wooster: At 7:52 a.m., 75 years ago Wednesday, U.S. Army Pvt. George Morton was sunning himself on the Hawaiian beach of Waikiki, enjoying his Sunday off.
Then Morton heard a siren in the distance. He lifted his head in the direction of the sound to see smoke rising from the west. He turned on a portable radio to hear the music briefly interrupted: “This is an air raid alert. Take cover.”
At 7:52 a.m., 75 years ago Wednesday, Bernard Comito found himself wandering around a coconut field not far from his barracks at the Naval Air Station in Kaneohe. The 17-year-old had just arrived in Hawaii three days earlier, and he’d never seen coconuts before.
Suddenly, there was an explosion in Kaneohe Bay. Then another.
Comito looked up as the sky filled with airplanes, each marked by a bright crimson circle. The rising sun. The symbol of the Empire of Japan.
The next few minutes changed the world.
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 — a time in which the United States was not at war with anyone — killed 2,335 U.S. military personnel and 68 civilians, motivating the country’s entrance into World War II.
Morton of Akron and Comito of Dalton are among a dwindling number of living Pearl Harbor veterans who survived that fateful day.
On Wednesday, the two men shook hands at the Wayne Center for the Arts just prior to an annual ceremony that began precisely at 12:52 p.m. That’s 7:52 a.m., Hawaii time.
There were more than 60,000 military personnel in Hawaii when eight installations were bombed and strafed by Japanese pilots.
The youngest Pearl Harbor survivors turned 92 this year, and some estimate there are fewer than 2,000 still around to tell the tale.
Memories preserved
At the age of 95, Morton’s memory is beginning to fade, but an oral historian with the National Park Service and Morton’s son Tom, a journalist, both recorded his recollections when the images, sounds and scents were still clear, and sharp, and painful.
Raised by a single mom on the streets of Cincinnati, Morton was 18 when he decided he’d had enough working as a bookbinder’s helper making meager wages.
The U.S. Army beckoned as a more exciting alternative. When he was offered the option of serving in Hawaii, his mind filled with travel brochure images. He arrived in May of 1940, and served as a clerk at Fort Armstrong on Honolulu Harbor.
Tensions were rising between the U.S. and Japan, but it was still a peacetime stint that offered plenty of recreational amenities.
“Several of the fellows had cars. We’d chip in and buy gasoline and go to different places around the island,” he said in a park service interview in 1991.
The night before the attack, Morton attended a Saturday night local college football game and had dinner with friends. Before going to bed, he made plans to join “some of the guys” swimming early at Waikiki, before the crowds arrived,
And so he was nine miles from the site of the attack, far enough that he didn’t hear the explosions. The sirens and smoke were disquieting, but still a mystery until the radio’s brief interruptions of “Take cover” added a new caveat: “This is not a drill.”
By the time he got back to Fort Armstrong, a second wave of bombings had begun and martial law had been declared.
That evening, Morton was patrolling a blacked-out downtown Honolulu while others were assigned to begin digging trenches.
“We were actually preparing for what we thought was an invasion,” he said.
The next day, he was assigned to bag bodies.
“The Honolulu Mortuary was right down the street, and [they] would bring in whole bodies if you were lucky,” Morton said.
Attempts were made to piece together corpses that weren’t whole. The bodies were dusted with formaldehyde and placed in mattress sacks for burial.
“Death has a smell that clings to you,” Morton said.
Paradise under attack
The Japanese attack was the last thing Comito, now 92, was expecting when the teenager arrived in paradise on Dec. 4.
The California native said his parents gave him permission to enlist early, and he was thrilled with the Hawaiian assignment because he loved surfboarding.
It was that youthful innocence that caused him to stare at the buzzing planes in the sky and wonder: “Why are they firing at us? If I fire back, will they be mad at me?” Comito told a reporter in 2013.
But fire back, he did.
Comito and another friend found Springfield rifles and started shooting at the first wave of planes. They upgraded to repeating rifles by the time the second wave began.
“My barracks was destroyed. Everything I’d brought with me was destroyed,” Comito told the Wooster gathering Wednesday.
Later in life, Comito and Morton both joined the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association and took roles as local officers. They both returned to the Pacific during milestone anniversaries, each time visiting the USS Arizona Memorial where 1,177 sailors still are entombed in their sunken ship.
Morton’s son, Andy Morton of Wadsworth, said his dad didn’t talk about his war service much while he and brother Tom were growing up. George Morton’s sons were in their 20s before they were old enough to grow curious and question him about Pearl Harbor.
Now Andy Morton makes sure to take his dad to a Pearl Harbor remembrance every year. He’s gone to ceremonies in Cleveland, in Cuyahoga Falls, and most recently, in Wooster.
“I know it’s important to him,” said Andy Morton. “It’s a part of him.”
Paula Schleis can be reached at 330-996-3741 or pschleis@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/paulaschleis.