Oscar M. "Jake" Jacobson US Navy USS West Virginia |
Oscar "Jake" Jacobson was a gunner's mate assigned to the USS West Virginia, the 20-year-old Jacobson ordinarily spent Sunday mornings below decks writing letters home to his family. Instead, he was on overnight liberty, the first he had taken since arriving in Hawaii. Jacobson spend Saturday night ashore sleeping at a Navy recreation center, where he was looking forward to playing baseball the next day. He was standing in a breakfast line about four miles from Pearl Harbor when the Japanese struck. "We heard these explosions, and I thought, "Now why do they have to go and do that for on a Sunday morning," Jacobson said recently. "I thought it was practice. Later, I found out that the torpedoes hit the West Virginia below decks, pretty much right where I would have been sitting. If I had been on the ship that day, I would have been dead." In the eyes of the Navy he was. Nine days after the Pearl Harbor attack, Jacobson's parents received a telegram informing them that their son had been killed in the attack on Pearl. Three weeks passed before the Jacobsons received another telegram from the Navy correcting the error. In the meantime, the weekly Webster Times declared Jacobson the town's first war fatality. Webster officials ordered all flags in the town to be flown at half staff for five days, and the local chapter of the Red Cross started a campaign to support he war effort in Jacobson's name. An appeal that ran in the local paper said, "We pledge ourselves to see that he did not die in vain." Jacobson's father never believed he had died. "My son's a tough Norwegian," the father told an insurance man who came to the family's house to pay off a policy. "Keep your money because he's not dead". Not by a longshot. Jacobson went on to serve aboard the USS Salt Lake City, a cruiser that saw some of the heaviest action of any ship in the Pacific theater. While he grew to respect the Japanese as fighters, he never came to like them. "After Pearl, we got mad," he recalled, "and I guess we just sort of stayed that way all the way to the end." The anger and the action made the time go quickly. It was 13 battle stars and almost four years later when Jaobson found himself in Tokyo Bay as Japanese officials came aboard the USS Missouri to surrender. Jacobson watched the ceremony from the decks of the Salt Lake City, and finally received the payback that he and thousands of others who lived through Pearl Harbor had been waiting for since that first deadly day. "I got to watch them bow down to us," he said. "It was a good thing. It gave me a warm feeling inside to see it". |
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