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http://www.greatfallstribune.com/article/20111207/NEWS01/112070301/Remembering-Pearl-Harbor-Attack-survivors-Montana-dwindling-70-years-later

Remembering Pearl Harbor: Attack survivors of Montana dwindling 70 years later

LEWISTOWN — When Hal Conrad, then 20, called in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 70 years ago today, the man who received his message accused him of being drunk.

But soon the disbelieving voice at the other end became a stutter. We’re under fire, he stammered.

“What the hell do you think I’m trying to tell you?” Conrad yelled.

Conrad is one of a handful of Montanans who carry firsthand memories of the sneak attack that killed 2,335 military personnel, sunk four battleships, three destroyers and two other ships, destroyed 188 planes and launched America’s involvement in World War II.

Conrad is chairman of Big Sky Chapter 1 of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. Or, as he said, “state chairman of nothing now.” He’s been notified the national organization will disband at the end of this month. He doesn’t have anyone left to invite to meetings.

Nationwide, the group has fewer than 3,000 members. In Montana, the last of the group’s members have died, left the state or moved into rest homes. Alzheimer’s disease is erasing memories of some of the few Pearl Harbor survivors who remain.

“I’ve lost track of most of them,” Conrad said. “Five years ago, we had 25 people. Now, well, I’ve sent a lot of death notices. We’re down to four or five of us.”

Conrad thought about marking the anniversary in Honolulu. In the past year, he has lost Edward Chlapowski, longtime chapter president. Conrad’s wife of 66 years, six months and five days and his 30-year-old grandson also died in the past year. So instead of returning to Pearl Harbor, he’s spending his money to join his daughter for Christmas in California.

“None of my friends who were there that day are left,” he said. “Most didn’t make it through the raid.”

Chlapowski had just transferred from the USS Arizona to the Pacific commander-in-chief’s office. He sent the message that told the world the United States was under attack: “This is no drill. Pearl Harbor is being bombed by the Japanese. This is no drill.”

He died in January. George Dolezal, who died three weeks ago in Havre, was one of the few active-duty service men to be armed and readily active in providing anti-aircraft artillery during the bombing.

On Saturday night, Dec. 6, 1941, Conrad had a six-hour pass into Honolulu. He tucked in about midnight, expecting to have Sunday off. But at 5 a.m. he was woken with the news he’d have to take the place of the guy who had called in sick for guard duty at the Hickam Field water tower.

“That’s why I wasn’t in my bunk when the bomb hit it,” he said.

The blast blew his bunk out of the barracks and destroyed all his things, like his helmet, gas mask and mess kit. Buddies died in the sack.

But Conrad had been on duty since 6 a.m. At about 8 a.m., Conrad spotted silver planes. He saw a bomb drop and thought it must be a dummy.

“I thought it was the Navy going to give us a show,” he said.

Then came an explosion. He saw “red meatballs” — the rising sun of the Japanese flag — on the planes.

He shouted into the field phone. “The Japs are bombing the hell out of Pearl Harbor!”

At the height of the attack, a woman ran from married officer quarters and brought him a gas mask. Machine gunners joined his position and told him to get down before he was killed.

The water tower was about the length of a football field from the Pearl Harbor Naval Base and only 400 yards from the USS Arizona. Japanese pilots used the water tower as a pylon, a point to turn in their attack. Every gunner fired at him — 40 planes worth, he figures.

“Every one of them missed,” he said.

At noon, Conrad expected to be relieved. Instead he stayed on duty two days. Finally a passing colonel asked him how long he’d been on duty, took him to the field kitchen and then sent him to sleep.

“I was too tired to sleep,” he said. So he joined a squad looking for stray Japanese soldiers. After their patrols, he fell into an exhausted sleep in a cane field with a steel helmet for a pillow. He said Japanese on the island lit fires to guide troop transports in an invasion that materialized at Midway Island instead.

“I was numb,” he said. “I had my job assigned. You did your job, period, and you did it until you were relieved.”

He was supposed to become a tail gunner of B-17s that arrived in Hawaii during the raid.

