did sharks eat pearl harbor victims did sharks eat pearl harbor victims

In 1949, the newly created U.S. Air Force was trying to fill it out its ranks with experienced support crews, almost begging for mechanics who knew the aircraft. A moment passes. Once a week, they motor on into Tulsa, where Marietta takes a china painting class and Lonnie wanders the aisles of sporting-goods stores. "He should have the Navy Cross," Stratton says. Someone from the bureau had been asking questions. He has met many of his old friends and shipmates. did sharks eat pearl harbor victims. For years, Stratton wore the scars from the Arizona without talking about them much. "We'd send two guys out to knock the icicles off the guns, then they'd high-tail it back in. The Coghlan's crew battled just to keep the guns free of ice as they headed toward their next target. He has told her about his escape from the Arizona. The ship accompanied General Douglas MacArthur to the Philippines and was anchored in the harbor off Nagasaki, Japan, when the second atomic bomb exploded. If they found anything that belonged to the Navy or hadn't been approved, they'd take it. A carnivorous shark diet usually includes fish, mollusks, and crustaceans. Cook worked in California, mostly welding jobs, until the union he belonged to called a strike. As he prepared for his new posting on the Frazier, Langdell decided to make a move. He had turned 90 and was starting over again. "The new ones, they didn't know beans.". He returned to Oklahoma again and started his own business, outfitting a one-ton Ford pickup with a winch and other equipment that let him work the oil fields. 2 gun turret. His ships steamed across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal to Africa. "It ain't worth a damn if it ain't loaded," he says. He was assigned briefly to the Arizona, then to the Saratoga, an aircraft carrier, then, as the Navy tinkered once more with its troop alignment, back to the Arizona. He was able to visit the national cemetery at an area called the Punch Bowl. The license plate reads USS ARIZ. A mural on a white bed cover depicts the USS Arizona and the memorial that floats above it in Pearl Harbor. On the other end of the line is an old shipmate from the USS Saratoga, the aircraft carrier where Hetrick worked as a mechanic through most of World War II. A tale of war and romance mixed in with history. Photographs. Knives. A while later, he and Marietta were on the road again, to a missile base in Sturgess, S.D., to gas lines in Wisconsin and North Dakota. Potts was based out of the port director's office there were two, one at the harbor, one on the ninth floor of the Aloha Tower in downtown Honolulu but he logged most of his hours at the controls of the motor boat, a Jeep or a station wagon. He spent long months on a tender, a vessel that carries equipment, parts and other supplies for ships at sea. After so many years of travel, the Cooks have settled into a more tranquil pace. That's why the FBI was nosing around me, Potts thought. Potts was touched. And my co-pilot, Lou Conter, saved my life. Still traveling at 17 knots, the Indianapolis began taking on massive amounts of water; the ship sank in just 12 minutes. Repair crews were already at work on the battleships that had survived. "I ran the decompression chamber on jobs. Today, he tries to pass on what he knows to students of history. Cook was assigned to the USS Patterson, then two months later, transferred to the Aylwin, a destroyer that had been moored at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7 and engaged the bombers as the attack began. Some even like to dine on smaller shark species! A painting of the Arizona hangs on the wall of a sitting room. The telegram, which misspelled Conter's last name, promises further information and asks his family not to divulge Conter's posting. Peeling potatoes. He refused to cut the line no matter what. The pieces the largest is about as long as a bus sit in a salvage yard on the Waipi'o Peninsula on Oahu. "We got halfway there and I told them to turn around," Conter said. "It hadn't really sunk in what had happened.". A sign over the arched door marks the room as "Captain's Quarters.". Whether they're a spiny dogfish all the way to great whites, sharks love eating fish. The Hirasaki family suffered some of the worst losses that terrible morning. Three days later, he and his buddy were on a ship to San Francisco and then a train to Pensacola. "I motioned to crane operator what we needed, what tools to send down." by Pia Peterson. "I said goodbye and left.". Tall pines tower over the house. Sailors jumped into fires to escape sinking vessels. Answer (1 of 23): Before I begin this answer I must confess to a surprising degree of ignorance, I once thought myself pretty well versed in maritime history and sea lore, until I began research for this answer. Or both. Once a month or so, Clarendon Hetrick's phone rings with a call from Utah. Though Conter turned around the first time he ventured toward the sunken Arizona, he has been back since, to see it with other survivors. "Say your prayers, men, we're seven miles off shore and we're in 10, 15-foot swells," one of the officers said as the crew abandoned the plane. "They paid everybody in two dollar bills back then. OAHU, Hawaii (NEXSTAR) On the day that will live in infamy December 7, 1941 2,403 U.S. personnel were killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Langdell is one of the last nine survivors from the Arizona. Once, I made a dive in a two-man submarine, down in over 1,200 feet of water off Santa Barbara coast. He describes the store of booze they pulled out of safe and the money. Discipline seems less important than it was in his day. December 5, 2021 at 11:21 a.m. EST. Once he was awakened by a loud noise and a flash and thought his ship was under attack. You need the exercise. "Mr. Langdell," he said, "when you're done with your breakfast, you'll report to the pier and you'll be met by a motor whale boat and a party of 20 enlisted men with sheets and pillow cases. Ted asks. He remembers when the order was given to abandon ship. Anderson picked up and moved to New Mexico. Potts says, shaking his head. The mangled bodies such as J.J. Astor was probably caused by the 1st smokestack falling into the water and. The trophy sits on a small white base that raises it above other items on a shelf. The nurse who checks in on him regularly likes Haerry. The planes could fly at low altitudes, then buzz upward for a bombing run, confounding enemy gunners trying to calculate speed and distance. Yet in a place where you couldn't cross the