Pearl Harbor Survivors Share Stories

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DALLAS (CBS11) - Three men stood as best as their ninety-plus year old bodies would allow as a school band played the Star-Spangled Banner at a Dallas Veteran Service Center. They are survivors of an attack seventy-four years ago today on Pearl Harbor.

Their bodies are frail, their hearing failing but they remember clearly the morning of December 7, 1941.

"That morning I was going on the gangway watch," said John Lowe, who's naval tanker had pulled into the harbor the day before.

"And, I was eating an orange and throwing the peelings over the side when the (Japanese) came in and they hit me with a bullet right here and it came out my back between my shoulder blades," Lowe said as he pointed to an area on his chest.

"We were at peace," said Bill Hughes, a radio operator on board the USS Utah. "We didn't expect the attack."

Hughes escaped from the sinking and listing Utah and took cover in a ditch on shore. A shuttle boat later picked him up and he could see the American Pacific Fleet in ruins.

"All of those ships, it was terrible," Hughes said. "I wouldn't know it until the next day but they had people in small boats going out and gathering up bodies and body parts. It was terrible. That was a sickening feeling. I knew that so many lives must have been lost."

The survivors are dwindling in numbers. They know the pre-teen and teen students in the band and ROTC class that has come to visit will be the last generation to hear their stories first hand. And they hope that generation will pass their stories along.

"I hope they do, I hope they do," said Lowe. "And when they see a ceremony like this they will be and hopefully that'll happen."

"I fear that the way history is being rewritten today that we might be a footnote in future history books," Hughes said. "And it wasn't like that at all. At that time its magnitude was unimaginable.

"They should know that they enjoy their cellphones, their computers and all their whiz-bang sports cars that someone died so they could enjoy that," he said.

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