on how prosecutors, lawyers and judges lack understanding of technology and his work to help resolve that problem. he is interviewed by dustin volt, reporter at reuters. >> scientists love the law, love policy. they are probably -- they think they are probably better at it than they are. it's something to appeal to people. help the government out. >> what's the communicators on c-span 2. on december 7, 1941, japanese planes attacked the u.s. fleet at pearl harbor, hawaii. 2400 americans were killed and almost 1200 wounded. the next day, president franklin roosevelt appeared before a joint session of congress request a declaration of war against japan. this year marks the 75th anniversary of the pearl harbor attack in the u.s. entry into

world war ii. up next, we will hear from survivors stationed at honolulu in 1941. the national park service conducted an oral history. this is about an hour. >> we're in a hurricane for 9 days coming over from san diego. you have a rather green crew, when we got into honolulu and some of us got liberty. we took a taxi into the army slash navy y. i walked across the street, i ordered a soda and the lady said, you're from the u.s.s. ward. and i said how do you know? she said you're all that delicate shade of green. the u.s.s. ward was the guardianship, part of division 80 which consisted of four old destroyers, the ward, the sly, the alan and the chew.

we rotated duty guarding the entrance channel to pearl harbor. the regulations were that on all the charts of the world was an indication that no submarine must approach pearl harbor within 100 miles without coming to the surface and requesting a destroyer escort on the surface to approach any closer to honolulu or pearl harbor. we had oftentimes been called to general quarters when the sonar man believed he heard screws. the captain backed up the sonar man all the time. the sonar man heard screws, we went to general quarters. it was our responsibility and we knew it to sink any sub that was attempting to reach pearl harbor submerged. the supply ship was coming into pearl harbor at 0645 or a little before that.

towing a barge, and this little two-man sub was trying to sneak into the harbor. it looked like a 50-gallon oil drum on top of maybe three or four of them that were laid down below it with a broomstick sticking up. of course, that broomstick was the periscope. i'm sure the men on the bridge could tell that there was something like your prism so that at the top of this broomstick they could see the periscope but it was too far , away for us to know it was anything like that. we thought it my have been a toy or who knows. we had never heard or seen anything like a two-man sub before. the folks saw the ship was rowing and pitching, and the shells that the crewmen were ready to load into the gun weighed over 75 pounds. here you are staggering all around that rolling, pitching

deck with live ammunition with grazed fuses on the nose. kind of afraid of that kind of ammunition. we fired. you could watch down the end of the barrel and see the projectile just missed the end of the sub. i thought if it had another coat of paint on the sub, it might have activated the gray's fuse. that's how close we came. gun number 3 hit at the base of the tower, and i'm sure it killed the japanese commander. the captain said stand by to ram. he made up his mind he was going to get that submarine one way or another. it was not going to get through. i found out later that it not only had two torpedos but a 500-pound debt nation charge on nation nation -- that

nation charge on the surge and it was supposed to blow itself up along with the other ship. we were surprised to find a submarine that close on the surface. so we knew that it wasn't supposed to be there. i think my impression was that perhaps this submarine might have been one single reconnaissance effort. i had no concept at all that it was going to be followed up with a major combat till i saw the planes coming, which was an hour and 20 minutes later. >> i was a crew member of the utility squadron 2 on the luke field side of ford island. that particular sunday i had the duty and i was at the hangar at the time the attack began. i was waiting to muster the on going duty section. we thought a plane had crashed.

we ran out of our hangar looking across the runway. we see the smoke coming up from the hangar. we still didn't know what was happening. about that time here comings a plane diving down from the sun. we could see the symbol of the rising sun under his wings. then we knew we were being attacked by the japanese. i started looking for a place to hide. we didn't have any bomb shelters. i was looking for a place to hide. here comes a japanese plane flying from south to north up on the west side of ford island. and they were flying so low i could see the goggles on the rear gunner's helmet as he swings his machine gun around. he begins district with machine gun fire. i look out there and hear all this splattering concrete where the bullets were hitting, just splattering dust, concrete dust. i jumped behind this tractor

that was parked there. it gave me the protection i needed. i noticed a couple of my ship mates picked up the 45 caliber pistol that it can used on watch the night before. the guys had just taken their pistols off and laid them on the table to exchange with the on going duty section. a couple of them grabbed the pistols and went out and started shooting at the japanese planes with these pistols. i discovered that there is a motion that's more strong than fear, and that's shame. i began to feel so ashamed of myself. here i'm trained to be a gunner and i'm hiding. the lord gave me enough guts to leave my hiding place and go into the armory where the machine guns were stored and some others had gathered. we took those machine guns and put them in the mounts parked on the ground. the last gun i put in was in one parked on the warmup mat.

