WORLD WAR II SURVIVORS: After the battle Deusterman recalls infamous day at Pearl Harbor
Posted on Sunday, December 7, 2008
John Deusterman and his buddies relaxed on the Sunday morning, taking a day off from their duties in the U.S. Navy.
“There were some of us going into Honolulu,” he recalls.
They heard some bombing, but thought it was the U.S. Army training. Their thought, he said, was why did the Army have to do that on a Sunday morning?
Deusterman happened to look out the barracks window and saw a beerbellied Navy chief. Japanese torpedo bombers flew over the area, low.
The chief said, “‘Them’s Japs,’ and he took off running,” Deusterman says.
Deusterman remembers watching somebody shoot one of the bombers from a tug boat in the harbor, the bomber blowing up and its skeletal remains landing in the harbor.
He and his shipmates had been making their way from their barracks near the gate of the harbor to their ship, the USS Sicard, a light mine layer, which was undergoing an overhaul.
A few got together to help other ships. They first went to the USS Pennsylvania, a battleship, and told one of the guys to man a gun while four went to retrieve ammunition. When they got back to that ship with the ammo, he said, there was “no more gun” and their buddy was gone. Ten years ago, his DNA was found.
“That was the only man we lost that day,” Deusterman says of the Sicard crew.
He remembers the kid was new, an Iowa farm boy.
“He had just sent home enough money to buy a calf,” Deusterman says.
It all happened so fast. That night, they slept on the ship deck. Deusterman wore his dress whites — for the planned trip to Honolulu that morning that never materialized — and wore that outfit for three days. There were no pillows or blankets, but they were on their ship.
Not ‘shocked’
When the invasion of Pearl Harbor began on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, Deusterman said, “we weren’t shocked.”
He and his colleagues had known they were in war-time conditions during maneuvers in the Pacific Ocean prior to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. He said sailors had a different idea about the war than people back home.
“We couldn’t understand why we weren’t already at war,” he said.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt had transferred the U.S. Fleet to Pearl Harbor to deter Japanese aggression.
“Everybody knew there was going to be a war in the Pacific,” Deusterman said. “We expected it. It wasn’t a complete shock.”
Deusterman wasn’t even 20 yet, and it was the beginning of the Pacific campaign. He played his part on the Sicard and another ship. The duties of the Sicard included escorting the USS Kitty Hawk to Midway Island. They land mines in the Aleutian islands and Bougainville near Australia.
Deusterman got out of the military in 1944 after losing an eye at the Philippines. He had planned to stay in the Navy.
“I always thought a lot of the Navy,” he said.
He was born in St. Paul, Minn., and returned to Minnesota after the war, where he worked for a mining company and married his wife, Audrey. They eventually moved to San Francisco, where he sold centrifuges. After a series of other moves, they landed in Fayetteville. They are residents of Butterfield Trail Village.
Deusterman has made several trips back to Hawaii and has seen the memorial at Pearl Harbor. He remembers standing on the bridge of his ship watching the USS Arizona, a battleship, blow up and the USS Oklahoma, another battleship, “roll over” as he stood next to a couple of naval officers when Pearl Harbor was invaded.
“There were tears in their eyes,” he said.
He shows the Pearl Harbor 50th anniversary Commemorative Medal he received in 1991 in Florida. He is a member of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. Deusterman, however, tries to put Pearl Harbor in perspective.
“There were other things way worse than Pearl Harbor,” he says. “We had some rough duty at sea.”
Japanese father ‘very distraught’
Mitsy (her Japanese name is Mitsuko) Kellam was 10 when Pearl Harbor occurred. She was living in Japan. She remembers seeing her father “very distraught” after he read the paper and learned that Japan had gone to war with the U.S.
Three or four months prior to Pearl Harbor, she said, her father was saddened by the suicidal death of the prime minister, who was the cousin of the Emperor Hirohito, who was part of the faction of the government that wanted peace. The defense minister Tojo Hideki, became prime minister. He was part of the warring faction.
She remembers that, later in the war, her hometown, Toyama, was bombed by a B-29 about two weeks before Japan surrendered in 1945. It wiped out the town, she says, which was about the size of Little Rock. There was a factory left where children continued to attend school.
Her mother passed away a few months later. Her father died two years after that and her sister married. She moved to the U.S. to pursue an education. She attended Loma Linda University in Southern California, where she earned her master’s degree in nutrition. She later received her doctorate in nutrition at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She taught at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, and then came to the University of Arkansas to teach before marrying a widower, Owen Barnes.
Several years after Barnes died, she married Ray Kellam, another widower, who had been a prisoner in Japan “almost all of World War II” and had been part of the Bataan Death March in the Philippines He died in 1997.
She has visited her sister and her family a few times in Japan. She is a resident of Butterfield Trail Village.
As she looks back on the war, she says, “I don’t think very many people in Japan wanted to go to war.”
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