Donald Stratton > Quotes

“What happened on December 7, 1941, if it didn't kill us, changed us forever. President Roosevelt was right to call it "a date that will live in infamy." But for my fellow survivors and me, it also is alive in memory, like shrapnel left embeded in our brains because the surgeon thought it too dangerous to operate.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“As Lauren Bruner raced up the same ladder I had taken, a Zero fixed its sights on him. A blast from its guns, and bullets bit metal. One of those shots struck flesh, hitting the back of Lauren’s lower leg. He limped onto the sky platform, a trail of blood following him. The others of our team came after him, spilling into the metal enclosure, called the “director,” where we directed the antiaircraft guns—Harold Kuhn, Russell Lott, Earl Riner, George Hollowell, Alvin Dvorak, Fred Zimmerman, and Frank Lomax.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“We were sitting ducks. Not just the Arizona, but every ship in the harbor. And there was nothing we could do about it. The dive bombers were too low for our guns, and, almost two miles above, the horizontal bombers were too high. With few exceptions, our planes, which the Japanese strategically hit first, never got a chance to get off the ground. We couldn’t even make a run for it into open waters, because it took two and a half hours for the boilers of a battleship to fire up.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“I started hand over hand across the line, feeling a surge of adrenaline as I went. The first half was okay, and I made it to the midpoint in good time. But then the rope curved upward, and I had my full weight pulling against me. I could feel the heat from the burning oil spill below me. The exposed tissue on my legs and arms felt the heat. The pain was excruciating. My hands, raw as they were, kept going. Somehow they kept going, one hand over the other over the other. I refused to let go. Maybe I felt I would be letting the men down if I did. They were all rooting for me. Or perhaps I kept going because if I let go, the rest might not make the attempt for fear of following my fate. I knew they had to get off that platform or the heat would overcome them. Joe extended a hand and his hearty encouragement as he snatched me from the flames. I was safe, for now, but I was exhausted.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“ON DECEMBER 6, 1941, our naval base was put on Alert No. 1, a warning to watch for small acts of sabotage, here and there. For this reason the airplanes were bunched together. And the ships, too, were arranged in tight rows. The consensus was that if you bunched everything close together, they would be easier to defend.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“On December 6, no one on Oahu was more overconfident than the military,” writes historian Thurston Clarke, summarizing the attitude on the eve of December 7. Clarke quotes Richard Sutton, a young ensign attached to Admiral Claude Bloch: “We had the supreme overconfidence a great athlete has who has never been beaten—we all thought we were invincible.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“Journalists were among those who thought that way. Clarke Beach, for example, in a September 6 article for the local newspaper, the Star-Bulletin, wrote, “A Japanese attack on Hawaii is regarded as the most unlikely thing in the world, with one chance in a million of being successful.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“The battle of Leyte Gulf was short, lasting only from October 23–26, 1944. But don’t let the duration fool you. The Philippine Sea, around the chain of islands where the battle was fought, was a roiling cauldron for those four days. On the morning of the 23rd, that sea held the largest assemblage of ships, in terms of tonnage, the world had ever seen. By the evening of the 26th, Leyte Gulf had taken more tonnage to its murky depths than in any other naval battle in history. The Japanese lost four aircraft carriers, three battleships, six heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, 12 destroyers, one destroyer escort, over 600 planes, and 10,500 sailors and pilots. The Allied forces, on the other hand, lost one light carrier, two escort carriers, two destroyers, one destroyer escort, around 200 planes, and a little more than a thousand men. As a result of this devastating blow, Japan never again launched a major naval offensive.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“We sent volley after volley of antiaircraft fire their way, the shells filling the sky with puffs of black smoke. Antiaircraft shells didn’t explode on impact like other rounds. They had fuses inside them, that could be set to explode, say, fifteen seconds after it left the muzzle of the gun. If you found the shells were exploding too low, you adjusted the next ones to go off twenty or twenty-five seconds after they were shot from the gun.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“I stood in a stupor and would have continued to stand there were it not for a breeze that parted the smoke, revealing a sailor from the Vestal. It was Joe George. He had been following orders to cut the lines that tethered his ship to the Arizona so they could head to open waters. Since there was no one on the Arizona to help on our end, he was taking a fire ax and cutting the lines on his. We called to Joe through a seam in the smoke, motioning for him to throw us a monkey’s fist, which was a lightweight heaving line knotted around a metal ball and attached to a thicker rope. It was a long shot, but our desperate idea was that if we could secure a rope between the two ships, then perhaps we could make it to the Vestal. As Joe rummaged for the ball, I looked at my arms. A sheath of skin from each had peeled off and was draping them. I tore off one length of skin and threw it on the floor of the platform. Then the other. The remaining tissue was a webwork of pink and white and red, some of it black, all of it throbbing. But that didn’t matter. My focus narrowed to Joe George and the ball in his hand. He threw it, but it fell short. He gathered up the line and lobbed it again. Short once more. Joe was perhaps the strongest man in the harbor, an All-Navy boxer whom I described earlier as an “ox.” He was the only man with a prayer of getting that line to us—if he couldn’t do it, then it was impossible. The reality started to sink in: we were going to burn alive. Joe collected the rope once more. For a third time, he tossed it with all his strength. It sailed from one wounded ship to another, across flames, smoke, and carnage. I tracked it all the way and caught it in the air, pulling the smaller line until I felt the main rope. I tied the rope to the railing, cinching it tight, and Joe secured his end. The rope stretched seventy feet to span the water below us, which was forty-five feet down, slicked with fuel that had caught fire. Our only hope was to make it to the Vestal, hand over hand across the rope. But the flesh had been burned off all of our hands, and using those raw fingers and palms to get us across the chasm that separated us would be at best excruciating, and most likely impossible.