i got behind it and manned it for the rest of the attack. i think everybody has a little coward in them. but once you can get over that, and by the way, this is where i praised the training of the united states navy. they train and train and train, and you do it over and over and over. when the time came, we just did what we were trained to do. we didn't have to think. you just did what you was trained to do. i was angry. my feelings went from fear to shame to anger. if i could have, i would have shot every one of them down. that was the way i wanted it. that's the way i felt. still mixed in there, fear was in the background but it was still there. planes were everywhere now, like bees around a hive. i don't know how they kept from running into each other. i'm sure it was all planned down. they reversed it and reversed

-- rehearsed it and reversed it. by this time you could close your eyes and shoot in the air and you're bound to hit something. they were everywhere. this particular plane i'm thinking about had dropped a bomb or torpedo on probably the california, because he was sort of pulling out of his dive and he was coming right across the runway heading over our hangar. all of our gunners, including yours truly was shooting at him. we can see the tracer bullets penetrating the fuselage. he burst into flames. smoke trailing out of his tail. it looked like he was going to crash right out there in the channel. but he got in the middle of the channel and he does a little arcing dive and purposely crashes on the deck of the u.s.s. curtis. that became known as the first kamikaze of world war ii. it was uncanny what they were

able to pull off. just like yamamoto said they , woke a sleeping giant. >> we were going on a picnic at the naval ammunition dump that the marines were doing guard duty at. and previous week the ports at the starboard side had the picnic there. this week we were going. we were looking forward to it because i had been there a couple months earlier. we had a nice time. i was looking forward to drinking beer, pitching horseshoes. there were planes flying down like if they were -- not like if they were. we assumed they were doing target practice because out of sea we would pull the target behind us, maybe 100 yards or so and the planes would practice dive bombing. we watched them and we says, hey, what kind of emblems are those? we couldn't understand why are they doing this on a sunday. that's the first time.

and then in port, we didn't realize when we discussed this among ourselves, within the few seconds we had. and then across the bay we seen a ship afterire, smoking. the officer of the day had the bugler sound fooir and rescue. we were going to drop what we had and go and get ready. and then there was a call, delay that call. and then a few seconds after that we heard the familiar da, da, da, da, da, da. that was general quarters. it didn't dawn on us until somebody said, hey, those are japanese planes. we said general quarters. the only thing we can think of then were the japanese because there was so much talk about what was going on between japanese and our country. many things flashed through my mind. one of them was, hey, what's my mother going to say if i'm killed? that was my biggest concern.

there was oil on the ship. i can see -- hey i never could , climb that thing in school that you would climb up in a gym. but that day this was oily, so i climbed that up even with the oil. you know how hard you've got to grip. that's like trying to hold on to a greased pig. you can see what you can do when there's anxiety, or fright, anger, danger, whatever you want to call it. let's say time heals everything. that's why i look at it. how long can you hold your anger? are you going to die with it? i don't want to die with it. let's say we did the opposite. did they forgive us about hiroshima? if they forgive us about hiroshima, we should forgive. not that i think it saved lives on both sides. >> i took my bugle and ran up to the bridge. that's where my battle station was.

it couldn't have been a couple minutes before 8:00. i didn't really sound color so i'm not sure. then the captain came up, and this was a little bit -- couple minutes after 8:00. he come up here and said, my god, we're at war. the next thing i remember, there was a tremendous explosion on the tennessee. your number two gunter at. that gun to rent. et.number two gun turr and there was shrapnel all over the place. i looked around and the captain was laying on the deck. he had most of his, he was almost tore in half. we made him as comfortable as we could. and this was just a little bit, about eight or nine minutes after 8:00. we stood up and all of a sudden i saw the arizona explode. i'm telling you, i never was so scared in my whole life. you could feel the tremendous heat and the concussion blew us back into the pilot house, came back out and the captain was

