Dec. 7—Their memories are snapshots in time, newsreels in history.
For decades, they generously shared their stories with The Bakersfield Californian and its readers.
Local survivors of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor were eyewitnesses to the precision air attack launched on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, exactly 80 years ago today.
Some of them lost friends. Some lost blood. And many lost a part of their innocence they would never get back.
But none of them lost hope.
When it was over, more than 2,400 Americans lay dead and a large portion of the U.S. Pacific fleet was left damaged or destroyed.
On one battleship alone, the USS Arizona, 1,177 men were lost when the hulking vessel burst into flames and sank after being struck by eight armor-piercing bombs.
At least one of the Arizona’s crew had Kern County connections, U.S. Navy Seaman 1st Class Harvey L. Havins, who lived for a time in Shafter.
At nearby Hickam Field and other air bases, 347 aircraft were damaged or destroyed, most without ever leaving the tarmac.
Across the United States, millions of Americans were suddenly shaken from their support of an isolationist foreign policy, a legacy of the horror and perceived meaninglessness of the First World War. But the attack at Pearl Harbor would inspire a national commitment to fight and win this second global war.
The men and women — profiled in story after story in The Californian — bore witness to this cataclysmic shift that changed the world. Each one offered a living, breathing connection to that critical moment in the nation’s history.
But virtually all of them are gone now, eight decades after what then-President Franklin Roosevelt called “a date which will live in infamy.”
We share parts of their stories here.
‘Why wasn’t I afraid?’: Pearl Harbor survivor remembers
The morning of Dec. 7, 1941, started like any other Sunday at Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor Naval Base for 18-year-old Bob Cunningham.
A sailor aboard the USS Vestal, a repair ship moored alongside the battleship Arizona, Cunningham downed a Navy breakfast before heading to the recreation room to relax, play some cards and chat with his shipmates.
It was the last routine activity he would ever experience aboard the Vestal.
Seventy-six years later, Cunningham, age 94 and living in Lake Isabella, still remembered another sailor interrupting to say there appeared to be some sort of practice bombing run happening at nearby Hickam Field.
The sailors scrambled up to the top deck to watch.
As they stood riveted, a dive-bomber made a direct hit on an American plane resting on the tarmac. It exploded in flames.
“Someone said, ‘This is for real,'” Cunningham recalled.
And it was. All too real.
The sky was soon black with smoke. The attack could easily have been the precursor to a ground invasion, but no one knew for sure. The young sailor was operating on pure adrenaline.
The Vestal wasn’t built for battle, but it had two 3-inch, 50-caliber guns mounted fore and aft.
“I was assigned to the one on the back,” Cunningham remembered.
His memories of that long-ago day were jumbled, uneven, and muted by the mist of time.
“I’m surprised at myself,” he said. “I didn’t get fearful about what was going on. Why wasn’t I afraid?”
Cunningham was struck in the back during the one-sided battle, possibly by hot shrapnel. But when he went to the sick bay, he saw men with limbs missing, part of a man’s head gone.
He backed out of the room, refusing to divert medical care away from someone who needed it more.
“I certainly didn’t need the attention,” he said.
‘I’m not a hero’: Wounded Pearl Harbor survivor shares his harrowing story
When this Californian reporter visited Edwin Alan Tischbirek at his home in northeast Bakersfield in 2005, the Pearl Harbor survivor was 86 and plenty sharp.
After the one-time U.S. Army recruit shared some of his memories of that unforgettable day in 1941, he stopped abruptly to lay down the law.
“Let me get one thing straight,” Tischbirek said. “I’m not a hero. All I’ve been doing in all these experiences is trying to save my own hide.”
Luckily for the 22-year-old who grew up in Southern California and rural Arizona, someone else was also interested in saving his hide that day at Hickam Field, the Army airstrip located less than 2 miles from Pearl Harbor.
It was a few minutes after 8 a.m. and Tischbirek was running for his life, a Japanese Zero strafing the road beneath his feet.
“I saw a Marine. He was the target of machine guns — the shells were ricocheting off the pavement,” Tischbirek remembered of that moment.
“I don’t know who he was,” he said. “But he saved my life. To this day I owe my life to that guy.”
Tischbirek had thrown himself into a shallow ditch alongside the road, but it hadn’t shielded him completely from enemy fire. He was hit twice in the right leg. And he was losing blood.
But the Marine — the one he never had the chance to thank — made his way to Tischbirek’s side. The man applied a tourniquet and later stopped a military ambulance to ask for help.
There was no room at the nearby clinic, but medics were able to stop the bleeding, and Tischbirek would live to see another day.
The enlisted man would later be accepted to officer training school. He served in the South Pacific and left the Army as a first lieutenant in 1945.
He married Verna Jean Maxwell in 1943. The couple raised two daughters and one son.
The Tischbireks came to Kern County around 1950. The war veteran taught high school at Arvin and Foothill high schools for more than a dozen years before moving to Bakersfield College, where he taught agricultural mechanics.
He died in 2012 at age 93. He never did get to thank that lone Marine.
‘I know God had my hand’: Former sailor remembers chaos, confusion
William Penn Gentry was just 17 when he joined the Navy in June 1941, six months before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
As a black American in a segregated military, he was relegated mostly to kitchen and cleaning duties.
“We couldn’t go as far in those days because those were racial times,” Gentry recalled in 2006.
The teen sailor was stationed on the USS Tennessee the morning of the attack. He was on deck and saw the whole thing, he said, including the Arizona as it capsized. At one point he was working with another man when Gentry spotted two sailors struggling in the water.
“I went looking for a lifeline to help them, but when I got back the men in the water were gone and so was the man on the deck,” the former Ridgecrest resident remembered. “To this day, I don’t know if they made it.”
The air was filled with smoke and the harbor was littered by damaged ships and floating debris. Why he survived that day when so many others died is a question Gentry asked himself many times.
“I know God had my hand, to bring me as far as I’ve come today,” he told this reporter those many years ago.
‘He told me he saw the guy’s eyes’
Joseph Licastro Sr. was already a two-year veteran of the U.S. Army Air Corps when he was jarred awake on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941 by the whining engines of Japanese dive bombers, their machine guns strafing men and planes on the tarmac at Wheeler Army Airfield on the island of Oahu.
In an interview with The Californian in 2014, Licastro recalled “the terror of being awakened” in the chaos of battle. The scene, he said, “was hectic, disorganized. There was no leadership. We kind of ran around in circles.”
He saw friends die, planes destroyed and his own barracks go up in a ball of flame. More than seven decades later the memory of that Sunday morning was still clearly painful.
But on the day that would launch his nation into World War II, the 21-year-old grabbed his .45 caliber sidearm and ran for cover.
An enemy pilot was firing at him but the strafing stopped just short of the airman. Licastro turned.
“He told me he saw the guy’s eyes,” Licastro’s son, Joseph Licastro II, told The Californian following his father’s death in 2015. “He said he was firing his .45 at the plane as fast as he could.”
He was known for years as one of Kern County’s last living Pearl Harbor survivors, but Joseph Licastro Sr. became so much more, including a professional architect, private pilot, oil painter, fly fisherman and family man.
“He didn’t think of himself as a hero,” recalled Licastro’s son.
Many would beg to differ.
Reporter Steven Mayer can be reached at 661-395-7353. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter: @semayerTBC.