Flashback 1991: Pearl Harbor terror recalled at rites here

The 50th anniversary was front page news

  
     Today is Pearl Harbor Day — a Sunday, as it was in 1941. I will fly the flag. Can't say whether the newspaper will run anything — memories fade, passions cool, and 84 years after the event, only about a dozen survivors of the Japanese attack remain alive. Time was, if the Sun-Times didn't mark the anniversary, prominently, readers would complain bitterly. This isn't a column — I was a general assignment reporter at the time, reporting on the Dec. 7 anniversary commemoration — other stories had run the day before. Starting on the front page.

     How bad was it at Pearl Harbor? Enough for Arlandres Dixon to suddenly feel homesick for the Southern city he joined the Navy to escape
     "It was one of the few times in my life I missed Jackson, Miss.," said Dixon of the moment he stood on the deck of the U.S.S. Dale and watched Japanese bombers rip into the harbor. "I was scared as a fox with a pack of hounds behind him."

     The 72-year-old former gunner was one of hundreds of veterans who gathered at Daley Plaza on Saturday for a solemn ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. 

     Maj. Gen. James H. Mukoyama Jr., a third generation Japanese American, said honoring the Pearl Harbor dead should not mean rekindling bigotry against Japanese Americans, many of whom fought bravely in World War II and almost all of whom were loyal citizens despite official government outrages committed against them.

     "During World War II, tens of thousands of Japanese Americans were taken from their homes," he said. "In Hawaii, (they) were forced to wear black badges on their clothes, reminiscent of the cloth badges Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany. The only crime committed by these American citizens were their parents were born in Japan."

     Despite somber speeches, the moment of silence, and the Marine bugler playing taps, it was still a gathering of veterans, complete with hearty handshakes, slaps on the back, more than one dirty joke, and a lot of reminiscing.

     Dixon, whose destroyer was the first ship to make it out of the harbor, recalled using blowtorches and bolt cutters to break into the ship's magazine to get at shells because the officer with the keys was on shore.

     Another attack survivor who was present was Clyde Leland Ernst, 85, who 50 years ago was chief warrant carpenter on Ford Island. He was warming up the engines of the ferryboat he operated when he saw waves of Japanese torpedo planes — at eye level, it seemed — pass by.

     "I couldn't believe it. I just couldn't believe it," said Ernst, who would spend the next three days ferrying wounded to the mainland hospital. He said that despite his memories of burned sailors, he holds no animosity toward the Japanese today.

     "I've outgrown that," he said. "Time heals the deepest wounds."

       — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 8, 1991