laying there. i think it was a signalman went down and got a hold of our executive officer. he came up and the captain was still alive. he looked down and said, captain, what are my orders? the only thing the captain said, he says, the ship is yours. i'm not going to make it, that's all. we stayed up on the bridge through all the torpedos and straefing. the committee said what the hell are we doing up here? let's get below so we can help out. we stayed aboard and fought fires and rescued people from down below at the officer's country. i was with a group. there were 3 of us. we went down and busted the doors open. everything was sprung shut. we got two officers out. got them top side. the water was about up to our

navals so we climbed back up on the quarter deck. we did everything we could. some of the guys coming up, their clothing was burning. we threw them down on the deck and tried to pat the fire out. finally, the tennessee fired up her engines, and to push the fire from the water, push it away from the ship, that helped a lot. then the tugboat came up and started to squirt us with water, and then commander helen caught us and said to abandon ship. we passed the word to abandon ship. that was around 9:30. then we fought our way back. that was just a fire forward. it was not as much after the arizona. one guy in particular, orval, he

said, gosh, i left my money and my wallet. my wallet is in my locker. he fights his way back through all of the fire. in the case makes, we have these five-inch shells sitting along the bulkhead to lose. if they got hot, they were going to blow up. so, he finds his way back through the casemate's, gets to his locker, opens it up, gets his wallet out. this takes three or four minutes. i mean, he was going to make it. he takes off all his clothes and them up nice and neat. he did not want to get them wet. he was in his skivvies and you swim to fort allen and all of his money stayed right there. i will never forget that. it is strange. i remember the forecastle i

, remember diving into the water, i remember climbing on for allen -- on four hour. but the 50 or 60 yards is gone. i don't know. and i can't tell you. i don't know. at night, about 7:00, we heard these airplanes coming in and we thought they were japanese and they were off of the enterprise, and i wasn't the first one to open up. because they were firing before i started to shoot. but as they were coming in, boy, it looked like the fourth of july. we shot down six. we killed three of the pilots. one of the guys coming in, as he was landing, i was up on the machine gun, and i filled his airplane full of holes and i did i don't know if you ever met him or not -- jim daniels. he is a good friend of mine. [laughter] but he said if he could have caught me that night, he would have killed me.

i believe he would have, too. i think it was wednesday or thursday i finally got some sleep. you just couldn't sleep. you were on watch all the time. you are on watch, you are eating sandwiches. and you are supposed to -- the eight hours you are off, you're supposed to sleep, but you can't do it. your nerves are just right on the edge. and i think there was about -- i think wednesday or thursday i fell asleep. and of course it was a while before i could hear from all of those torpedoes. we took nine torpedoes and the arizona blowing up. arizona long up. and the tennessee was completely firing their five-and -- five-inch guns. of course, i wear hearing aids today, but it was about a week before i could really hear.

we had 106 dead, about three hundred, over 300 wounded. and of course, our captain received the congressional medal of honor. i played taps for him the next night in the warehouse where we stayed, you know, and it was the taps ever played in my whole life. edward hyland: it was admiral kimball's ship. he just did not happen to be on it these days. we would say, the japanese are attacking. we would run to our battle

station. most of us knew eventually we were going to have to fight the japanese. where that trickle down from, i have no idea. i suppose the politicians, the officers, but we expected to fight them eventually. we just didn't know when. there is no need for radio communication. it was obvious to all of the ships in the harbor we were under attack. so, they had us handing in the -- had us carrying ammunition out to the 350. handed a three inch shell, and i was getting ready to run it out to the gun again, and the next thing i knew, i was flat on my face. something went through my right thigh and out through my rear end. i had a six by eight inch long through the left thigh. i had five pieces of shrapnel in the left leg. my right hand was shot. i lost part of my left elbow. i lost part of my left bicep.

they finally put me in the bunk. i was lying there, and i saw one of the third class radio makers and i said, hey, housman. he looked at me and he said, who are you? and then i realized that either something is wrong with me or something is wrong with him. so, i said, it's hyland. and all he did was go, oh, oh, and walk away from me. i found the navy had me listed as superficial wounds. him it seems the big problem was trying to keep me alive because of the burns when the bomb went off. the blast just took all of the skin off our legs, arms, face. we had shorts and t-shirt on. that was our combat uniform. my brother was a sergeant with the marine detachment in indianapolis and they were out

