Ralph Jeffers US Navy USS Curtiss

Ralph Jeffers remembers a sky lit up like "fireworks" with gunfire coming from every direction and the incredible noise when Japanese airplanes pounded Pearl Harbor 60 years ago. Jeffers fought back from his battle station at a machine gun on the stern of the USS Curtiss, a seaplane tender that was anchored in the harbor. The Japanese assault began at 7:55 a.m. December 7, 1941, when Jeffers was having breakfast in the mess hall, a time and moment etched on his memory like no other until the terrorist attacks of September 11 this year. The Curtiss, with Jeffers aboard, had just arrived in Pearl Harbor two days earlier. "We had just come in from Wake Island," Jeffers recalled as he recounted that fateful day.  "We had just dropped off some Marines and aircraft at Midway and Wake islands.  Those people we dropped off at Wake Island were taken prisoner shortly afterward." Jeffers, now 81, said the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor dawned "nice and very quiet".  It was a Sunday. "I went down for breakfast and was enjoying by breakfast - the Navy is known for its good food - and was just sitting there when we heard tremendous explosions in the harbor," he said.  "We thought perhaps the Army Air Force was having drills.  But, when we looked out the starboard hatch, we could see the USS Utah turning over.  We knew something was amiss." Jeffers, state chairman of the New Jersey Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, which has 168 members, said he had no inkling that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor. "Nobody expected the Japanese there," he said.  "Remember, they were talking peace in those days." Once they realized they were under attack, the members of the crew rushed to their battle stations.  Those heading topside went up the ladders or through the hatches that were open for air. "We didn't have the air conditioning that you have today, so we had hatches all over," Jeffers explained.  "You got up the fastest way you could.  We climbed over bunks to get to the hatches because the ladders were crowded.  I scrambled over a couple of bunks to get up to topside and went to man my battle station." What he saw was a sky full of Japanese airplanes - 383 of them - firing on the U.S. ships below that were anchored all around Ford Island, which sits in the middle of the harbor. Jeffers said Ford Island was a naval air station that airplanes on board arriving US ships would fly to before the ships entered the harbor.  When the ships left the harbor, they would receive the planes that would fly back to them, he explained.  He said the planes would be serviced while on Ford Island. It wasn't until a little after 9 a.m., Jeffers said, that the Curtiss was hit the first time.  He said a Japanese pilot, on a suicide mission, slammed his airplane into the deck. Jeffers has an incredible photograph showing the plane diving a moment before impact. "We got hit again, about 20 minutes later, by a 500-pound bomb," he said.  "So my ship took quite a bit of damage.  We were already in the throes of abandoning the ship because we were damaged so severely, but the ship repairs party managed to get the ship righted.  "The engine rooms weren't damaged, but the handling rooms - the ammunition handling rooms - and the hangar areas, those areas were," he continued.  "We had lost quite a few men.  We had many casualties.  The ship got underway.  We got the water pumped out, got the fires under control.  We fought fires all day.  The ship was a mess, really a mess, with oil through some of the passageways." Before the Curtiss steamed away, yet another bomb sank one of the two buoys the ship had anchored to keep it from swinging about in the harbor, Jeffers said. Jeffers said that during the first hour of the attack, the Japanese planes were concentrating on the "battlewagons and heavy cruisers" anchored on the opposite side of the Curtis on the other side of Ford Island. Among the battleships on the opposite side of the island, he said, were the Arizona, now a memorial with its entombed crew; and the California, the Oklahoma and the West Virginia. Jeffers called the attack "Devastating."  "There were fires all over the harbor - ships burning," he said.  "We didn't see the real carnage on the far side where the battlewagons took a tremendous beating." He said that it was "unbelievable," but that in the two hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese lost only 29 airplanes. "They claim we got three," he said, referring to the crew of the Curtis.  "the one that hit our ship definitely was one." In a less well-known facet of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Jeffers said, some US airplanes were shot down by friendly fire that night.  He said that in a "strange" circumstance, all the US carriers, which usually went out to sea individually, one at a time, weren't in port. "They weren't touched at all, except that night when some of the planes from the Enterprise came in," he related.  "We shot some of those out of the air - our own people.  They came in about 11 o'clock at night.  And we were so trigger happy, not knowing what was happening because nobody was telling us anything, and we were expecting a third strike." "You never read much about that.  They kept that quiet," he added. Asked how many were shot down, Jeffers replied, "I have no idea." They put me ashore the next day, and I spent the next few weeks on Ford Island while my ship went back to the States for repairs.  I stayed at Ford Island about six weeks until my ship returned. Jeffers equates the 9 o'clock hour when his ship was hit with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, when hijacked airplanes were flown into the twin towers around 9 a.m.  And as America has rallied in the wake of the September 11 attacks, so it did after Pearl Harbor, he noted. "I think people got really gung-ho after that, when President Roosevelt said it was a 'day of infamy' and the nation rallied right behind him, just like they're doing today," Jeffers said. "The country is more patriotic now than I have seen in the last 60 years," he added. Jeffers was 18 years old when he enlisted in the Nay in 1938, right out of high school in Jersey City, where he lived. Before World War II broke out, his service included time aboard the Constellation, a historic wooden sailing ship and the sister ship to the Constitution, dating back to the Revolutionary War. He was among the first crew aboard the USS Curtiss when it was commissioned in Philadelphia in 1940, making him a plank owner. "That's when you put a new ship in commission and you're the first crew about it," he explained.  "You're a plank owner." When the Curtiss came back from San Francisco after undergoing repairs for the damage it sustained in Pearl Harbor, repair crews were still on board working on it, Jeffers recalled.  He said that during the overhaul, new guns had been put on board in an upgrade from 50-caliber to 20 mm cannon. Jeffers went through six campaigns aboard the Curtiss, two of them to Guadalcanal and another to the Gilbert Islands, before leaving the ship in 1943.  He said it was hit by yet another suicide Japanese bomber at Okinawa in 1945, near the end of the war, and survived again, but was sunk in 1957 because it had become radioactive while taking part in the Bikini Atoll atomic tests. In 1944, Jeffers participated in the invasion of Guam and stayed there until November 1945, after the war had ended.  He wound up making a career of the Navy, retiring in 1960 after 22 years.  On December 7, 1941, he was an aviation machinist mate third class.  He retired as a chief aviation machinist mate. Asked if he felt the American government knew in advance that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, Jeffers said be believed Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Russia's Joseph Stalin all knew something was going to happen in the Pacific, but he noted, "They exonerated the general and the admiral who were responsible for not being prepared." The passing of 60 years has not mellowed his thoughts about the Japanese. "I have a complete dislike for them," he said, "because I know what they did to my friends.  I had friends who suffered for four years on Corregidor, who were put into Japanese prisoner of war camps, and I know what happened to them.  They were cruel.  You try to forgive and forget, but sometimes you can't." "I don't know about the people today," he continued.  "But we also must remember that there were many loyal Japanese-Americans.  We put 120,000 into detention camps in the United States.  Over 70,000 were American citizens.  People forget about Roosevelt putting them in detention camps during the war." "By the same token," he said, "the American Japanese did a tremendous job in Europe.  They fought in our Army and did a marvelous job.  So you can't blame them." The Pearl Harbor Survivors Association has a national convention in Hawaii every five years, and Jeffers has been going to them ever since 1966.

Information provided by Ralph Jeffers.