Ira "Ike" Schab had just showered, put on a clean sailor's uniform and closed his locker aboard the USS Dobbin when he heard a call for a fire rescue party. He went topside to see the USS Utah capsizing and Japanese planes in the air. He scurried back below deck to grab boxes of ammunition and joined a daisy chain of sailors feeding shells to an anti-aircraft gun up above. Though he was only 140 pounds as a 21-year-old, he somehow found the strength to lift boxes weighing almost twice that, the AP reports. "We were pretty startled. Startled and scared to death," Schab, 103, said at his home in Beaverton, Oregon. On Thursday, he returned to Pearl Harbor.
Eighty-two years later, Schab was among the five survivors at a ceremony to remember the more than 2,300 servicemen killed in the attack that propelled the US into World War II. Six men had been expected, but one was not feeling well, organizers said. The number of Pearl Harbor survivors has been rapidly shrinking. David Kilton of the National Park Service noted that for many years survivors volunteered to share their experiences with visitors to the historic site. That's not possible anymore. "We could be the best storytellers in the world and we can't really hold a candle to those that lived it sharing their stories firsthand," Kilton said. Now, he added, "the opportunity shifts to reflect even more so on the sacrifices that were made, the stories that they did share."
The Department of Veterans Affairs doesn't keep statistics on how many Pearl Harbor survivors are still living. But department data show that of the 16 million who served in World War II, only about 120,000 were alive as of October and that an estimated 131 die each day. There were an estimated 87,000 military personnel on Oahu at the time of the attack. Schab never spoke much about Pearl Harbor until about a decade ago. He's since been sharing his story with his family, student groups, and history buffs. And he's returned to Pearl Harbor several times since. The reason? "To pay honor to the guys that didn't make it," he said.
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Thursday's ceremony was held on a field across the harbor from the USS Arizona Memorial, a white structure that sits above the rusting hull of the battleship, which exploded in a fireball and sank shortly after being hit. More than 1,100 sailors and Marines from the Arizona were killed, and more than 900 are entombed inside. A moment of silence began at 7:55am, the time the attack began on Dec. 7, 1941. Harry Chandler, 102, who was a Navy Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class, raised the flag at a mobile hospital in the hills above Pearl Harbor in 1941. Gazing over the water from his front-row seat on the ceremony grounds on Thursday, Chandler said the memories of the USS Arizona blowing up still come back to him today. "I look out there and I can still see what's going on. I can still see what was happening," he said.
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