Recalling time of Pearl Harbor

President Franklin D. Roosevelt called Pearl Harbor a “date which will live in infamy,” and Frank Weitzel well remembers having to live through it.

Stationed aboard the heavy cruiser U.S.S. San Francisco as a 19-year-old Navy engineer working to overhaul the engine room, the Huntington Beach man watched helplessly as planes flew in and sank ships right across the harbor. Though only one man of 800 was hit by gunfire on his ship, they were all a captive audience to the Japanese sneak attack that pulled the U.S. into World War II.

“Suddenly things got real bad,” he said. “It was quite a mess. We were right across from the battleships that rolled over. You’d see the [U.S.S.] Arizona blow up, then the [U.S.S.] Shaw was in floating dry dock and it blew up.”

What was worse was not knowing what to do, he said. Things had been so quiet that Weitzel had been sent to the doctor to get his tonsils out the week before, and the ship was not prepared.

“We were tied up at one of the finger piers” away from the action, he said. “We had no oil and no ammunition aboard ship at all. I was wondering what to do with no ammunition.”

Weitzel has kept in touch with survivors of the attack over the years, even at one point heading the chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn. that includes Huntington Beach and Long Beach. But only about 50 remain in the area, he said. That chapter plans a memorial service at El Toro Memorial Park in Lake Forest Friday, he said. Bob Davis, commander of the local American Legion Post 133, said his group would raise a flag that day. But even though the date ought to live in infamy, Weitzel feels younger generations remember less and less.

“Half of them don’t know about it,” he said. “They say, ‘Pearl Harbor? What’s that?’ They don’t teach it in the schools. All they’ve got in the history books is one paragraph.”