A bell chimed nine times Monday morning during a solemn point in the local Pearl Harbor observance.
It was a lot more chaotic in 1941 for Paul Johnson, Gordon Sage and Ralph Laedtke. Seventy-four years ago, the significance of Dec. 7 was signaled by shouts, explosions and gunfire.
The three World War II veterans were there when the Japanese attacked. And they were the three Pearl Harbor survivors able to participate in the annual observance Monday at the American Legion Smith-Reynolds Post 14 hall.
Johnson was a crewman on the USS Castor, a transport ship carrying 10,000 tons of ammunition.
Sage was a U.S. Marine stationed aboard the battleship USS Maryland, where he was an admiral’s orderly.
Laedtke was a pharmacist’s mate and medical records technician on the USS Solace, a hospital ship. The Washougal resident said that he was at the 74th anniversary observance “to remember this day that changed my life.
“We had a job to do on the hospital ship, and we did it well,” Laedtke said. He helped get the 480-bed hospital ship ready for combat casualties, and fatalities. About 150 patients were brought aboard the Solace, he said, many with serious burns.
Those who died aboard the ship were among the 2,400 soldiers, sailors and Marines killed in the attack.
Johnson and his shipmates tried to fight back, but ammunition for the USS Castor’s guns was locked up. Johnson, a gunner’s mate second class, had to unlock the armory so the gun crews could load their weapons.
Aboard the USS Maryland, Sage also helped fight back. He joined a line of sailors and Marines passing ammunition to one of the battleships’s guns. He then joined a firefighting crew before responding to the call of the admiral: “Where’s my orderly?” And then Sage had to change into a pressed uniform.
Sage said he wanted to be at the event Monday to represent the military personnel who survived the attack, and who then took the fight to the enemy.
“Those people are getting so few and far between,” Sage said of his fellow Pearl Harbor veterans.
That was the message of the tolling bell during the memorial service. Each of the nine chimes saluted a local Pearl Harbor survivor who has died within the last couple of years.
“We’re getting kind of scarce,” noted Paul Johnson, who was one of six charter members when the local Pearl Harbor Survivors Association was formed.
Decades ago, when the group’s members were active enough to go to Hawaii for the annual Dec. 7 observance, “We all flew to Pearl Harbor on a charter,” Johnson said.
Now, he said, they could get around “on a motorcycle.”
