Pearl Harbor
 

Remember 77 years ago today

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

I wasn't born yet at that time, but I have seen a lot of actual film footage of the attack. That and 911 will always remind me that freedom isn't free, and we as a country must always be vigilant.

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

We all owe it to the "Greatest Generation", we will never see something like them again. If anyone gets the chance, visit the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. Last month I spent a day and a half there and it wasn't enough. All Americans should see it!

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

I forgot about that....usually remember as Dec 7 was my wedding anniversary (went the same way as Pearl)

GB

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

A true story told by my friend Bill.

William Malpas
Pearl Harbor Piling
April, 2014

In 1975 or ‘76 Parker and I were thinking about logging. He had a cat to skid the logs, but we needed a way to load the trucks. I went down to a heavy equipment auction in South San Francisco to see what they might have in the way of a loading machine.
It was a three-hour drive down, and I’d left early, so there was time to kill before the auction started. I went into a coffee shop nearby and sat at the counter. A grizzly old guy next to me looked at my suspenders, “You a logger?”
“Yeah, I’m going to the auction next door to find a loader.”
“I drove truck up in Washington before the war.”
“Where?”
“Up east of Everett.”
“How did YOU load?”
“With a little hoist and a hay-rack boom mostly.”
“With end tongs?”
“Yeah sometimes. Sometimes we muscled them on with peavys, it took a lot of men to get a load on. I’ll tell you what the trickiest load was… piling for Pearl Harbor, must have been 1939 or so…”
And he was off, telling one of his good stories to a captive audience willing enough to suspend disbelief.
“We built a set of brow logs cross-wise to the road, see. The loading donkey was at one end, so we could yard the piling up parallel to the road. The front truck was no problem, it was a Mack or a Chevy, and had bunks and blocks. But instead of a trailer, we used another truck in back and cribbed up with 8x8’s off the frame.”
“How’d you attach the cribbing to the frame?”
“I don’t remember, maybe we chained it, but I think we drilled and bolted it. It was tricky, because the cribbing wouldn’t pivot like a bunk. So turning tightened and loosened the chains. That was nice timber, no limbs, maybe thirty inches on the butt and eighteen inches at the top, a hundred and sixty feet long – the best logs we’d ever seen.
Anyway, we had those trucks positioned, then we got all the men on the show and rolled the piling up onto the trucks with peavys. Butt end forward, the trucks were about a hundred feet apart, so fifty or sixty feet were hanging past the back truck. We could put three on, and that over-loaded the trucks considerably.
I drove the front truck, and getting down that mountain was scary as hell. The piling rubbed the bank on the outside turns, like to swipe my truck right off the road, and the piling was way out over the canyon on the inside turns, like to twist the cribbing right off the back truck. The trucks would go, but there was no way they’d stop. And they’d get high-centered when either truck went down in a dip, the piling would drag on the road, so we had to pour on the coal. A big problem was crossing the railroad tracks in Everett. The grade was built up from street level, the first time across it broke the wrapper and hung up and we came to a complete stop – blocking traffic and blocking the train. I forget how we finally got loose, maybe the railroad crew had a Simplex jack and we jacked it, pulled forward till the jack tipped over, again and again. The railroad crew had to pound the track back so it didn’t de-rail the train in the middle of town. After that we learned to hit that track at a pretty good clip. It still peeled what was left of the bark off the bottoms of the logs though.
Anyway, we were feeling pretty cocky when we pulled into the Navy Yard with that first load, the first of many. Days of work, the limit of all that big steam logging machinery and just about all the men could handle. ‘Let’s see what you sea stiffs can do with this!’ I reported to the Officer of the Day and he told me where he wanted the trucks.
About an hour later, here came the biggest crane you ever saw. As big as a city block with steam hoists all roofed over, a hundred feet in the air, on steel lattice towers mounted on four flatcars, rolling down rails on the dock. It picked up all three of our piles at once like they were matchsticks…”
I’ve been telling, or re-telling this story ever since. Sort of tongue-in-cheek, a west coast Paul Bunyan tale. Not that I doubted that piling came out of the Washington woods and got driven into the coral sand at Pearl Harbor, it’s just that I know from personal experience that logging stories tend to get better over time, logs get longer, checks get bigger, wrecks get worse, and this was a good one. And then, almost forty years later, a re-print of an old photo came up on EBay – and there’s the old guy’s Chevy, there’s the cribbing, there he is sitting with his door open, looking at the camera. And there are the smooth bellies of the logs that he so carefully polished on the way down the mountain.

