It was a very good year until it wasn’t
By Richard Robbins
Do you realize, or care, that the 2025 calendar jives with calendar year 1941, down to the day? Now, in many ways 1941 was a wonderful year, but it ended in lousy fashion at Pearl Harbor on Sunday, Dec. 7.
Among the ways 1941 shone: many credit it as the greatest baseball year ever, what with Joe DiMaggio’s record 56-game hitting streak and Ted Williams swatting .406.
It was a good year for music, with Glenn Miller (“Chattanooga Choo Choo”), The Andrews Sisters (“Boogie Woogie Bulge Boy”), and Bing Crosby (“White Christmas”) ringing the jukeboxes.
Hollywood had a stellar year. The screwball comedy “Ball of Fire” starring Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper premiered just five days before the Japanese treachery.
“Ball of Fire” is the movie in which Stanwyck, playing nightclub singer/gangster moll Sugarpuss O’Shea, beckons Cooper, as naive English professor Bertram Potts, to check out her infected throat. Bertram sees nothing, upon which Sugarpuss gives out, “Why, it’s as red as The Daily Worker, and just as sore.”
And if you don’t understand that, well, you’re a monkey’s uncle.
Pearl Harbor was a complete catastrophe. The Japanese surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet killed thousands of service personnel while ushering the country into World War II. As historian Richard Ketchum writes, Pearl Harbor was “the dawn of a new day and a new world for America, a world that would never be the same….”
Eight U.S. battleships, tied to their berths, were destroyed or disabled on Dec. 7. One bloodied vessel was the USS West Virginia. An officer from that ship, Dr. John D. Walters, was back in Uniontown on leave during Thanksgiving, along with his pretty wife Doreen and the couple’s young son. They spent the holiday with Dr. Walters’ mom and dad at 211 Union St.
The doctor, a 1929 graduate of Uniontown High School, was in Philadelphia on Dec. 6, 1941, to learn about his next duty station. The West Virginia, with a complement of 64 officers and 1,241 enlisted men, suffered 106 dead as a result of the Japanese assault.
One wonders how Dr. Walters reacted to news of the deaths of his former shipmates. The ship’s skipper, Capt. Mervyn Bennion, was one of the dead.
Enlisted seaman Curtis Corder, speaking years afterward, recalled the Japanese strafing of the West Virginia, enemy planes flying so low “we could see the faces of the pilots,” and shrapnel and explosions and chaos everywhere.
“The first thing we saw was the [battleship] Oklahoma rolling over…. We were still on the guns when the Arizona blew up. The blast knocked us all off our guns. We had a 35-degree list to the port…. It was flooded down below. Our gunnery officer said we should abandon ship.”
Diving into the churning, fiery water, Corder was immediately enmeshed in the oil leaking from the damaged ships. “I couldn’t see. I didn’t know if I was under water or above. Somewhere, some how I picked up a life jacket.”
After struggling to reach shore, Corder was conscious of “bullets … flying in front of us and at the sides of us…. My thoughts were that I was dead because the bullets looked as if they were going right through us. Then I realized I was still running, so I was still alive.”
At the Ford Island Naval Base Air Field mess hall, Corder, dazed by his ordeal, recalled other seamen “taking the oil off me and cleaning me up. There were a lot of wounded men in the mess hall…. I lit a cigarette for a fellow who was badly burned.” Enemy planes bombed the place, which created more chaos and additional wounded.
Aboard the West Virginia, sailors Ronald Endicott, Clifford Olds, and Louis Costin survived the initial attack. Holed up in the airtight pump room at the ship’s bottom, they hung on until around Christmas.
U.S. Marine Dick Fiske recalled, “You’d hear the bang-bang-bang, then stop, then bang-bang-bang in the bow of the ship.” This was the three men signaling for help. “Pretty soon nobody wanted to do guard duty.” For those on the outside, the taping was especially unnerving at night.
Trapped in the increasingly airless chamber, Endicott, 18, Olds, 20, and Costin, 21, were beyond rescue. They died of asphyxiation 16 days after Dec. 7. They marked off the days in red on their calendar.
Yes, 1941 was a very good year that ended in the worst possible way.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.