Ed Johann will always remember the sound of planes diving out of the sky to bomb US battleships, the explosions and the screams of sailors. He still recalls the stench of burning oil and flesh.
The 86-year-old retired firefighter was due to return yesterday to Pearl Harbor for the first time since World War II to attend a ceremony marking the 68th anniversary of the Japanese attack.
“I really don’t know how I’m going to handle it,” Johann said, from his home in Oregon. “When I think about it, all I have is unpleasantness. I’m sure it’s not like that now.”
Johann was a teenage apprentice seaman on Dec. 7, 1941. He had enlisted in the Navy only five months earlier so his parents, who picked and packed tomatoes and other crops in California’s San Fernando Valley, wouldn’t have to support him.
He and two other sailors were waiting to ferry passengers on a small boat to and from the USS Solace, a hospital ship that was moored in Pearl Harbor, when they saw the Japanese planes.
They first thought they were US aircraft conducting drills until they saw explosions and flames from the stricken ships.
Johann’s motor launcher boat rushed to the USS Arizona, which was hit by several bombs, one of which struck her forward ammunition magazines and set off a massive explosion. Already fueled and manned when the attack began, their 9m boat was the first rescue vessel to arrive at the scene.
They found the water littered with people — some wounded, some dead, some unharmed. Many were covered in the leaking oil from the ships.
They loaded as many as they could and delivered them to the hospital ship before returning to the USS West Virginia for more.
“As we’re pulling them out of the water, a lot of times the skin would come right off the arm,” Johann said. “They would just be black with oil, except maybe you could see the white of their eyes.”
The planes kept coming. Dive-bombers plunged out of the sky, dropping bombs and strafing the water and ships with machine gun fire before roaring back up for another round. Torpedo bombers flew in level to drop their submersible weapons for underwater assaults.
The burning, sinking vessels at first lowered men into Johann’s makeshift rescue boat. But some sailors started to panic and jump into their small ship, forcing it to pull away so it wouldn’t sink too.
“Some of the sailors would be like in shock and some of ’em would be like going out of control, screaming and hollering,” Johann said.
The next morning Johann’s boat unloaded men from the Solace who failed to make it through the night and delivered them to land.
“We had them stacked like cordwood in our boat. The open end where the feet was sticking out was these big brown tags that said ‘unknown, unknown,”’ Johann said.
The military hadn’t adopted dog tags yet and many couldn’t be identified.
The attack sank four US battleships and destroyed 188 US planes. More than 2,200 sailors, Marines and soldiers were killed.
Johann served the rest of the war on the USS Wright, a seaplane tender. After 1945, he returned to California where he worked in sawmills before moving to Portland where he spent 28 years as a firefighter. He retired to a beach cottage in Lincoln City.
Every July 4, he goes to bed early to avoid the fireworks because they remind him of Pearl Harbor’s explosions. Even so, the blasts keep him awake.
But the horrors he went through also led him to become a firefighter.
“I think I had it in my mind,” Johann said, “I wanted to help people.”
For years, Johann said he wouldn’t go to the annual observance in Hawaii in honor of those killed in the attack. But now that he’s 86, it seemed liked a good idea.
“If I’m ever going to do anything like that I’d better do it now,” Johann said.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
RSS