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“That kind of thinking went as high as the secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox. Speaking to a private gathering in Washington on the evening of December 4, he announced: “I want you to know that whatever happens, the United States Navy is ready! Every man at his post, every ship at its station. . . . Whatever happens, the Navy is not going to be caught napping.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“THE ARIZONA WAS scheduled to return to Bremerton, Washington, in late November for an overhaul in their shipyard. We were all looking forward to it. It meant we would get to spend December in the States, celebrate Christmas there, maybe even be given leave to go home. In October, though, those plans abruptly changed. We were on maneuvers from October 18 to 26, and the weather was foggy and rainy almost the entire time. The schedule had been stepped up during that month. None of the officers told us why. We wondered what they knew that we didn’t. Of course, we didn’t ask. They added zigzag maneuvers—timed turns made in unison with other ships—to the normal routine of target practice. They were evasive moves to be used if submarines were in the area or whenever she was in range of an enemy’s big guns.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“Since 1982, the Navy has allowed survivors from the Arizona to be interred there, along with a full military service. They can either have their ashes scattered over the wreck, or they can have their ashes put in an urn that a Navy diver will place in the barbette of the No. 2 turret.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“It’s a shame it has been relegated to a junk heap in the Navy’s backyard. It carries so much history, yet it is cared for so little. December 2016 will likely be my last time to go back. I look forward to reuniting with several Pearl Harbor survivors at the anniversary, especially the other four survivors from the Arizona: Lauren Bruner, ninety-six, from La Mirada, California Lou Conter, ninety-five, from Grass Valley, California Lonnie Cook, ninety-five, from Morris, California Ken Potts, ninety-four, from Provo, Utah”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“Okinawa was the last major battle of the bloodiest war the world had ever seen. (It has been pointed out to me that, by virtue of fighting in both the Pearl Harbor attack and the Okinawa invasion, I can claim a small footnote in history for having served at the opening shots and the final battle of America’s Second World War.) The campaign claimed the lives of more than a quarter million people. Of those who died, close to 140,000 were civilians living on the island; 107,539 were Japanese servicemen; and 12,274 were U. S. servicemen. The battle pitted the greatest U. S. naval flotilla ever assembled against the most tenacious of enemies, both in the air and on the ground. In the sky, kamikaze pilots flew to their deaths as they ravaged the U. S. fleet. On the land, Japanese soldiers fought to the death rather than surrender. The radar picket ships took the biggest beating of the U. S. naval ships engaged at Okinawa, all the while protecting the rest of our ships from 1,900 kamikaze attacks. Fifteen of the picket ships were sunk; 45 were damaged. Causalties of those serving on those ships were 1,348 dead and 1,586 wounded.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“Men stumbled around on the deck like human torches, each collapsing into a flaming pile of flesh. Others jumped into the water. When they did, you could hear them sizzle. James Cory, one of the Marines on board, recalled what he saw from the quarterdeck: “These people were ‘zombies,’ in essence. They were burned completely white. Their skin was just as white as if you’d taken a bucket of whitewash and painted it white. Their hair was burned off; their eyebrows were burned off. . . . Their arms were held away from their bodies, and they were stumping along the decks.” While that horrific scene was unfolding below us, billows of black smoke pushed into where we were, stinging our eyes, filling our nostrils, our throats, our lungs. We stumbled to our feet, coughing out smoke, unable to catch our breaths because the fire had also burned off our oxygen.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“By Saturday afternoon the wind had died down, the sun was warm, and the sky was clear, with the exception of a few cumulus clouds that had gathered to watch a civilian football game. The University of Honolulu stadium brimmed with twenty-five thousand hometown fans cheering their Silverswords in their game against the Willamette Bearcats from Oregon.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“8:06 A.M. A great sucking sound, like a whoosh, rocked the ship and everyone in it with concussive force. A 1,760-pound, armor-piercing bomb, dropped from ten thousand feet above, had penetrated four steel decks to the ammunition magazine. The blast blew the No. 1 turret into the air, where it came crashing back onto the deck. A plume of black smoke spewed out of the forward smokestack, and an expanding fireball shot five to six hundred feet into the air, engulfing those of us in the director.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“The next morning the Arizona took on a full load of fuel oil, nearly 1.5 million gallons, in preparation for her upcoming trip to Bremerton. The trade winds blew steadily over the island that morning, but the heavy smell of oil still lingered. Besides that, the ship held 180,000 gallons of aviation fuel for the scouting planes it had on board and over a million pounds of gunpowder in the forward magazines for the big guns. There was enough fuel on board to get us to Japan, and nearly enough firepower to sink the entire Imperial Fleet, should Hirohito be foolhardy enough to fire so much as a round across our bow.