STOCKTON, Calif. (Tribune News Service) -- The 73 years that have passed since the date that will live in infamy, since Japan's surprise attack on the U.S. Navy fleet at Pearl Harbor, have not faded the memories of John Chapman.
The East Bay resident is in Honolulu this morning. He will serve as a grand marshal of the annual parade and attend several other ceremonies, including one at the USS Arizona Memorial.
Chapman can almost smell the smoke in the air, hear the screams, feel the oil that covered his skin as he swam through the slick water.
The theme of this year's events in Hawaii is "Preserving the Memory," which focuses on keeping alive the story of the attack on Oahu that provoked the United States to enter World War II.
But Chapman is already doing that.
The 92-year-old, who was a 19-year-old shipfitter third class on the USS West Virginia battleship when the attack began, kept 16- and 17-year-old students in Oscar Fry's history classes at Linden High School enthralled last month with his first-person account of Pearl Harbor Day.
It was history as they rarely experience it, from someone who not only lived through it, but who was captured in one of the iconic images of the day.
Chapman, who jumped from the West Virginia when the order was given to abandon ship in search of a small boat to use to rescue his shipmates, was swimming in the water when a motor launch from the USS California spotted him and hauled him aboard.
It saved his life. The USS Nevada was racing through the harbor at about 10 knots, Chapman estimates, and would have run him over.
The image of Chapman in the water as the motor launch arrives to pick him up is on page 404 of the history books used by Linden High students.
It's a testament to Chapman's role in the attack that killed nearly 2,500 and wounded another 1,000. He doesn't need it, though, to remember those two hours that would change the world forever.
It started innocently enough. He was waiting for a liberty pass that Sunday morning to go ashore to a job as a lifeguard at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. That paid $2 an hour, better than the $21 a month from the Navy. Chapman, who'd been forced into an orphanage and foster care when the state of California determined his deaf mother and father, injured on the job with the railroad, were unsuitable to raise their two children, had joined the Navy on his 18th birthday in 1940 in pursuit of a better life.
It was about 7:45 a.m. on Dec. 7 when a torpedo struck the port side of the West Virginia.
"It knocked me down," Chapman said. "I asked if a ship was coming to tie up (next to the West Virginia)."
He looked out the porthole and the ship was hit again. In all, the West Virginia would be struck by nine torpedoes. The captain of the ship was killed almost immediately, struck in the chest with debris when the USS Tennessee, moored next to it, was hit.
The Executive Officer took charge and called for general quarters. Chapman, 19, took charge of his area, securing the hatches on his deck. Once he did, water began to rise.
"I thought to myself, we're all going to die down here," Chapman said. "It got up to our shoulders, then up to our necks. Men were hanging on the beams overhead."
"Everybody down there was saying their prayers," he remembered. "I recited the 23rd Psalm."
"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. ... Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me ..."
The words offered comfort, but Chapman wasn't prepared to dwell in the house of the Lord for eternity. He'd been ordered to open valves to counter flood the ship, which allowed him and others to swim out through an aft shaft.
He reached the quarterdeck by hoisting himself up a 30-foot line, and once there, cut a piece of cargo net to drop down to the men to climb up. He also fashioned a stretcher for men trapped with broken limbs.
When the order came to abandon ship, Chapman slid down the oil slicked deck into water that was six inches deep with burning fuel and began swimming toward a small boat when the craft from the California rescued him from his impending collision with the Nevada.
Chapman ultimately commandeered a captain's gig to rescue men from the West Virginia.
"At about that time, the bomb hit the Arizona," Chapman said. "It blew off the front. Men were just flying from the explosion of the ship."
The Arizona's forward ammunition magazines were hit, and more than 1,100 crew members were killed.
"The boat went about six feet in the air, then back into the water," Chapman said.
The sinking of the Arizona would define Pearl Harbor Day for many Americans, but in real time, it was simply another unfathomable reality of the attack by 350 Japanese planes on the U.S. Naval fleet.
Chapman watched in horror and continued his rescue efforts.
"I picked up some men from the Arizona who were in the water, as many as I could," Chapman said.
He took the rescued men to a submarine base by the dock, but an ensign ordered him to give up the captain's gig, preventing him from helping others.
"I said, 'Men are out there dying. We need to go out and get them. Do you want me to put you in the drink?' "He said, 'I can't swim' and pulled a .45 out and said, 'You better not throw me in the water.'"
Threatened with going on report for insubordination, Chapman found a higher-ranking officer who told him to get cleaned up, make sure his back, hit by shrapnel, was cleaned, and put him to work.
Chapman was ordered back to the West Virginia to retrieve welding tools and he spent the afternoon burning holes through the bottom of the Oklahoma to rescue men trapped inside.
At day's end, 18 ships and nearly 300 airplanes were crippled or destroyed.
Chapman left Pearl Harbor after the attack. He spent the rest of the war crossing the Pacific on a destroyer assigned to carriers.
He made the Navy his career, serving in Korea and Vietnam.
In 1962 he was stationed in Hawaii when preliminary work on what would become the USS Arizona Memorial began. A Navy diver, he helped install the foundation above the sunken ship.
He was reassigned before the memorial was completed and never returned to Hawaii -- until today, when he'll join fellow Pearl Harbor survivors, including the nine remaining members of the Arizona crew.
He'll no doubt be shown appreciation and respect from visitors.
It's what he got at Linden High School, where students left other classes to hear him speak in Fry's classroom.
Garrett Gallagher, 16, was supposed to be in English.
"I just wanted to learn about it first hand, from a primary source," Gallagher said. "The way he told the story, it wasn't out of a text book. He was there. He actually saw people. It's his perception."'
Cole Schwark left his ROP fire science class to listen to Chapman.
"I never see a lot of World War II veterans, let alone one from Pearl Harbor," Schwark said. "It's one of those things if you can, you do. It's a great experience to meet someone who was there, who witnessed it, to tell you first-hand what happened, how he felt about it, what he did."
When Chapman was done, students lined up to have a copy of the famous photo of him autographed, or, to pose with him for photos of their own. They hugged him. They thanked him.
Chapman visited Linden for the second year, courtesy of career counselor Pam Knapp, whose late father was a lifelong friend after the two met in Naval training.
He's a born story teller, who can't, however, account for his good fortune that day.
"I'm surprised I survived it all," he said. "God was looking out for me."
(c) 2014 The Record. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
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