on patrol. he saw me about a year later. he said when he came -- i guess it was wednesday after the attack, he came over looking for me and they had me on the missing list. at that time, we had this large navy hospital. he went over there looking for me. he said he finally found a group of us all lined up. they had tagged my toe already. that is how he identified me. he said even he did not know me. he said i looked like roast turkey. the pearl harbor story is important to me because people should be made aware of these things, that they really did happen, and hopefully they won't happen again. but of course, that's dreaming because it happens in the world every day. somewhere. >> we came in port on friday

afternoon, on december 5. for thed in mid-channel lexington, which was the world's largest aircraft carrier. monday that ship was scheduled to come back to the states and i would have gotten out. i had saved $400 and i was going to go to medical school. the day before was not eventful except i did not go anywhere. i did not go ashore. honolulu in those days was not -- waikiki was not a favorite port because there were no women. there were 2000 men, 2000 for every woman, so we like the state side. somebody said, what are all of those planes in the air? what are all of these planes doing out on a sunday morning? i could hear vaguely a droning, which was not unusual. fort allen was unable airbase. by the time i -- fort allen was a naval airbase. by the time i looked up skyward,

i was almost positive there were six of them coming in a v formation. i saw the bomb struck. i saw a huge red flame and black smoke. i thought, oh, my god. somebody really goofed because those are real bombs. i thought, my god. somebody really made a mistake. those are real bombs. just about that time, i felt the ship lurch. we were being hit by torpedoes on the opposite side, which, of course, i could not see that side. when he torpedoes hit, i actually felt the ship lurch. the ship was somewhere around 22,000 tons. we were not walking around. and when a bomb would hit, you could feel the ship.

this was kind of an outward feeling, and i'm sure there was a torpedo. there is some question about whether the bombers got there first. i am sure that lurch was a torpedo. there is a matter of seconds before the bugle sounded general quarters. you know, that is were you go to your battle station. so, my battle station was midship. as i was running down, running down the passageway, the ship lurched again. now this time, i don't know whether was a bomb or torpedo. but it knocked me through a lot of room door, you know where they kept the records. i went this way. i got up a little dazed. you don't have time to think. anyway, i dived down the ladder. our battle stations were below the deck. no sooner than we were down there and we could tell the ship

was already listing. this was a matter of 1, 2, three minutes. everybody is looking around. what in the world is going on? what is happening? we were there, i'm sure not over a minute or two and then the bugler sounded abandon ship. they were chanting, abandon ship, abandon ship. we had taken on ammunition in san francisco for the fleet. the naval ammunition depot was loaded. we were going all over the ocean with this ammunition and i thought, oh, my word, when this ship sinks it's going to blow up. i wanted to get away fast. these things occur to you in a matter of seconds. i was going to run and dive way out. and about then, the shipper really lurched. i thought for some time after it was another bomber torpedo, but

actually it was the mooring lines. it was 22,000 tons. these great, big lines holding the ship. and so, as the ship was sinking, those lines snapped and when they snapped, that threw me off balance and i landed on my fanny and scraped across those barnacles, you know, on the side in the bottom. when i got in the water, when i tried to get my bearings, i saw this boat launch and there was a coxswain, in the bow. we were pulling these guys out of the water. i started swimming for that motor launch. i could see the ping, ping, ping in the water, the bullets hitting the water. you make decisions in seconds. and i figured, that is going to be a target. and that is going to stick

little old me by myself. i changed course. i headed straight for fort allen. if anybody else tells you he was first on the beach, he is a liar because i was first on the beach. i was transferred to the hospital. we got these aviators, japanese aviators for days, weeks even, and they would be brought to the morgue. and when they were stripped, we would find these maps. they have these rate -- there's a lot of japanese riding in the margins, but the names of all of the ships -- there's a lot of japanese writing in the margins, but the names of all of the ships was in english. the lexington was where we were. it was such an unbelievable thing. i cannot believe it. even when i saw the arizona burning, we could not believe the scene. and even what happened to me,

you know and what happened to our ship. it was just too incredible for words. dr. george laitner: ever since i was 4 or 3, i had an idea about going to see in seeing the world. about two weeks after graduation from high school, i enlisted in the coast guard and went to washington for basic training and decided that aloha land would just be wonderful. hula girls and all that kind of thing. on december 6, 1941, there were about 13 of us who were still together who had enlisted in omaha, who would come to port townsend. we are talking 17, 18-year-old kids. we decided we were going to the bar and we really going to celebrate. that was the black cat. the black cat had a huge menu above the bar. a is for something, b is for

something, g is for g. we said, we will have a night of this. we started with the a's, and we would all have around, what ever a is for we are talking 17, 18-year-old kids. they did not care. if you have the money to buy it -- that is the way it was. december 7, at 7:55 a.m., i was in sick bay and i was talking to a friend of mine who was a pharmacist mate. at i said, what do you have that is going to take care of this? and then the bombs started coming and i really did not know whether this was something i was imagining. there was the pounding and all of the rest going on in my mind.

