The USS North Carolina (BB-55) My all-time favorite warship. As an elementary school student in North Carolina, I donated nickels and dimes to save this ship back in the early sixties.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

A Pearl Harbor Survivor Remembers

From the Nov. 14, 2009 and Dec. 7, 2011, Bowling Green (Ky) Daily News.

William J. Roberts, 87 and 89 at the times, joined the Navy in 1940 before he was drafted into the Army. When the attack came, he was a 19-year-old mail clerk on the USS Maryland.

"I knew most everyone on the ship. If a guy didn't get mail I heard from him it seems like. I remember the planes flying so low I could have thrown a rock and hit the guy in the teeth."

"There was a guy hurt, the doctor gave him a shot I don't know what and I must have sat with him for two hours till he passed on. O couldn't do nothing but I couldn't leave either...for some reason."

"A couple bodies floated out from under the pier, these things still get to me."

The Greatest Generation. --GreGen

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