street without running into a war vet, Bruner was not just another ex-sailor who made it home. "The stuff he likes.". I said, 'You send her over, I'll re-enlist.' The exhausted crew dragged ashore an hour later and hid in the jungle, fearful they would be captured by Japanese soldiers. "I hadn't told him he was going to be individually honored that day," he says. "We didn't hear much from the outside at first," Hetrick said. The attack was devastating for the Americans, though the Japanese . However, larger shark species like to eat large marine mammals and large fish species, including dolphins, sea lions, tuna, mackerel, and seals. "It sounded like someone shooting guns. "Mr. Langdell, Mr. Langdell, you've got to come here quick," he said. The Coghlan turned back, almost spent. It sits a little higher than most items, but not necessarily on a platform. That summer, the ship joined others for the invasion at Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, one of the first major assaults against Japan by the Americans. They bought a small ranch and, while Lonnie continued to work welding jobs, they grew walnuts, almonds, peaches, apples, nectarines, cherries and grapes. He said, 'whatever I can get out of you.' Sometimes he can't control his emotions, so he declines speaking requests. "We wouldn't get much fire back and by the time they sounded general quarters, we were on our way," Conter said. Pictures of past parades. "But it was a lot better than being shot at.". He gave Anderson the name of a contact there. He's not so fond of the crowds around Honolulu and doesn't plan to go back. "I do as much as I can to keep his story alive," his son says. We had survival training on the job. "This shows where all the ships were," he says, pointing at a map depicting Pearl Harbor on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. "It's hard to explain." One of the first people to do that.". "I bought it at the receiving station in Pearl Harbor. elephant tail jewelry did sharks eat pearl harbor victims. Langdell was discharged at the war's end and returned to Massachusetts, where his wife, Libby, waited. Survivors' groups wanted to find all of them so their stories would not be lost. We swept the decks and took the small bones. Calhoun quizzed Conter about his posting, his job on the ship. Hetrick was sent to the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier. At his request, he was assigned to the officer candidate school in Newport, R.I. On one mission, Haerry's tender was tied to a larger ship as the crew delivered supplies and completed maintenance tasks. As a youngster, Anderson heard stories about the Navy from his uncle, a man named Ray Stokes. "I was back here on leave before the war started and he was here too," Cook says. By 1941, he worked the cranes on the ship, a job that entailed retrieving the Arizona's small seaplanes after they landed on the water. On a recent fall afternoon, Stratton ambles down the driveway and fires up the engine. Over the next year, Anderson would sail across the South Pacific, joining other ships in the American assault on the Marshall Islands, Parry Island and the Palau Islands. He once helped design programs that sent soldiers into the wilds for days or weeks at a time. Put in eight years at least and you'll have a pension, he promised. He met up with some of the guys from the turret crew and they hopped a boat to shore, where there was a call for volunteers to join the Navy's destroyers. Haerry says he wants lunch delivered to his room, but the nurse says no. Cook was a gunner's mate on the Arizona. He was on Ford Island when the Japanese attacked, training for new assignment. Then we got hit.". "It didn't take me that long. He visited the memorial and was relieved to see the builders got it right. Conter's plane hadn't been out long in September 1943 when enemy bullets pierced one of their rear hatches and hit a parachute flare. At 100, he is the oldest. And he still likes to talk about that other young fellow from Oklahoma, the one who didn't make it home. Before the attack, many Americans were reluctant to become involved in the war in Europe. The Navy occasionally cuts away small bits of the wreckage for memorials. Before the war started, a hospital stay that long would have earned a sailor a discharge, but not anymore. But there are moments when he knows what he did meant something. Would Langdell agree to meet Abe on film? Sometimes, Japanese pilots attended memorial ceremonies and some of the other survivors would shake their hands. . The ships sent up their own planes and turned back the assault. He wants to secure a proper medal for Joe George, the sailor from the Vestal who helped rescue the six men from the gunner's control tower. That led to a job in Roswell, the Sagebrush Serenade and Elvis Presley. The Navy loaded 5,000 bunks on board, along with a row of portable latrines, and the Saratoga sailed to San Francisco, passing under the Golden Gate Bridge with toilet paper streamers and thousands of sailors who needed something to do. Crippled ships still floated around the mooring posts along Ford Island. He made bargemaster on a huge drilling rig, but yearned for something more interesting, so he got a job as a tender with a commercial deep sea diving business. Anderson's road to the radio booth started in Hollywood, with a screen test at a studio where he had worked. "The kids coming up now have never heard of it," he says, his voice tinged with sadness and dismay. The ships encountered a Japanese fleet, two big cruisers, six destroyers, some troop ships, and engaged. His story is always in demand, though he'd just as soon not tell it in front of a lot of people. That was enough to rattle nerves on board the ship, which was at general quarters every day an hour before sundown and an hour before sunrise. On Oct. 12, Langdell celebrated his 100th birthday with with his older son, John, who flew in from Spearfish, S.D. Fire had blackened much of the structure still visible. An aerial view of "Battleship Row" at Pearl Harbor, photographed from a Japanese aircraft during the the bombing. The men, their charred skin peeling away, climbed hand-over-hand across the line to safety. Bruner was at his battle station in an anti-aircraft gun director, a metal box on the forward mast of the Arizona, when an armor-piercing bomb ignited the ship's powder magazine. Then they'd go by.". The Edsall sailed farther north, then headed to the Philippines, where they played baseball with a group of indigenous Moros, who had fought the United States more than 20 years earlier. Finally, the tanker spotted the destroyer.