the signal is clang, clang, clang. this is general quarters, this is everything. around300 guys running saying, what are we doing? this was fire and rescue. where are you going? this is general quarters. i will go there. this was something else. we are all running around, wondering what the devil to do, each one of us. confused, we had no more idea of what was going on than anything. all we ever worked with was a dummy, wooden ammunition, loading and going through all this was all faux pas. down below about five, six stories, way down in the magazine -- is where the magazine is, and it's locked.

and it is a summary court-martial to open that, a summary court-martial to open that unless you have an officer. and we were up on top saying, my god, they're here, they're flying around, they're coming. send up live ammunition. the guys down there, you're all drunk up there, i'm not going to open this thing. i am not going to get any summary court-martial. some officers are ashore. there's nobody going to open this thing up. by the time we're screaming back and forth and back and forth, then the live ammunition starts coming up, and we start firing. at that time, there were not world tensions. you didn't expect to get into any problems. you didn't think about really having a war. for instance, when the japanese attacked, we probably said it would take two weeks and maybe we'd blow them out of the water and we'd all go home. and some said they wouldn't shave until we won the war.

and others said they would let their hair grow until we won the war. that kind of -- it is a different, a whole different kind of thing, whole different idea, concept, feeling. one of our men was taking, was there for some official reason or another and came back and told us of the sinking of the battleships. and of course, we thought he was out of his gourd, out of his mind. it couldn't be. arguments of probably no, they couldn't do that. as i said, we never expected it, never thought it would happen, and the pushover japanese, you know, the paper tiger kind of thing. we'll get them. herb weatherwax: i had a chance to go home for a weekend pass. it was on a sunday morning. we heard all this explosion going on and wondered what was

happening. i looked up in the sky, and it was the direction of pearl harbor. there were all the black puffs. it was a bright morning. it was a nice morning. and i could see all those bright puffs. we heard over the radio that all and then, military -- calling all military personnel to report to the stations immediately, that the japanese have attacked pearl harbor, and this is war. and naturally everybody was shocked. and at that time, we had our bus station at the army and navy ymca which is located right in honolulu. and from there as we were traveling over to scoffield barracks where i was stationed at that time, i passed on aiea heights and looked down into pearl harbor.

i saw -- i had a panoramic view of the destruction. the arizona was blazing in flames. all the other ships were on fire. and what stood up in my mind was the oklahoma had capsized. it was on its side. and i saw sailors above the hull of the ship just scrambling on it. and that was for them to keep out of the fire because all the water was on fire. i was shocked, needless to say. we were expecting the japanese navy to come down and invade us. by sea, but it turns out they did invade us, and that was by air, and it was a total surprise. i just couldn't get over it. in the 298 infantry, we had a big group of japanese boys as well as filipinos, chinese. they were worried they would take the japanese.

anyone with a japanese name or if they were japanese, you didn't have to be japanese. if you had a japanese name, if you were adopted by someone with a japanese name, you were automatically taken. when i got wind that they were going to do that, take the japanese boys out, i figured that's a big mistake, because i felt that the 298th infantry was one of the best fighting units. we were prepared, we were trained well for defense. but as soon as we got word that that happened, our morale went down. i figured that in my particular case, i might as well get out of there, and i was able to being an electrician before. i went to the signal core area and asked the man in charge if

they needed an electrician, and for them to put a request from there over to the infantry, in which they did. we were trained in the military, and we got to be animals. we weren't human beings. i look at it from this point of view because we talked like animals. we -- that was nothing at all to us. we look at another person -- as long as it was an enemy death. saw an american death, and we -- we saw an american death, and we felt awful because we didn't picture ourselves as being there in that person's boat. tom child: i had never been on a destroyer, never seen the inside of one. but i knew that's where i wanted to go. i asked for destroyer duty when i was in school in new york. i got orders to go to the uss cassin, dd 372. the early morning of december 7th starting at midnight, i was the old o.d. on the quarter deck of the cassin, so i had to watch from midnight to 4:00.

