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Thursday, December 07, 2000
By Milan Simonich, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The date -- Dec. 7, 1941 -- lives in infamy, but the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association is dying.
U.S. servicemen who lived through Japan's surprise attack on Hawaii 59 years ago are slowly closing down the organization they formed to preserve and study the history of Pearl Harbor.
Ceremony at county airport One of the larger Pearl Harbor remembrance ceremonies will begin at 12:55 p.m. today at the Allegheny County Airport.
The time coincides with the moment the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The surprise air raid began at 7:55 a.m. Hawaii time, took the lives of about 2,400 Americans and plunged the United States into World War II.
Pearl Harbor survivors, military organizations, schoolchildren, bands and politicians will convene for the ceremony.
The veterans don't want to surrender their association or their legacy. Their average age of 81 leaves them no choice.
Sickness and death are putting the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association out of business at a pace that quickens by the day.
"I don't know that we can be a viable organization much longer. Age is getting to us, as you can understand," said Anthony J. DiLorenzo of Rockville, Md., director of an eight-state region of the association that includes Pennsylvania.
A record 632 Pearl Harbor veterans died in the last year, and entire branches of the organization are disappearing from towns and states.
Pennsylvania began the 1990s with six chapters of Pearl Harbor survivors scattered across the state. Now it's down to three.
The trend is the same across the country. Fifty chapters of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association have closed, leaving a total of 139, many of which are fading fast.
Three states -- Maine, Mississippi and Rhode Island -- have no chapters left. A smattering of Pearl Harbor survivors from those places have become at-large members of an organization that numbers about 8,000, but is losing 40 to 50 members each month.
"The guys are dying like flies. Everything dies, so we can't do anything about that, but the real loss is the lack of knowledge about what happened," said John W. Finn, 91, the last living Medal of Honor recipient from the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Finn, who lives on a ranch in San Diego County, Calif., still makes it to parades, schools and reunions to try to keep the story of Pearl Harbor alive and accurate. He's an old man who is losing battles to ignorance and embellishment.
"I meet young people who don't have the slightest idea what Pearl Harbor was about, and I meet older people who swear I shot down five planes," Finn said. "We have people who know nothing and people who exaggerate everything."
Sixteen men received the Medal of Honor for valor in the Pacific on Dec. 7, 1941, and Finn's story is among the most dramatic.
He fired a .50-caliber machine gun at Japanese airplanes while he stood exposed in an open section of the Naval Air Station on Kaneohe Bay. Even after he was wounded many times, Finn held his ground and fired back at attacking planes.
The Pearl Harbor Survivors Association is made up of U.S. servicemen such as Finn, who were on or within three miles of Oahu when the Hawaiian island was bombed by the Japanese. The raid lasted an hour and changed the world forever.
A total of 353 Japanese planes swarmed Pearl Harbor at 7:55 a.m. Their bombs and bullets killed 2,335 U.S. servicemen and 68 civilians. Twelve hundred other Americans were wounded.
Moored at the base was much of the Pacific Fleet, neatly aligned for disaster in Battleship Row.
Twenty-nine destroyers, nine cruisers, eight battleships and five submarines were in port that Sunday morning. Twenty-one of the American ships were sunk, beached or badly damaged. In addition, 300 U.S. planes were damaged or destroyed.
Japan's government had expected its stunning and nearly flawless attack to drive the U.S. military from the Pacific islands, which then seemed so distant and obscure that few Americans had heard of Hawaii or Pearl Harbor. Instead, the assault galvanized the nation.
The United States entered World War II the day after the bombing. President Franklin D. Roosevelt went on radio, deplored the attack and called Dec. 7 "a date which will live in infamy."
The memory of that day is still fresh to Joseph Messner of Brighton Heights. A sailor on the USS Avocet, he witnessed the raid from what amounted to a front-row seat.
"I saw the first bomb fall that started World War II," said Messner, 77, one of the younger Pearl Harbor survivors.
He helped put out fires aboard the sinking battleship West Virginia. As the bombs rained down and sailors died in their bunks, all of it seemed surreal.
Messner watched the USS Shaw explode in a ball of flames. He saw the bomb that hit the battleship Arizona and "cracked her right in half."
He had heard airplanes circling the base that morning, but never imagined they could be foreign bombers bent on destruction. Before Messner could make sense of the commotion, the 19-year-old sailor was under siege by waves of Japanese planes.
"They were like bugs, flying in and out. It was so perfectly executed, it proved that they had been practicing it for a year or more. Because it was done without a declaration of war, it was, in my mind, premeditated murder."
A member of the Keystone Chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, Messner speaks at schools each fall. Such appearances have been his ritual, but Messner, slowed by three heart attacks and legally blinded by virulent diabetes, feels himself slowing down and the organization running out of life.
"There's not many of us left and we know it," he said.
His best friend, fellow Pearl Harbor veteran Frank Naper of Ross, died in February.
Julius Finnern, 81, of Menomonee Falls, Wis., is national leader of the association. Unlike many in the organization, he said he hopes to keep it afloat for years to come.
"Age is a factor, but a lot of people use that as their crutch, too," he said.
But DiLorenzo, the regional director, said dissolution of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association has become an important topic. Its bylaws dictate that cash, investment holdings and other assets go to the sons and daughters of Pearl Harbor survivors when the organization no longer can function.
As the men of Pearl Harbor grow older and more frail, that time approaches.
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