A hero remembers

Pearl Harbor survivor reminisces 63 years later

MOSES LAKE — In at least one corner of this city, the page on today's calendar will have a special meaning.

It has nothing to do with the approaching Christmas holiday, but with heroism of the highest kind. The kind that moves a nation into action and a warrior to tears.

That warrior is Jim Brown, an octogenarian man who survived Pearl Harbor, the attack on the American Navy by Japanese planes on Dec. 7, 1941.

That Sunday, 63 years ago, Brown recalls, he was in Honolulu, wearing his dress whites aboard the USS Whitney, preparing to go sightseeing with a friend.

The USS Whitney was a repair ship for the American fleet's destroyers, and Brown was a third-class torpedo man, fresh from torpedo school.

He stepped out of the Whitney's quarter-deck door and he saw the planes.

"They were making runs at the battleships," he said. "They were heading for the Arizona."

One of the officers told Brown to sound "Fire and Rescue" — the call for the group assigned to put out fires.

"I said to him 'No. (You must) sound General Quarters. This is war.'" General Quarters orders every man to go to their battle stations.

Brown grabbed three of his fellow shipmates and took them to get ammunitions. Right there, in the middle of what it was up to that point a surprise attack, he showed them how to clip the ammunition together.

Somehow, they managed to try and put together a defense, with the Japanese planes zooming overhead.

"You could hear the shells hit the belly of (their) planes," he said. "We heard a plane crash, and I was probably the only one who saw it go down."

There were two waves of planes attacking that Sunday morning, Brown said. One that lasted for about an hour and then another one that took about an hour and a half .

The day that would live in infamy would pass, though not fade, for Brown. Years later, in a business trip to Sumatra, Brown flew into Honolulu and visited the gravesite of the Arizona.

"I was overwhelmed," he said, his voice quivering. "All the memories came rushing back."

Brown's career with the Navy would have another dire brush with death.

Four years later, halfway between Okinawa and Japan, the war found him aboard the USS Little, a brand-new destroyer out of Seattle.

There, on May 3, 1945, 24 Japanese planes attacked the ship, sinking it within minutes and killing 30 crew members.

Just as it had happened four years earlier, some resistance took place, and Americans knocked down four of the planes. However, one of them got into the engine room, with three more of them coming after, effectively crippling the ship.

"The ship went down in 10 minutes. Thirty people died and about 40 were injured."

Among them was the quartermaster, whom Brown grabbed and helped move toward the front of the ship.

"He said, 'I can't make it,' and I told him, 'sure you can.' Then I touched his back and there was just a hole. A .50 caliber machine gun bullet had gone into his belly and out his back."

Survival became a priority, and Brown put on his life jacket, as the ship took on a V shape as it started to sink. He took to water and realized in horror that his life jacket was defective.

"It had a hole in it," he said.

That's when he saw an aluminum powder case floating about. He held on to it and waited to be rescued.

"That case saved my life," he said.

Not seriously hurt, Brown's ears paid the price of combat. The roar of the planes and the gunfire affected his hearing, confining him to shore duty for the rest of 1945. To this day, Brown wears a hearing aid on each ear.

"I was lucky," he said.

The memories of war are still there, even if it is on a replica of the USS Little that doubles as a cribbage board, with cannons as pegs. Nevertheless, Brown holds no grudges and has lived happily for 18 years in a city noted for its deep connections with Japan.

"I don't feel bad about the Japanese," he said. "They were fighting for their country and they had a job to do."

Brown holds an identical perspective on his own performance. Never considering himself a war hero, he simply said he had "a job to do."

With the job over, he moved on. Thirty days after the sinking of the Little, he married the woman he had been corresponding and sharing pictures with for years but had never met. Fifty-nine years later, they are still together.

"The secret to a long marriage," Beulah Brown said with a smile. "is not having met the person you are marrying."

The father of two boys, Jerry and Tom, and a retired former oil well-driller for Standard Oil, wholesale salesman for Master Fence Fitting in California and a real estate agent in Moses Lake, Brown looks back and ruefully says that time has erased from the collective memory the heroism of Dec. 7, 1941.

"With time, it disappeared." he said. "I feel bad that it does."