after that, i turned in. and i slept, i was asleep. when i heard the general alarm on the downs next door, and just then, my roommate came in who was just coming off watch. his name was wesley p. craig, and he had just been relieved. the watch is ordinarily relieved about a quarter before the hour. so craig was in shuffling around the room, and i heard the alarm go off. i said, what goes, craig? he said, some dunderhead on the downs must have sounded the general alarm. the general alarm was used to call the crew to quarters or to muster at 8:00 in the morning every day except sunday. however, it was not at all unusual to hear an alarm sounding someplace across the

harbor because somebody would forget it was sunday and turn on the general alarm. so it was not a surprise. so i rolled over and thought nothing about it. within two or three minutes, craig was back in and speaking in a pretty severe voice, said, wake up, wake up. get up, child. we're being bombed. the japs are bombing us. i put on my helmet, my pistol, and got up in a hurry. the skipper, i ran into the skipper on the main deck just out side the ward room. he was in a hurry to get the magazines open so we could get some five-inch ammunition up, but soon we realized our guns were out of commission due to some work in the yard. so there was not really not much for me to do, so i went up on top of the bridge on the director platform. the thing i remember most i think is the high level bombers in a v shaped formation. i believe five planes for each

going from left to right as i observed them. in other words, more or less in line with where the battleships would be. we could very clearly see the bombs falling. the sun reflected from the bombs as they fell, and we could see them as they came down. especially when they first left the airplanes. it got very, very noisy where we were. we were being strafed and bombed. and i remember seeing a pretty good fire start back on the port side of our ship. i remember seeing men on their hands and knees trying to scramble away from the flame. i thought certainly we've lost some people here. the fires were really raging on the cassin and the downs. our skipper, daniel francis joseph shea, lieutenant commander at the time, said, abandon ship. that's what we all did in a hurry. there was no place to hurry to really. so we just trotted away from the

ship. i remember there was no hurry to get anyplace because you may be running into more problems than you're running away from. i was with someone from the cassin. i don't recall his name. i would recognize him if he walked in here today. we were 30, 40 yards from the ship when there was an explosion behind us. there was a sit on the side of -- there was a hit on the side of the dry dock between the ship and where we were. as a matter of fact, i have a picture of that in this bomb damage report that shows yard workmen standing in the crater. anyhow, some of that debris i remember hit me on the helmet. somebody came along and wanted to know in a hurry where our how they could get to the fuel docks or to the fuel, the controls that allowed the fuel to be pumped into a ship.

for some reason, i knew something about them. i don't know who this guy was or where he was going. but anyhow, i took him. i took him. we flagged a car down, and we went toward the submarine base, and i got this guy to where i thought he wanted to go. then i went on to the submarine base. there were several torpedo boats roaring their engines alongside the submarine base pier, and i stepped aboard one of them and asked, could i go along? the skipper of that ship was lieutenant jg harry parker. and parker looked at me, and he said, what can you do? i said i'm the torpedo officer for the cassin. he said my torpedo man is not here, come with us. as we were abreast of the shaw, her forward magazine, which had had a fire in it for some number of minutes, blew, detonated. and some of the shaw came down

on pt 22 and went through the engine room of pt 22 -- through the main deck and into the engine room. i remember it must have been toward 10:00 that a japanese plane came down fairly low on the harbor, and we took a shot at it. that was the last plane i saw. there was a commander on the beach there. and he looked at me, and he could tell i was not a pt boater because i was still wearing whites. he said, what ship are you from? and i said, cassin, sir. he said, the cassin is no more. he said, you go into that submarine base, the closest building there, you go into the first office on the left and turn that pistol in.

and i said, aye, aye, sir and saluted him. i went up the sidewalk to the submarine base office, right where he told me to go in, up the stairway, back a long hallway to the other end of the building, down the stairway and out, and returned to the wreck of the cassin with my pistol. i think that roosevelt was so hungry for us to get in a good war and have us all united. and this was undoubtedly the best way to do it. so that was the goal, he got it accomplished. dale justice: asked for service duty on the vestal because my brother was on the vestal. he told me all about how good a ship that was and how you could learn something there. well, he was right. i learned a lot. everything that you would ever need to do to repair another ship or anything else, electrical, anything, we did it. and i, i wanted to put in my years there to learn something.

