Local veterans share Pearl Harbor stories of survival

When Martin Knapp woke up 73 years ago today, he knew it was a Sunday he’d never forget.

Dec. 7, 1941, was going to be his wedding day.

“I was starting to go on liberty,” the Vancouver veteran said a few days ago. “I was planning on getting married. I’d been going with a girl for a while.”

Knapp’s wedding never took place.

o o o

When Paul Johnson’s ship steamed into Pearl Harbor, he figured his seafaring days were just about done. Once they sailed back to the West Coast, Johnson would start a new life with the woman he’d married in Vancouver on Nov. 18.

But on that morning, Lucille Johnson, a bride of less than three weeks, suddenly was wondering whether her husband was alive.

Knapp and Johnson are among at least nine local veterans who were at Pearl Harbor that Sunday. The Japanese attack on America’s Pacific stronghold killed about 2,400 people and propelled the United States into World War II.

Knapp was aboard the USS Medusa, a Navy repair ship. Johnson was a crewman on the USS Castor, a transport ship carrying 10,000 tons of ammunition.

Other local Pearl Harbor survivors were on a variety of Navy vessels, from a noncombatant hospital ship to battleships that were high-priority targets.

Ralph Laedtke and Johnson are scheduled to share their first-person accounts this morning at the community’s annual Pearl Harbor memorial service. The 9:30 a.m. event is in a new location this year: the gymnasium building on the Vancouver Veterans Affairs campus, 1604 E. Fourth Plain Blvd.

Laedtke was a pharmacist’s mate/medical records technician on the USS Solace, a hospital ship. Laedtke said he was getting ready for the ship’s 10 a.m. church service that morning.

Christmas cards

Aboard the USS Maryland, Al McDowell was locked inside the battleship’s emergency radio room. The radioman had gone into town Saturday night to mail Christmas cards to his family and he was hoping to sleep in on a quiet Sunday morning.

At 7:55 a.m., 180 Japanese warplanes attacked and the focus immediately shifted to life-or-death tasks: Save your ship. Help the wounded. Fight back.

McDowell said he woke up to the sound of shipmates hammering on the locked door of the emergency radio room. They were yelling something about a war.

Local Pearl Harbor vets

There are nine Pearl Harbor survivors in Clark and Skamania counties, by unofficial tally; all were in the U.S. Navy. The local veterans and their ships:

• Joseph Bailey, USS Whitney (destroyer tender).

• Gebhard Galle, USS Nevada (battleship).

• Paul Johnson, USS Castor (supply transport).

• Martin Knapp, USS Medusa (fleet repair ship).

• Marvin Kaufman, USS Whitney (destroyer tender).

• Ralph Laedtke, USS Solace (hospital ship).

• John Leach, USS California (battleship).

• Larry Lydon, USS San Francisco (cruiser).

• Al McDowell, USS Maryland (battleship).

Note: For a chart showing locations of ships where local veterans were serving at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, mouse over photo window above and click on arrow.

• Pearl Harbor attack timeline

6 a.m. — Japanese launch 180 fighters, bombers and torpedo planes from six aircraft carriers about 230 miles north of Hawaii.

• 7:55 a.m. — First wave of planes attack U.S. military airfields and the Pacific fleet.

• 8:10 a.m. — An armor-piercing bomb ignites an ammunition magazine on the USS Arizona; 1,177 crewmen die in the explosion and fire, half of the U.S. death total.

• 8:55 a.m. — The second wave of 170 fighters and bombers arrives.

• 9:45 a.m. — Japanese planes head back to their carriers.

His response?

“You’re crazy!”

Then, “I felt the battleship rock,” McDowell said. “Battleships don’t rock. I’ve been on them when they fire 16-inch guns and it just pushes them back in the water a bit.”

And then McDowell heard the blasts of bombs and torpedoes punching holes in the pride of America’s Pacific fleet.

“If you’ve ever seen an air show with 25 planes, it looks like the whole sky is full,” McDowell said. Now just try to imagine the sky swarming with 180 planes, he said.

Johnson didn’t even have to glance up. Aboard the USS Castor, he looked down to see a Japanese torpedo plane 10 feet or so above the water.

“I was drinking coffee on the fantail,” Johnson recalled. “I was 30 or 40 feet above the water, and I could look down and see the pilot.”

Battle stations

Like a lot of sailors that day, Johnson and his shipmates found that fighting back was a frustrating process. Ammunition for the Castor’s guns was locked up. Johnson, a gunner’s mate second class, had to unlock the armory so the gun crews could load their weapons.