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

Yes without the greatest generation we may now not be free!! My father in law was a Hellcat pilot in the South Pacific. Shot down twice but made it thru without a scratch.

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

Incredible story.
I hung on every word. Then a photo! Just awesome.
I have to agree. The greatest generation.
I thank them all.

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

I remember Pearl Harbor some but 12/8/41 even better. I was in the second grade and while waiting outside of the school for it to open, the older kids told us that the "Japs" were coming and that they were going to kill us. We young'uns were all frightened and crying. My father's youngest brother was a Marine and fought them on Tinian Island. He died in 2003 and would never ride in a Japanese car. He brought a lot of souvenirs home when the war ended.

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

Every year on Pearl Harbor day my sweet mother who would never say a cross word about anyone always came up with "G" "D" Japs ! She and my father graduated from High School in 1942. All of the boys in her class went to fight leaving behind all the girls and many never came back!!!

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

J. FRANKLIN and Bill

Thanks for taking the time to relate that story. I have always reveled in the daily events of those decades. To those that lived it, it was just another day.

Dec 7th excepted!!!

They all stood together to get it done. When I was young I recall living with my Gram. We lived on the county line. On occasion a vagabond (Hobo) wandering down the road would encounter us kids and perhaps ask for water. We'd get Gram, she would sit the man at her table. Feed and converse, sometimes broken English.

When riding to town, any time we saw someone walking we'd stop and offer a lift.

These times I miss.

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

I took this picture of the Arizona from the fantail of my minesweeper in June of 1968. We stopped here in Pearl Harbor on my way home from Viet Nam.
BILL WELLS

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

Bob.... thank you for the photo!! To visit this is site very humbling. I too have have visited here in July of 1968 on my way home from Viet Nam.

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

lIKE 41

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

Thank you Mr. Franklin for that story. The first house I bought, at age 21, in '74 was just East of Everett (across the trestle). I know the area well. I have been to the Arizona site and memorial. I read an awful lot of books, especially in the winter, and sometimes I try to read something that isn't about WW2. I always finish them because it's a rule of mine, but the next one and the next one and the next one ARE about WW2. Just bought 10 more such books at a used book sale. WW2 books and firewood are both stocked up for the coming months. Thanks again, you are a good writer!

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

I was very young. All I remember is blankets over the windows in San Francisco, waving a small flag during the VE Day parade, A squadron of P38's flying over SF, the "JAPS SURRENDER" headlines, Newsreels at the movies, and my older brother coming home from the Merchant Marine. Then came a flood of Made in Occupied Japan toys.

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

same here GB I've lots of books stacked up mostly on WW i and II. I just can't help myself when I see them in the shops and I finish them too.....perhaps I should go see a Doctor.

Graeme

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

"A date that shall live in infamy"

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

Sadly, our youth know very little of this.

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

Thank God for all of our veterans who served then and now. Without them, we would probably all be speaking another language.
I was one year old then they struck Pearl Harbor.
Six of my brothers served in the military. One came home in a casket.
Remember to always thank a veteran for his or her service.

Re: Pearl Harbor
 

I came from Hawaii, as my Dad took a job at Pearl Harbor at the beginning of 1946, and my Mom took the three of us boys over later that year.
My Dad was in charge of the group that initially began the removal of "remains" from the Arizona, before it was decided to seal it up, as it is to this day.
None of this stuff is taught in schools anymore that I know of. Just sad.
Jim