i didn't plan on pearl harbor though. [laughter] dale justice: we got a call from somebody, they ordered some work done on the arizona. i think it was to work on the evaporators. they probably had another few things that we would do. we had been alongside about four, five, six days, something like that. i had the 4:00 to 8:00 watch in the morning on sunday morning. and, i had i was relieved of my, watch, went down to one of the guys that was to relieve me. he was almost still asleep. but anyway, i gave him my pistol, went up back on deck, and i heard planes, and i heard noises, booming noises. my brother, being in the battery locker on the vestal, the battery repair, i ran back there.

i was going to get a cup of coffee. well, i didn't get my coffee. i told him that something was happening, and i heard the quarter master say that, hey, those are japanese planes. well, i told my brother and the coffee drinkers in the battery locker about that. now they, i don't know whether they believed me or not, but they rang a fire drill. i saw fighters coming by, they were strafing everything in sight. of course, what got us was the high-level bombers, the same thing that hit the arizona. the magazine in the arizona, it

was the high-level bombers. these were 16-inch naval projectile's with, they had modified them with pins. so of course, the old vestal, she wasn't important, but we were in the wrong place. and we got hit aft. it went all the way through the ship and began to flood the aft part of the ship. along about that time, i'm not sure it was before or after, was when the same bomb, i'm sure it was, came through into the arizona magazine, and that was quite a bit of noise there. we sure heard it. i mean, it rocked the ship pretty bad. and of course, that's when it blew, blew quite a few people from the ship over the side.

of course, there were a lot of flash burns from the fire. but our captain, captain young, he went up -- he went back to see why the darn gun wouldn't work. he shouldn't have been there either, got blown over the side. and then somebody comes -- one of the officers -- i'm not sure which one it was, and it doesn't make any difference now -- ordered abandon ship. we had casualties. they had taken most guns to the radio room. and everybody was either going over the side or i was -- i was headed for the stern, hoping to get into a motor launch. and then i noticed these injuried in the radio room. and so i got another guy, and i, and we carried a guy that i knew who had been hurt in the back,

shrapnel in the back, and we carried him -- we carried him down, back to the quarter deck and put him in the boat. by that time our captain had come back aboard, and he countermanded the order to abandon ship. so we went back to our battle stations. normally when you're in this condition, you don't have enough steam up to maneuver. you've got enough to run a generator or alternator for the power and lights, but you don't

have steam up to maneuver. all of that time had gone when they hit. when we wanted to get out of there, we couldn't do it. we would have been right down there along with the arizona except for a tug that came by, and i forgot which one it was. threw a line to us and began to pull us away. the fires on the arizona, of course they were -- they had no power. they couldn't operate the

anti-aircraft guns, not normally. so they tried to do it manually, and i know -- i know this because i saw them. they were firing their five-inch guns at least once in a while. they, the fire would spread so that it was just about all around them. and i'm not sure whether it was my imagination, and i don't think it was, but i saw those gunners fire all around them, trying to train those guns around, and they were dying there. i mean really. now i have tried to suppress that idea as much as i can because it bothered me quite a bit. and i don't even like -- 55 years later, i don't like to even think of it. to me, it happened. now, those on the aft part of the arizona were fortunate because they didn't get, they didn't get killed by concussion or lack of oxygen or whatever. they may have gotten a lot of oil going over to ford island or getting over to our ship, but they were fortunate. that is about the only ones that survived, of course.

the japanese missed a lot of chances. really they did. they missed that cairo, which was loaded with a lot of 16 and 14-inch ammunition and, of course, everything else smaller, they miss it by about ten feet with a bomb. it went through the dock where they were tied up. that was one thing. another was the oil storage tanks. i mean, we operated, we operated on oil. if we didn't have oil, we didn't operate, and they didn't get those, and they, and if they'd have got those, they would have flooded the harbor with burning oil, and they also missed the gasoline on ford island. they didn't get that. a lot of us that were at pearl harbor, we blame roosevelt for a lot of this.

