Pearl Harbor survivors gather for `final reunion'

HONOLULU -- Donald Robinett came directly to the sign-in area for Pearl Harbor survivors when he arrived here this week.

"I am trying to find my shipmates," the 89-year-old veteran announced excitedly. "I want to see which ones are here."

A volunteer at the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, one of the groups organizing a massive reunion to mark the 65th anniversary of the Japanese attack on U.S. forces here, began flipping through a log book until she came to Robinett's ship, the USS Tracy, a small mine-laying vessel that had been in port that infamous day. "Sir," she said sadly, patting the old sailor on his shoulder, "you're the only one here."

In the decades since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, countless survivors have made the long journey back to Hawaii every five years to remember comrades who were lost and to catch up with those who lived but later went their separate ways. They drink Scotch and tell war stories; they brag and weep. They often just sit together and say nothing at all.

But this year's reunion holds an urgency that hasn't been part of gatherings past: Most Pearl Harbor survivors, nearing their 90s or even older, say it will be their final trip back to this place that changed the course of their lives and their nation forever. Event organizers--many of them children of survivors who are ailing or already have died--pragmatically are calling this the "final reunion." And survivors' extended families, including children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, are coming along to the reunion in unprecedented numbers to glimpse history firsthand through their loved one's eyes before the opportunity is gone.

"This is their last swan song," said Sue Marks, an event volunteer whose father, a Pearl Harbor survivor, died a decade ago. "They know that a lot of them either won't be around in five years or won't be able to make the long trip."

On Thursday morning, some 1,500 survivors, friends and family members will gather with 2,000 other guests and dignitaries for the 65th anniversary commemoration at Kilo Pier on Naval Station Pearl Harbor, looking out at the USS Arizona Memorial a half-mile away.

Living history

The amount of living history gathered in one place this week is almost mind-boggling. An estimated 450 American survivors are in Honolulu. They are easy to spot by their hats that announce "Pearl Harbor Survivor" and where they were stationed on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese planes appeared through Oahu's Kolekole Pass to drop their deadly payload on the unsuspecting U.S. forces below.

Yet these numbers represent just a fraction of the estimated 4,000 to 6,000 Pearl Harbor survivors still living--many gravely ill or too frail to travel. Over the last decade, the number of survivors to attend these memorial events has plummeted. The same is true of membership in the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, the largest national organization for survivors; chapters all across the U.S. are closing as members die.

"We had more than 650 survivors come for the 60th anniversary out here five years ago," said George Sullivan, chairman of the Arizona Memorial Museum Association. "Our numbers are falling fast."

The survivors in Honolulu this week, many hunched, some in wheelchairs, men deeply wrinkled yet still trying to trade a history lesson for a quick kiss on the cheek, collectively know one thing: They defied death 65 years ago, but the inevitable is creeping up on them. They know this from the pain in their backs and hips. They know this as their eyesight fades and their hearing fails. And they know this because every five years, when they return to Pearl Harbor and find that their old buddies are not there, it's a reminder that their friends either couldn't endure the arduous Hawaii flight or died within the last few years.

"At our little happy hours each night you see the guys sitting alone who don't have any old shipmates to speak with because they've all died," said Debbie Marks, 35, who became involved in the survivors association because of her late grandfather. "I just spend the night walking around trying to get the ones who are alone to start talking to each other instead."

Impromptu reunions, always emotional, are even more so now that survivors have lost so many friends to illness and age. On Tuesday, as two men spotted each other from opposite sides of the escalator at a hotel where the bulk of the survivors are staying, one man shouted: "Thank God, Stanley! You made it another five years!"

Survivor John Rutledge, who was a member of the band aboard the USS California, has been waiting for one reunion in particular. On the evening of Dec. 6, 1941, Rutledge had played piano at a "Battle of the Bands" at Pearl Harbor when a 10-year-old girl named Patricia Thompson won over the crowd with her flawless dancing. A young sailor Rutledge remembers only as "Jack" had gone out to the floor to be her partner, and the two won the dance contest that night. Both--unknowingly living less than 20 miles from one another in California all these years--have traveled back to Hawaii for the 65th reunion and have promised to dance together at a dinner Thursday night.

"I want a good seat for that," said Rutledge, 87.

Not only do mostof the survivors expect this to be their last reunion trip back to Hawaii, they know that the memorial site at Pearl Harbor will look dramatically different if they do return. Plans call for ground to be broken Dec. 7, 2007, on a $50 million Pearl Harbor Memorial Museum and Visitor Center. The state-of-the-art facility will take some two years to complete and will feature interactive exhibits and twice the visitor capacity of the current site.

Stories preserved

The new museum will have an increased focus on the very people back in Hawaii this week: the survivors. While lists have long been compiled of service members who died on Dec. 7, 1941, historians are attempting to create a complete database of all who lived to tell their stories.

At hotels throughout Honolulu, audio booths have been set up in the hopes of getting survivors to record their oral histories of the day of the attacks. The project was launched two months ago; already some 200 recordings have been collected.

Many of the survivors are taking their role as dwindling witnesses solemnly. For the first time in the history of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association reunions in Hawaii, so many survivors brought grandchildren and great-grandchildren that organizers had to make sure all meals included a children's menu. Of the more than 2,000 people who registered for events, fewer than one-fourth were survivors; the rest were their families. Still, some survivors seem to be carrying the historian mantle more seriously.

"There's one guy here who brought out 15 members of his family," said Mal Middlesworth, an Elgin, Ill., native who is national president of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. "But he gave them Pearl Harbor history classes and each of them had to pass a test before he would pay for their trip."

At a survivors reception on Tuesday night, Henry Klump, 90, sat surrounded by a dozen members of his family. He has attended the Pearl Harbor reunion in Hawaii every five years since the early 1980s, but he worries this may be his last.

Klump's family, all singers, surprised him by taking the stage and performing a song in his honor: the Judds' hit that begins with the line, "Grandpa, tell me 'bout the good ol' days." Klump, who had been assigned to the USS Grebe in 1941, was teary-eyed at the end of the song as he shouted to the crowd, "Those are my grandkids!"

As the survivors gathered, a young man circulated through the crowd with a DVD of the movie "Pearl Harbor." He politely asked the veterans to sign the DVD case. George Smith, a survivor originally from Monmouth, Ill., who served with aviator Edward O'Hare--for whom one of Chicago's airports is named--on the battleship USS New Mexico, earnestly gave his autograph.

That night, as all the festivities took place, Robinett continued to search for USS Tracy survivors, men like him who were unharmed by the bombs and later sent to bear stretchers on the USS Pennsylvania, where 29 men were either killed or missing in action. But as the hours passed, no one else showed up.

"They better hurry up," Robinett said, crestfallen. "I don't have much longer to wait."