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A4
PEARL HARBOR, 75 YEARS LATER
U.S. NAVY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES
HELIVEDTOTELL
HE LIVED TO TELL
BY MARTIN C. EVANS
NEWSDAY, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2016
newsday.com
[email protected]
Gerard Barbosa, a 17-year-old
gunner’s mate from Brooklyn,
had just finished breakfast
aboard the Navy cruiser USS
Raleigh docked at the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii when
a torpedo rocked the hull with
such power that “It felt like the
ship lifted out of the water.”
Ordered to hurry to his antiaircraft gun, Barbosa came
onto the deck to find the ship
was being attacked by Japanese
warplanes that filled the sky.
“Bullets were bouncing all
around us and hitting the bulkhead as we ran,” said Barbosa,
93, of East Meadow. “I don’t
know how I didn’t get hit. Someone must have been watching
over us.
❛
Bullets were bouncing all around
us and hitting the bulkhead as
we ran. I don’t know how I didn’t get
hit. Someone must have been
watching over us.’’
Gerard Barbosa, 93, of East Meadow
“My loader said ‘Ain’t you
scared?’ ” Barbosa recalled. “I
said ‘Damned right I’m scared.’
I was shaking. I told him, make
sure I have enough ammunition.”
Barbosa, the son of a father
from Cuba and mother from
Spain, is among the last known
living area residents to have survived the attack at Pearl Harbor
— an attack that indelibly
marked his life and plunged
America into World War II.
Today marks the 75th anniversary of the attack, with fewer and
fewer living eyewitnesses to tell
their remarkable stories.
“I still remember it; you don’t
forget that stuff,” said Barbosa,
who worked for Republic and
Grumman as an aircraft electrician after the war and retired
from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Coney Island yard in 1990. “It never
leaves you.”
Barbosa saw history made
again in June 1944: After Pearl
Harbor, he was transferred to
Europe, where he was a landing
craft crew member during the
D-Day invasion of France.
The Pearl Harbor attack came
without warning even as American and Japanese diplomats
were negotiating in Washington
to prevent growing tensions between the two countries from
spilling over into war.
Japan’s Admiral Chuichi
Nagumu, commander of the
fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor, described the planned operation 15 days before his
TOP STORIES
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NEWSDAY / ALEJANDRA VILLA
Signs of reconciliation
Gerard Barbosa of East Meadow, above, survived the bombing of
the USS Raleigh, left, in the Pearl Harbor attack 75 years ago. Top
left, Barbosa in his Navy days. ] Video: newsday.com/eastmeadow
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under fire and on which hits
were observed, were seen to
crash close aboard, either in
flames or in fragments.”
Japan’s attack was devastatingly effective. In less than two
hours of nightmarish chaos, 21
ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet
were sunk or damaged, most of
them while still at their moorings. The attack claimed the
lives of 2,403 Americans, including 68 civilians.
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt declared war after
the attack in his famous “a date
which will live in infamy”
speech to Congress. The declaration abruptly ended what had
been a mostly isolationist
American foreign policy. Germany declared war on America
shortly after the attack.
The United States was anything but a superpower before
the attack. The U.S. military
numbered fewer than 200,000
personnel in 1939 — a military
that at 19th in the world was
smaller than Portugal’s. Today,
onciliation are in some ways
an attempt to sweep out the
final ghosts of the war.
“Despite the amicable relationship that the two countries
have enjoyed since the end of
the Pacific War, deep-rooted
negative sentiment has remained in both countries,” said
Narushige Michishita, a security expert at the National
Graduate Institute for Policy
Studies in Tokyo. “The
Obama-Abe joint visit to Pearl
Harbor will change this.”
“The amount of time passed
is an important factor,” said
Tsuneo Watanabe, a senior research fellow at the Sasakawa
Peace Foundation in Tokyo.
“As survivors become
fewer, the event becomes part
historical memory,” said Tosh
Minohara, a U.S.-Japan expert
at Kobe University in Japan.
He added that the concern
about China’s emergence as a
military power in the Pacific
“made this possible.” — AP
newsday.com
planes struck Pearl Harbor, according to U.S. Army historical
records.
“The Carrier Striking Task
Force will proceed to the
Hawaiian Area with utmost secrecy and . . . launch a resolute
surprise attack on and deal a
fatal blow to the enemy fleet in
the Hawaiian Area,” the admiral wrote.
The Japanese strike force
consisted of 353 aircraft
launched from six aircraft carriers, according to the U.S.
Navy’s History and Heritage
Command. The attacking aircraft — 40 torpedo planes, 103
bombers, 131 dive-bombers, and
79 fighters — swooped so close
he could see the faces of some
of the pilots, Barbosa recalled.
In all, he and his fellow crew
members fired a total of 13,526
rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition that morning, the Raleigh’s
commanding officer, Capt. R.B.
Simons, wrote in a report six
days later.
“The guns were magnificently handled; all hands from
chief petty officers to mess
boys volunteering to fill out the
regular gun crews and keep ammunition supplied,” Simons
wrote. “. . . the gun crews on
the top side kept up a heavy
and accurate fire. Five bombing
planes, which this ship had
the U.S. military numbers
about 2.7 million active and reserve members.
“What people don’t understand is at the time, the American public did not want to get
into the war,” said Keith Huxen,
senior director of research and
history at the National World
War II Museum in New Orleans. “You had organizations
like the America First Committee and other isolationist
groups that said we shouldn’t
get involved at all. Pearl Harbor
changed all that.”
Pearl Harbor energized the
United States to divert much of
the capacity of its shipyards
and manufacturing plants to repair damaged ships and planes,
and to build new ones.
“It was what Admiral Yamamoto feared,” said Robert J.
Cressman, of the Naval History
and Heritage Command, referring to the commander of
Japan’s navy. “That the capacity
of the United States to make
good the damage was something that the Japanese simply
didn’t have.”
Pearl Harbor also helped to
unite America around a singular task — to defend itself
against a common enemy.
“I don’t consider myself a
hero,” said Barbosa, who recalls
having breakfast with “an Italian guy from Chicago” moments before he rushed to his
anti-aircraft gun. “I just was
doing a job, protecting my buddies and protecting my country.”
TOKYO — An American
president in Hiroshima. A Japanese prime minister at
Pearl Harbor. One longtime
taboo has already fallen this
year, and the other soon will.
On Dec. 27, Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe will visit the
Hawaiian naval base attacked
by Japan in 1941. He will be
joined by President Barack
Obama, who seven months
earlier traveled to Hiroshima
to pay tribute to the 140,000
people killed there by a U.S.
atomic bomb in 1945. The two
attacks bookend World War
II in the Pacific.
The importance of the visits
may be mostly symbolic for
two countries that, in a remarkable transformation, have
grown into close allies in the
decades since they faced off in
brutal conflict. At the same
time, it’s significant that it took
more than 70 years for U.S.-Japanese relations to get to this
point. The two gestures of rec-