the government wanted to get us in the war so we could go against germany, and that has been a lot of us -- our opinion is it was either known about or almost planned to allow the japanese to do this. i guess history will not support that too well. but it sure -- to me, it sure makes a little bit of sense that we could have been notified, alerted so that we wouldn't have had all those people killed. and it, it bothers us. warren voerhoff: we knew sooner

or later we would have an altercation because tojo had signed a pact with hitler. we were sending convoys to europe. we had been helping the chinese over in china trying to keep the chinese from getting butchered over there which they were doing a good job of. we had lost a gun boat there a few times earlier. we knew sooner or later we'd have a problem. we didn't think it would be at pearl harbor. it was too far away. on december 7, 1941 i was curving on a tug boats. that was the keosauqua. that is an indian tribe. all tugs are named after indian tribes. we were up working already working that morning when the attacks started. we had to meet a ship coming

into port and take a barge away from it. as we were clearing the channel, we saw the ward, a destroyer that was on patrol duty, we saw him dropping depth charges. again, there was nothing exciting about this because these patrol things out there used to drop depth charges. they'd pick something out on the sonar and drop depth charges. and in this instant, when he picked up was a submarine. and he dropped depth charges, the submarine surfaced, and the ward sank it with gunfire. this was about an hour before the attack on pearl. but a submarine attack a mile out, don't tell us we're going to have an air attack at pearl. there's no correlation. hardly anybody was scared until, until after that, until after everything stopped. we didn't know what was going to happen next. were they going to come back and try to invade or what? we didn't know.

while the attack and everything was on, everybody is just mad, believe me. all you want to do was get at the japanese, that is all you wanted to do. all the time the attack was going on, these bombers were dropping these bombs. you could hear them coming down. i know we'd stop, just completely freeze and it would detonate somewhere, and people would say, there it is, then we'd run back and do whatever we were doing. joe langdell: we had a party scheduled for that sunday. an automobile, an officer was allowed a quart of booze a week. somebody had a little black book of the girls' names, and we were headed to the party on the beach over there. never happened. we were sound asleep. i had a bunk mate named barney malcolm that came to live up washington way. we were asleep. the building started rattling. we didn't think too much about it. but when we heard a big boom, we thought we better get up and see, and we got up, and i guess

we looked out, went downstairs and looked out and saw that it was more than what we thought and could see a jet plane go up. so, we went back, got dressed, and came down to the water's edge which, as i remember, was roughly 100 yards, watched the arizona sink in nine minutes. you were spellbound, couldn't think what to do. and then, after the ship blew up, then the sailors started coming ashore with their skin peeling off their back and their arms, and they were all full of oil, and we helped them out of the water. and then i remember distinctly taking one man named flanagan, happened to be an ensign, i didn't know it at the time, took him down to the hospital, and when you get to the hospital, you, there was a doctor. and the first doctor would look

the man over, and if he thought he could save him, he says go here. and if he thought that he couldn't save him right off, within a reasonable length of time, he went down to the second line, and that was the fellas that they didn't think was going to make it. the rule right now was that if you were physically aboard the ship on december 7th, your remains could be interred with the ship. we're working on a program so that anybody on the ship's crew on december 7th could have that privilege. that's number one. and the second thing is that way back in about 1981, or before that, my son was an ensign on a ship here in 1976. and i thought that it's just too bad that nothing has ever been done so that fellas that were on the ship december 7th couldn't go back here and have a memorial service or something like that. so, i worked on that and succeeded. in 1981, we probably had about 75 or 100 people who were either survivors of the arizona or former ship's crew going way back to 1916 or their relatives.

and we did, got that thing started, and we repeated it in 1986, and in 1991 we had 300 people out there. and yesterday -- this is the way it is, gentlemen. yesterday we went back to the ship, to the reunion which i always do on the first day we get here, go right out there and get that over with. then we had our beautiful memorial service up at punch bowl. and in 20 years, i learned how to get the government or the army or the navy to do things for you that i didn't know before.

so we had the marine band up there and international color guard and the firing squad. beautiful ceremony. and because we were the uss arizona, they closed the memorial up there. they had all the flags were flying just like on an important day. beautiful. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> we will show archival film, veterans and civilians first-person accounts and the ceremonies at pearl harbor and the world war ii memorial in washington. historians will take your calls. that is saturday, december 10, beginning at 8:00 eastern on american history tv, only on c-span3. all weekend long, american history tv joins our cox communication cable partners to showcase the history of tempe, arizona. to learn more about the city's visit c-span.org/cities tour.