Some of the men opened fire with the ship’s water-cooled machine guns. There was no water in the cooling jackets around the barrels, and after firing for a while, “The barrels just melted,” Johnson said. “That took care of that.”

The Castor also had a 40 mm antiaircraft gun that got off a few rounds. “A piece of shrapnel hit it and put it out of commission,” Johnson said.

He even pulled his .45-caliber pistol from its holster and fired it at attacking planes, “which didn’t do any good,” Johnson said.

Martin Knapp and his crewmates on a 3-inch deck gun also had to wait for shipmates to bring ammunition from the Medusa’s magazine. The Medusa was credited with helping shoot down two Japanese planes.

His gun also was credited with hitting one of several mini-submarines that were part of the attack. “It surfaced between another repair ship and ours,” Knapp said.

Aboard the USS Solace, Laedtke helped get the 480-bed hospital ship ready for combat casualties … and fatalities.

“During the battle, bodies were being fished out of the water,” Laedtke said.

A second wave of about 170 planes arrived at about 8:55 a.m.; by 9:45 a.m., the attackers were heading back to their aircraft carriers and the Pearl Harbor survivors could focus on fighting fires, stabilizing their ships and helping the injured.

“We picked up 150 patients, a lot of them with serious burns,” Laedtke said. “All our new patients came in out of the water without identification.

“Late in the afternoon, I was sent to the morgue to fingerprint people,” Laedtke (pronounced “lad-key”) said. “The bodies were so badly burned that the flesh came off in my hands. There were no dog tags yet, so there was no way to identify people.”

Laedtke wrote up one death certificate for 26 sailors, noting that all were burned beyond recognition.

“That haunts me yet,” he said.

How they survived

All four Pearl Harbor veterans can look back on circumstances that helped save their lives that day.

Johnson’s ship had arrived just before the attack and wasn’t on the Japanese target list. The USS Castor was hit by machine gun fire, but the ammunition-laden transport wasn’t attacked by dive-bombers or torpedo planes.

The aftermath

• About 2,400 Americans were killed, including 68 civilians.

• Twenty-one Navy ships were sunk or damaged — though all but three (USS Arizona, USS Oklahoma and USS Utah) were raised and/or repaired.

• 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed.

• The Japanese lost 29 aircraft and at least four “midget” two-man submarines, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command.

If You Go

• What: Pearl Harbor Anniversary memorial service.

■ When: 9:30 a.m. today.

■ Where: Vancouver VA campus, 1601 E. Fourth Plain Blvd., gymnasium building (near the Vietnam Memorial).

“If the Japanese had bombed the Castor, we would have blown Pearl Harbor to Japan,” Johnson said.

On the previous Friday, the USS Medusa had been elbowed out of its spot by the USS Utah, a former battleship that had been converted into a target ship and training station for antiaircraft gunners.

“The Utah wanted to take our berth,” Knapp recalled. “So we had to move, and the Utah got sunk. I’d have been in that spot.”

Laedtke and his USS Solace shipmates knew they were protected by their noncombatant status as a hospital ship. That was the theory, anyway.

“I prayed that the Geneva Convention would protect our ship,” Laedtke said.

McDowell said that a Japanese bomb that could have killed him never exploded.

“One hit the deck right above where I was. I shouldn’t be here,” McDowell said.

The Maryland also got some protection from its position next to the USS Oklahoma on Battleship Row. The Maryland was moored along Ford Island. The Oklahoma was on the harbor side and was hit by up to nine torpedoes, according to Navy historians.

McDowell said he happened to glance out a porthole at a smoke-filled sky and realized that something was wrong with that view. He was supposed to be looking at the Oklahoma, but the battleship had capsized — trapping hundreds of sailors.

Another bomb did hit McDowell’s ship, causing serious flooding, but the Maryland’s antiaircraft batteries continued to fire at the attackers.

He married Helen

There was another life-changing turn that day for Martin Knapp and his three sons: Mike, John and David. That’s because the sailor and his fiancée never did follow through on their wedding plans.

“I just lost track of her,” Knapp said.

She might have died in the attack. Her family’s home was destroyed. “We are assuming she was killed,” John Knapp said.

Martin Knapp eventually did get married during the war. He was able to come home on leave in 1943 to marry Helen, a girl he’d gone to school with in Longview.

It’s something that has had the three Knapp brothers musing about an alternative history. If the Japanese hadn’t attacked Pearl Harbor, and if the sailor had married his island bride that day … .

“We’ve often wondered,” David Knapp said. “Who would we have been?”