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Irv Jennings, a 91-year-old resident of Veterans Home of California Barstow, explains the various medals, citations and awards he earned during the most destructive conflict in human history. He served aboard the destroyer USS Case, which supported the attack on the island of Iwo Jima. Jennings also helped build the airfield that launched the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the first and only atomic bomb used in modern warfare.

Photo by Keith Hayes

Pearl Harbor remembered

9 Dec 2016 | Keith Hayes The Official United States Marine Corps Public Website

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

Those fateful words about the surprise attack on the United States Naval Base Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which propelled America in to World War II, were delivered by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to a joint session of Congress and the American people on Dec. 8, 1941.

During his declaration to the nation Roosevelt also announced that simultaneous attacks by Japanese forces took place against American bases established in Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippine Islands, Wake Island, and Midway Island. (The complete text of the speech can be found at https://www.loc.gov/item/afccal000483/.)

Historical accounts of the assault on Pearl Harbor indicate nearly 800 Japanese military aircraft and naval vessels launched the attack Sunday morning just before 8 o’clock when it was known that most U.S. military personnel and civilians would be at home.

As the smoke rose over the lush, picturesque island state, 2,403 U.S. sailors, soldiers, and Marines, and 68 civilians lay dead and 19 Naval ships including eight battleships were heavily damaged or destroyed along with more than 300 Army and Marine Corps aircraft.

Half of those killed in the attack included the crew of the battleship USS Arizona, which to this day lies where it was sunk to serve as a permanent memorial to all the Americans killed that fateful morning. 
The three U.S. Pacific Fleet aircraft carriers were not berthed at Pearl Harbor that morning because they were participating in maneuvers at sea and could not be located by the Japanese. (Complete listing of casualties and losses at The National World War II museum website at http://www.nationalww2museum.org/assets/pdfs/pearl-harbor-fact-sheet-1.pdf.)

History records indicate that the master planner of the Japanese military strike was Japan’s Naval Marshal General Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who intended that a declaration of war be delivered to the U.S. just before the attack, but that declaration was delayed for reasons that are unclear. (Source: Encylopædia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/Yamamoto-Isoroku.)

A quote following the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor often attributed to Yamamoto but never verified as actually having been said by him is “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

That “terrible resolve” resulted in a global war which claimed more than 60 million lives from 61 countries before it ended on Sept. 2, 1945, with the official surrender of Japanese forces in a ceremony aboard the battleship USS Missouri. The war in Europe had ended for Germany and the Axis powers on May 8, 1945, following the suicide death of Adolf Hitler.

A U.S. military presence is still at the same location now called Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam.

Irv Jennings Jr is a retired Navy enlisted man who has lived at Veterans Home of California Barstow since 2013.

He was 16 years old on the day Pearl Harbor was attacked when he and his father, a retired Marine Corps officer who served in World War I, heard on the radio what has happened.

“I remembered telling my father that I was going to enlist when I turned 17,” Jennings said. “I was the oldest of three boys. I was also a member of the Army JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) at North Phoenix High School. There were 24 members of my ROTC platoon, most of whom signed up for the war when they turned of age. Eight of them never returned from war,” he remembers.  

He recalls the mood of the country after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“It was stunning to say the least. Everybody was in awe of the fact, but when it sunk in what had happened and that the future of our country was in grave danger, I don’t think there was a kid in North Phoenix High School that if they’d handed them a gun and a hat wouldn’t have walked off to war that day,” he said. “That was the climate of the time. We were in the ROTC. There was already a war in Europe. We were getting ready to go to war.”

Jennings did enlist in the Navy at 17 years old with signatures from his parents to allow the underage teen to join the armed forces.
During his service in WWII Jennings was part of the force that retook the island of Iwo Jima from the Japanese while he served as Fire Controlman 3rd Class aboard the destroyer USS Case.

Jennings was on the island of Iwo Jima when the Marines raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi in February 1945, and took pictures of the original raising, not the iconic one that was later staged for photographers.

He served for part of his enlistment with the Naval Construction Battalion, or Seabees, and took part in the operation that ended the war in the Pacific.

“I had the happy job of drilling holes in the ground and filling them up with dynamite so the bulldozers could make the airstrip on Tinian Island from whence the Enola Gay (bomber) took off to drop the first atomic bomb on Japan,” Jennings recounted. 

Tinian Island was one of three islands in the Northern Marianas about 1,500 miles south of Japan and was the launching point of the attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day was entered into the Congressional record (Public Law 103-308) 22 years ago on Aug. 23, 1994, “… to urge all Federal (sic) agencies, and interested organizations, groups, and individuals, to fly the flag of the United States at halfstaff (sic) each December 7 in honor of the individuals who died as a result of their service at Pearl Harbor.”


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