“But there wasn’t anything left of them,” he said.

On Christmas Eve, his message saying he’d survived, arrived at his Michigan home. All three of his brothers joined the military.

Conrad later became a test pilot, missile engineer and small business owner. He was in the first class of flight officers with a serial number of T8. He started flying at 14 and learned to drive a car a decade later. In flying school, he was among five students trained by an old Alaska bush pilot. In the Army Air Corps, Conrad was voted “most likely to wash out,” but, in fact, he was the only one of them to graduate.

Nearly 2,700 miles across the Pacific from Pearl Harbor, Ed Dobeas of Great Falls was growing up in Bremerton, Wash., on Dec. 7, 1941.

“All I remember is a whole lot of people were upset,” he said.

He was 11 then and remembers hearing about Japanese people being picked up taking pictures of the shipyard.

“Everybody said they were spies,” he said.

People feared Puget Sound would be the next place the Japanese attacked. Soldiers were on guard, and in that time of rationing slipped the boy peanut butter and coffee.

He was more focused on the Germans than the Japanese enemies, though, because he’d been reading books in which they bragged about downing American and British aircraft.

“I don’t think we were as scared as we should have been,” he said.

Eventually, Dobeas put on his country’s uniform. A Marine, he served in China from 1945-49 and saw a country that had suffered much more from the Japanese. He remembered going out to dinner for a nice spaghetti dinner with a buddy. Leaving the restaurant, he saw a woman with young children. They were wrapped in burlap clothing, hungry and clearly desperate. The contrast with his own full belly, clothes and pay left an indelible mark on him.

“That’s what really rattled a young man,” he said.

Later, as Chinese Communists swept the country, Dobeas was at an airfield, packed and ready go to war. Vastly outnumbered — he remembers it as 50,000 to 4 million — Dobeas pegged his survival odds as low.

But instead, the mission was canceled and evacuation became the order of the day. He left the service two months before the United States went to war in Korea.

“I’d sure like to go back to China, to walk those halls and see how many ghosts we left behind,” he said. “I thought those three years would be the least important of my life, but it’s been turned around and become some of the most important times.”

Pearl Harbor and America’s entrance into World War II changed his life, but when Dobeas thinks of Japan’s involvement, his memories are tempered by thoughts of Joe Kawamoto of Quilcene, Wash., where Dobeas lived for a time. When the Kawamoto family was sent to an internment camp, neighbors paid his taxes and tended his farm, handing it back when they returned.

“Everybody loved Joe Kawamoto,” he said.

The feelings of those who were adults that infamous day in 1941 didn’t pass on to the younger generation, he said. And he figures Japanese hostility toward Americans died with the defeated generation, too.

Arley Wiseman of Great Falls was on the family farm between Choteau and Dutton when someone brought news of the attack at Pearl Harbor “so we turned on the radio and listened,” he said.

Wiseman was 16 that day. He remembers people afraid the attack would — as it did — lead to war.

He didn’t have any visions of fighting himself that day, but three days after high school graduation, he joined the Navy. A signalman, he saw action in the Pacific.

“Uncle Sam gave me quite a cruise — Australia to the Philippines,” he said.

Several times, Wiseman went through Pearl Harbor on his voyages. But it’s the image of the sunken Japanese merchant fleet Americans caught in Manila, the Philippines, that stuck with him. Pearl Harbor had been avenged, he said.

At Leyte Gulf, site of the biggest naval battle of the war, Wiseman celebrated Japan’s surrender.

“We were told by the port director we could shoot off pyrotechnics,” he said. “We had quite the fireworks, everybody shooting off their flares.”

Wiseman said as his ship picked up jeeps and weapons for the invasion of Japan and sailed north, he doesn’t remember anyone invoking Pearl Harbor after all that had happened in the meantime. The prevailing sentiment, instead, was “just that we all hated the Japanese,” he said. “I didn’t think I’d ever buy anything made in Japan.”

Eventually, he bought a motorcycle “and now I don’t give it a second thought,” he said. “Time has a way of healing things, I guess.”