on gardening and housework, and family say he remains proud of his service. Decades after the attack that nearly killed him, he still describes his gratitude simply: that America remains, in his words, the greatest country in the world, and that he is glad to have been part of defending it.
Stories like his are becoming rarer each year as the generation that lived through Pearl Harbor and World War II grows smaller. Local historians and veterans’ organizations in the Mobile area continue to document these firsthand accounts before they are lost to time.