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“Joe George, so I heard, had liberty that Friday night as well and was slated to fight in a “smoker.” Smokers were boxing matches held at the recreation center in Honolulu. If you won, you wouldn’t get money, which was against Navy rules, but you could receive a gift of some sort, such as a watch. You would then turn around and sell the watch, often to the very person who gave it to you. George did that a lot. After the smoker, he celebrated his win by getting drunk, which led to a fight with one of his own shipmates. Well, Shore Patrol came and broke up the fight, then took George to the ship’s brig. The next morning he was escorted to the captain’s mast to face Captain Young. The captain was so angry to see George disgrace his ship again and bring dishonor to his shipmates, he lashed out at him. “I wish I could take you to the forecastle and have all hands kick the shit out of you. But since I can’t, I’m going to give you a summary court-martial.” Joe was immediately put on report and sentenced to become a prisoner at large—PAL, for short—which meant he didn’t have to do time in the brig; he only had to be watched and restricted by the ship’s master-of-arms, who happened to be a friend. And so, on the night of December 6, instead of being locked belowdecks in the brig, he spent it sleeping under the stars in the forecastle.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“The flames swallowed the foremast where we were. As they shot through the two openings of the enclosure, we shielded ourselves by taking shelter under some of the equipment, our hands covering our mouths and eyes. But the flames found us, catching us all on fire, burning off our clothes, our hair, our skin.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“The fleet sailed into harbor on Friday, December 5, and tugboats helped position the ships so they could tie up to their respective quays, which were concrete structures built in the water close to shore, to which ships fastened their mooring lines. It took the better part of the day to get all the ships moored.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“What happened was that all the battleships had been following with precision the directions the officer on deck had given. Each was sailing in a straight line, then, on his command they made a sharp starboard turn. Somehow the Oklahoma fell out of sync with the rest of us, causing the accident. I was asleep in my hammock at the time, roughly between ten and eleven at night, and the collision jolted me awake. It scraped off the port-side blisters—honeycombed metal buffers that had been installed on the outer hull to absorb a hit from a torpedo—and tore a hole in the hull big enough to drive a hay truck through. The major consequence of the mishaps was that we had to spend time in drydock to get patched up, delaying our trip to Bremerton. And so instead of sailing for the West Coast in late November 1941 as scheduled, we would be remaining at Pearl Harbor through December. There’s no moping in the Navy, but the collision certainly put a dent in morale when we got the news, since we were all looking forward to being stateside for Christmas.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“On maneuvers, designated ships would pull dummy targets ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty miles out from where our ships were. The targets were the size of a five-room house, and we could hit the target three out of five times from twenty miles away. To give perspective, a man with an unaided eye can see roughly only twelve miles when at sea, to where the horizon disappears. The shell goes eight miles past that. They weighed anywhere from 1,800 to 2,500 pounds; they were so big you could see them flying through the air. The purpose of these big guns was to pound a site. To hit it again and again and again until it was pummeled. It could be a beachhead, or a fortress in the hills overlooking that beach.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“IN ALL, THERE were nine investigations into Pearl Harbor. The government didn’t waste any time starting theirs. On December 22, 1941, Supreme Court justice Owen Roberts began hearings in Hawaii. A month later, Justice Roberts submitted his findings to President Roosevelt. Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, and General Walter Short, commanding general of the Hawaiian Department, were both found to be in “dereliction of duty” and were promptly demoted to lesser ranks and retired.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“One by one, each of us miraculously made it to the other side. We hadn’t fallen. And we hadn’t been hit by machine gun fire. There wasn’t enough adrenaline in us to get us through that ordeal. We had help from the good Lord, I’m sure of that. One thing is for certain: had Joe George not stood up for us—had he not been a rebel and refused to cut the line connecting the Vestal to the Arizona—we would have been cooked to death on that platform. If anyone deserved a Medal of Honor that day, in my opinion, it was him. And I know at least five others who would second that.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“We got out of drydock on November 12 and went to sea again. This time we stayed out longer than normal, around two weeks, as I recall. We were on high alert, because there had been numerous sonar blips indicating the presence of submarines. Though we fired in their direction from time to time, we never hit one. Mostly they ran silent and deep, but they were running shallower now, at periscope depth, apparently not to attack but merely to observe. They were charting our movements, we surmised, trying to detect patterns in our movement, looking for any points of vulnerability.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“In fact, debris from the Arizona that rained down on the Tennessee caused more damage than the two bombs dropped on her by the Japanese.”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor

“First, the property loss: •  U.S. Navy aircraft: 31 damaged; 92 destroyed •  U.S. Army Air Corps aircraft: 128 damaged; 77 destroyed • Battleships: 6 damaged; 2 destroyed • Cruisers: 3 damaged • Destroyers: 3 damaged • Auxiliaries: 4 damaged; 1 destroyed”
― Donald Stratton, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor