OPPOSITE: Later in the war, after recovering from wounds received on December 7, 1941, Everett Hyland (right) is awarded the Purple Heart.
My brother was in the Marine Corps, a seagoing Marine with the USS Indianapolis detachment. And they were pretty big boys in those days. I figured that I’d somehow like to serve with him, but I could never make Sea School—I wasn’t tall enough. He was over six feet, and I only hit five feet eight in those days. So I joined the Navy thinking I could somehow get with him eventually. When we both ended up in the Pacific Fleet, I put in a request to be transferred to the Indianapolis, and it never was approved. The only thing I could surmise was that he was in the Marines and I was a sailor, and that may have had something to do with the decision. They didn’t tell a seaman second anything in those days, other than do this and do that!
So, I enlisted in November 1940. I went through boot camp in Newport, Rhode Island. They sent me to communications school in San Diego, and from there I went into the Pacific Fleet. I got assigned to the USS Pennsylvania in the summer of 1941. I went from San Diego to San Pedro on the USS Crane, and I was one of many passengers going to San Pedro to get on ships we had been assigned to. They were ready to move out, and we sailed for Pearl Harbor about a week after I got aboard.
We pulled into Hawaii that summer, and it was like I’d entered paradise! You know, you’re eighteen years old and you’re in a place you’ve only heard about. There used to be a radio program called Hawaii Calls, and I used to listen to it on Sunday afternoons. It would always start out,
“From under the banyan on Waikiki Beach….” And they broadcast this
show live from the old Moana Hotel on Waikiki. So I’d always had this idyllic image of Hawaii, and to actually be there was like a dream. When I got there, I went out to Waikiki to see the Moana Hotel, but as a sailor you weren’t allowed near those places. All I could do was look at the outside of the place. When I went back for the fiftieth anniversary in 1991, a buddy of mine, Coke McKenzie, and I were sitting on the veranda of the Moana and I said to him, “Fifty years ago if we’d have tried this they’d have kicked our butts right out into the middle of the street!”
When I went on shore leave in Honolulu, sorry to say, I was with the big boys, drinking. We used to hit Chinatown, that downtown area, and that was all there was to Honolulu then, it was pretty small. We used to hit some of the barrooms, but there wasn’t too much to do. Some of the fellas would go out to Waikiki to the beach, and I went swimming out there a couple of times with them. But, believe me, this was good duty!
I was a radio striker, which, in lay terms, means a radio apprentice. I had learned Morse code, and I was allowed to stand a certain number of watches, but I was mainly a “go-fer.” During GQ my battle station was the radio room, and the radio rooms in the old battlewagons were way down in the middle of the ship. Of course, in order to keep your watertight integrity, everybody’s locked in. And I figured if we ever go to war, the last place in the world I want to be was locked down in the middle of the ship. I wanted to be topside, so if something happened I could get off. Not very good thinking as things turned out! So I volunteered for antenna repair, which put my battle station topside.
On Saturday, December 6, I was on the Pennsylvania, and we were in dry dock at the time. I really can’t recall what I did that day, and it wasn’t until fifty years later that I was able to piece together what happened on Sunday morning, December 7. We had a ship’s reunion in Hawaii for the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor. I walked in wearing my name tag, and there were tables set up with about eight or ten fellows around each one. I sat down with my name tag and a fellow across from me started to cry. He was a radioman first, Ben Engelken, from Kansas, and on the morning of December 7 when he saw the antenna repair squad go topside—I was in that group—and he heard later that we were hit by a bomb, he assumed we all got killed. But I was the sole survivor and was sent straight to the hospital. Right after the attack he got transferred from the ship and never got the word that I survived, even though the others were all killed up there. But Ben told me that that morning, before general quarters sounded, he and I were getting dressed and getting ready to go to church somewhere.
So battle stations sounded, and I ran up the ladders to get to my battle station out on the deck. The fellows who had battle stations down below were coming down and passing me as I went up, and they were saying, “The Japs are attacking, the Japs are attacking!” But we said this all the time when we were out on maneuvers. So, I thought, yeah, yeah. But I got outside and they were right—the Japs were there, and they were attacking!
So the six of us assembled in a compartment on the starboard side on the main deck in the aft part of the ship, and first you had to make sure everyone was there. And then we each had a job to do. My job was to go down the full length of the starboard side of the ship and batten down the battle ports. These are the brass plates that fit over what some people call the “portholes.” As I would go down the length of the ship I would take quick looks out, and so much was happening so fast it was hard to decide, remembering back, what I saw and didn’t see. One of the things I thought I saw was people getting off the Arizona and going hand-over-hand on a rope over to the ship next to them. At the time I didn’t know it was the Vestal. When I first started volunteering at the USS Arizona Memorial in the early nineties, I mentioned this to one of the rangers and he hadn’t heard of that, so I shut up right away and figured this was all in my head. And then about four years ago our guest speaker was a fellow who got off the Arizona by going hand-over-hand to the Vestal; Don Sutton was his name. So I was right, and I did see that happening.
Though I was aware of Japanese planes flying around, the sky over the Pennsylvania wasn’t filled with aircraft. But things were blowing up, and it was noisy and smoky. So, after I finished my job of battening down the battle ports, we assembled aft again, and there we were standing with nothing to do, and we were adjacent to the clipping room where the ammo comes up on elevators from the magazines down below. So we figured, why stand here, so we just fell into line and started running ammo out to the gun that was right on the fan tail. You’d grab a shell, run it out to the gun, and hand it to Coke McKenzie. He was the third loader on the gun and a regular member of that gun crew. So according to the ship’s log at 9:10 A.M., one of the Japanese planes dropped a bomb that hit right where we were running the ammo back and forth. And in that moment that bomb killed twenty-four people on the Pennsylvania. And there were five more killed from the crews of minelayers—I think two or three different minelayers—and they were killed on the Pennsylvania then, too. I don’t know what they were doing on our ship, but they died there. Of the six of us on the antenna repair crew, five were killed. I was still alive, barely.
The next thing I knew I was flat on my face. I never really heard anything go off, but I realized all of a sudden we had been hit. My arms were out in front of me, and I could see all the skin was purple and peeled. That’s when I said to myself, “My god, we’ve been hit.” I stood up and wondered what had happened to the rest of the antenna repair crew and the gun crew, and that’s when I noticed that my feet felt wet. I looked down, and I had blood spurting out a hole in my left leg. So, I had always been taught that if you’re bleeding, you’re supposed to apply pressure. So I put my finger on it to stop the bleeding, and my finger sunk right into the hole in my leg up to the second joint! I figured the heck with this noise, and that was enough for me.
I was fairly badly injured as it turned out. My right ankle was shot open, and I had a chip of bone out of the right shin. They say I got a bullet wound through the right thigh near my hip, but I don’t know when I got that wound. My right hand was ripped open; I had five pieces of shrapnel in my left leg; I had a six-inch by eight-inch piece torn out of my left thigh; I lost part of my left elbow and part of my left bicep. I had on shorts and a T-shirt that morning, so everywhere I had skin exposed I had flash burns, which meant my legs, arms, and face. Interestingly enough, in my medical records, the Navy had all the wounds listed as “superficial.” I found that out recently when I tried to get more compensation.
So, I heard some officer shouting, “Get that man down to sick bay.” So they took me down below, and the sick bay for combat overflow was actually the old radio quarters where we lived. The first thing they did was sit me on the deck, and I’m thinking, “They left me alone.” I don’t know if they thought I was too badly hit to mess with, or whatever, but they finally came along and put me into a bunk. I remember a radioman whose battle station was right there, and as I remember it, his name was Osmond and I knew him fairly well since we worked in the radio room together. And I said to him, “Hey, Ozzie.” So he stopped and he came over and looked at me, and he bent over and said, “Who are you?” And that’s when I started to realize, holy mackerel, either there’s something wrong with him or something wrong with me!
I was moved off the ship that afternoon, according to the log, and I was moved to a big Navy hospital right there at the Navy Yard, and they had me in there in the burn ward. And there’s an interesting story about my stay in the burn ward. A year later I ran into my brother, and he told me that his ship, the USS Indianapolis, which had been out on patrol that day, had come back into the harbor about a week after the attack. When they docked, right away he went over to the Pennsylvania to look for me, but they had me on the “missing” list. He figured I had to be somewhere, so he started checking around and went over to the hospital. He finally found me, but he said the only way he identified me was by a tag that had my name on it tied on my toe. He said they had us all lined up there in the burn ward, and we looked like roast turkeys. I can’t confirm this story with my brother, because he later got transferred off the Indianapolis and into a Marine combat unit, and he got killed on Iwo Jima.
But, you know, we had no dog tags at the beginning of the war; those came out a little later. So if you had your clothing taken off and if you couldn’t talk, they had no way of identifying you. A few years ago I met a woman named Lenore Rickert, and she was one of the nineteen Navy nurses working in the Naval hospital on December 7. She worked the burn ward and took care of me. I told her the story about my brother and the tag on my toe. She got weepy-eyed, and she said, “When you boys were so far gone that we knew there was nothing we could do for you, we tagged you so we wouldn’t lose your identity.” They thought I was on my way out. My brother told me that the doctor told him that it was just as well I died, because if I did live I’d be blind and never walk again.
All this time I was out of it, and I didn’t wake up until Christmas. A couple of years ago I met a guy who worked in the hospital at that time, and he said, “Not only did we tag you, but we moved you out of the ward so you wouldn’t die in front of everybody.” He said there was a separate building outside somewhere, and they rolled us out and put us out there. Apparently it was bad for the morale to die in front of the other patients!
The first thing I can remember happening when I was conscious again of what was going on around me, was that there were food carts going by. And I mentioned to a corpsman who I noticed next to me, “They certainly feed well in here.” I had no idea where I was. And he said, “That’s Christmas dinner.” And then I realized I had been out from December 7 until Christmas, and that’s when I started remembering what was happening to me.
Because of my burns, they couldn’t do much surgery to get shrapnel out or fix bones up. And by that time infections had set in, so I guess I was kind of a mess. They moved me out of the hospital at Pearl fairly soon. I think I was in the second group to be moved back to the mainland. They put me on the old passenger liner, the Lurline. They took us back to San Francisco, and from there on a ferry boat they took us up to Vallejo Naval Hospital, and that was somewhere around New Year’s. I was there for about six months, and after that they sent me to Brooklyn Naval Hospital for physical therapy. I guess they were emptying the West Coast to make room for new casualties coming in.
My father died when I was one year old, and my mother brought my brother and me up. She came west when I was still in Vallejo. Even though I was listed as missing that time my brother came to try and find me a week after the attack, apparently they got it sorted out because the telegram they sent my mother was that I was wounded. So, she had moved to California to be closer to me. But then I got sent to New York, and not long after that I got sent back on duty. I’d been in hospitals for nine months. When I got out I had pretty much healed—when you’re young you bounce back fast! With the work they did on my face, you really can’t tell I had been burned except I do not have any lips.
I got assigned to the Atlantic Fleet to the light cruiser Memphis, and I was on that ship for about six months. Then I got transferred off that and spent the rest of the war on the beach, assigned to shore duty at the Naval Air Station in Charleston, South Carolina.
After I got out of the Navy, I got married and became a science teacher. At some point I got divorced and then retired from teaching in 1983. After that I got involved with working for a courier company out of Los Angeles. I had the best time of my life! I was living on 747s and flying all over the world for nine years. The company handled mostly Asia, but I used to end up in Eastern Europe once in a while, too.
I decided to go to Hawaii for the fiftieth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1991. I was staying at a hotel in Waikiki, and there was an attractive Japanese woman sitting at this tour desk in the lobby. She was working for the second largest tour company in Japan at that time. Every morning I’d go down and see this cute little Japanese lady, and I used to stop and talk with her. My buddy who was with me, Coke McKenzie, took some pictures of us, and I told her, “If you give me your name and address, I’ll send you a copy of these photos.” She had to think about that one! But she gave me her address and I heard from her. I sent her the pictures, then made a trip to Hawaii and stayed a week and met her son, and got along well with him. Then I took her on a trip to San Diego to meet my mother and my daughter. In fact my mom just died about six years ago at age ninety-six. But my daughter said, “Dad, don’t let this one get away.” So I put my toothbrush in my pocket, moved to Hawaii, and got married to Miyoko.
Some people think it’s kind of odd that I am married to a Japanese lady since the Japanese darned near killed me on December 7. And you know, I didn’t have a great love for those people when we were fighting them. But many years after the war I met a Japanese person who introduced me to Japan and Japanese culture. So, when I met Miyoko I didn’t have any animosity for the Japanese any more. Now we live in Hawaii, and I volunteer at the USS Arizona Memorial on weekends. I get to meet a lot of people and tell them my story. I hope it makes their visit to the memorial more meaningful, to hear from me and the other Pearl Harbor Survivors what it was like on December 7. Hawaii isn’t what it was when I was first here in 1941, but it’s still a great place to live, and I enjoy my life here now.