PEARL HARBOR SURVIVORS
WARREN AND BETTY SCHOTT, HONOLULU, 1941.
I Don’t Want to Walk Without You
— JULES STYNE & FRANK LOESSER, 1941
Warren Schott was a 20-year-old sailor when a friend offered to set him up with the new girl in town. “Don’t do me any favors,” Warren replied. He wasn’t looking for love. But on the Fourth of July 1935, love found him anyway.
Warren had enlisted in the U.S. Navy earlier that year, during the height of the Great Depression, and he was in no hurry to settle down. He had plans to see the world. Besides, at the time he was earning just $21 a month. Still, he agreed to his friend’s plan—after all, it was Independence Day and he figured one date does not a commitment make.
Betty Forest had just moved to Los Angeles. Her date with Warren was the day after she got to town. New girl indeed! “I liked him,” she said with a smile. “He was fun.”
That one date became lost in a blur of other dates over the next two years. Because their mutual friends were dating, Warren and Betty spent a lot of time together. Eventually, Warren decided they might as well spend the rest of their lives together. Neither of them can quite recall the details of Warren’s proposal, but he is clear on one thing. “It wasn’t any bendedknee affair,” he said, chuckling.
While his proposal may have lacked romance, whatever he said proved enough to persuade Betty to become his bride. They were married April 2, 1938 at the Wee Kirk O’ the Heather Chapel at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles. Betty wore a dress her mother had made, which was crafted so beautifully that Betty didn’t realize until after the wedding that she’d been wearing the dress inside out! She was the only girl in the office where she worked, and was touched when the guys pitched in and bought her a wedding bouquet of pink roses.
BETTY SCHOTT WEDDING PORTRAIT, APRIL 2, 1938.
WARREN SCHOTT’S MILITARY ID.
Betty laughed and said, “We got married in a cemetery and honeymooned in Death Valley, so we got all that out of the way!”
They had barely adjusted to married life when the Navy ordered Warren to Ford Island, Hawaii, the Naval Air Station inside Pearl Harbor. At the time, he was a first class petty officer in charge of small boat repair. Betty had to stay behind and earn her own money for passage, but she was determined to join her husband. In August 1939 she arrived on tiny Ford Island.
“We had quarters just up from Battleship Row,” Warren recalled. “Our bedroom overlooked the runway.”
The couple was used to noise, but the sounds that woke them on Dec. 7, 1941, were unlike anything they’d heard before. Betty pulled on her robe and looked out the bathroom window.
“Warren!” she called, “there’s smoke and fire at the end of the runway.”
At first he didn’t believe her. But at his wife’s insistence, he went to another window and spotted a plane flying low overhead. “I saw the red balls on the wings of the plane,” he said. “I watched that plane torpedo the USS Utah. I said, ‘Betty, we’re at war!”’ They hustled out of their quarters and stopped to pick up a young mother and her two kids who lived downstairs. “It was total chaos,” said Warren of the surprise attack. “We didn’t know what to do.” The horrific noise of the bombs, planes and machine-gun fire added to the overwhelming terror. Warren gathered everyone in the neighbor’s car and took off for the administration building. “Barbara and I were in our nightgowns and robes, and shrapnel was falling from the sky,” Betty said.
“The road was shredded by machine-gun fire,” Warren said, as he recalled their frightening journey. Steering the vehicle away from the strafing fire of a Japanese warplane, he found shelter in a supply building. There Betty, her friend and the children, waited out the first wave of the attack. “They put us to work immediately,” Betty said. “We unloaded guns and filled fire extinguishers.”
Later, she and other Navy families found shelter in the bachelor officers’ barracks. They assumed the attack would be followed by a Japanese invasion of the island, but the invasion never came. “It was just chaotic,” Betty said, “so many injuries and dead in the water.”
WARREN AND BETTY AT THE ALOHA TOWER, JULY 1941.
Warren returned to his duty station. “We were at war, and none of us had any experience,” he said. “I took one of boats and picked up our fellows who were in the water along Battleship Row.” The men he pulled out of the harbor were covered in oil. Afterward, Betty discovered, “They got rid of every towel in my house trying to help clean them up. Finally they took down my kitchen curtains and used them.” Over the years they’ve talked about everything, but on one topic Warren remained silent. “He never talked about the people he pulled out of the oily water that morning,” Betty said. “Never.”
At 8:00 that night, Warren found Betty and brought her some clothes, since she’d worn her pajamas and bathrobe all day. When she returned home, she couldn’t find their kitten anywhere and feared the worst. Ten days later, Betty found her huddling in a small section of their stove.
Communication had been cut off to the mainland, so their families had no idea if they’d survived—Betty’s mother even wrote to President Roosevelt. Finally, a telegram arrived, relieving the minds of the worried parents back home.
Soon after the attack, the military began evacuating women and children, but Betty refused to leave. For the next year she steadfastly ignored the pleading of officials and stayed with Warren. Finally, in May 1942 they were transferred stateside. Ironically, Betty realized they’d ended up on the same ship, but since Warren was on duty, she had no way to tell him. To his delight, as he walked up the gangplank he spotted his wife waving at him from the ship’s rail. “We were practically the last people to move off Ford Island,” Betty said. They’d both survived the horror of the ‘day that will live in infamy,’ but time can’t erase the memories of the tragedy they watched unfold.
They traveled to Norfolk, VA where Warren attended a diesel engine program. On Dec. 6, 1942, the Schotts welcomed their first child, Warren Jr. (Skip). What better way to honor the lives of those lost than to celebrate a new life? The celebration was short-lived however; Warren was soon shipped off to Australia and Okinawa. Betty had moved to Cleveland to stay with his parents and Warren got to see his son briefly, when Skip was 10 days old. Two years would pass before he’d see him again, the first of several such extended separations. Betty shrugged off the hardship. “You just do what you have to do,” she said.
In January 1946, after 12 years in the Navy, Warren was honorably discharged. The family settled in Washington state and another son, Robert John (Bobby) arrived in November of 1946. And in 1949, Warren built the home they would share for 65 years. “We got the plans from Better Homes and Gardens magazine,” Betty said. The fact that Warren had never built a home before didn’t daunt him.
WARREN SCHOTT, 1945.
“Give him a challenge, and he can do it,” Betty said.
“I built every stick of it myself,” Warren said, as he looked with pride on the home he’d created for his family.
Warren worked for the Corp of Engineers, the Atlas Missile program and the General Services Administration (GSA) until he retired in 1973, at the age of 55. The Schotts recently celebrated their 75th anniversary and attribute the longevity of their marriage to friendship. A plaque hanging in their kitchen says, “Happiness is being married to your best friend.”
Betty said, “We just get along. We finish each others’ sentences.”
Her husband flashed a grin and deadpanned, “She’s put up with me all these years and she hasn’t hit me yet.”
As Pearl Harbor survivors, Betty acknowledges that fate has smiled kindly on them. “A lot has gone on in our lives, but we just seem to come out on the right side of it,” she said. “We’ve been incredibly lucky.”
“Everything’s built on friendship. He’s been my best friend for 77 years.”
—Betty Schott
WARREN AND BETTY SCHOTT, 2010. Photo courtesy Ralph Bartholdt
Warren died May 19, 2014