James Leamon Forbis enlisted in the Navy in 1939. When war came on 7 December 1941, he was on the front line of history, serving as a coxswain on board the USS Arizona (BB-39) when the bombs started dropping. He survived the attack and went on to serve through World War II on board the destroyers Craven (DD-382), Kalk (DD-611), and De Haven (DD-727). He retired from the Navy as a chief boatswain’s mate in 1961. In the following excerpt from his U.S. Naval Institute interview, he vividly recounts the fateful events of the Day of Infamy from Ground Zero.
On the morning of December 7, 1941, I was aboard the battleship Arizona. The bugler went on the fantail for morning colors. He had already sounded first call, which was scheduled for five minutes to eight. He was standing there awaiting eight o’clock when some planes came out of the east. They were coming right out of the early morning sun and it was real bright. He couldn’t see anything but he said, “Boy, I wish I was up there in one of them planes flying around this morning.” I glanced up but couldn’t see anything because of the blinding sun, and I said, “Yeah, I guess it’s pretty nice up there.” Then other planes started coming in over Hickam Field and the naval shipyard. They were dropping bombs as they came. Then they veered sharply to the left.
Now, we were expecting the big carrier Enterprise [CV-6] to come in the day before and she hadn’t come, so we thought, maybe those are Enterprise planes. They were always playing war games out there, the Army against the Navy, in surprise attacks. So we thought, maybe it’s the crazy Army Air Forces. They don’t know when to quit. They even have to get after us on a Sunday morning. They probably had sandbags with flares that’d make smoke.
But then the bombs were dropping and you could hear them exploding and bang!—one of them hit the bow of the ship. I told somebody with me, “Boy somebody’s going to catch hell now. They hit the ship.” I still thought it was practice, but it was awful heavy for practice, because it jarred that battleship.
Very shortly we knew they were Japanese planes. Our battle stations were in number four gun turret, which was on the after part of the ship. So we went down to the third deck and aft to the powder-handling room and then started climbing up the ladder to the gun turret. I was on the ladder when a bomb hit the top of the turret. It ricocheted off and knocked me down to the lower handling room. There was a kind of flash and we got smoked out. You couldn’t breathe that old stink in there, that smell. I got burned, but not bad. We all got scorched. Then we went over into number three lower handling room. The compressed air lines had broken there, and the compressed air was blowing the smoke out so you could breathe and live.
The last word that come over the public-address system was, “Fire on the quarterdeck.”
The ship was down by the bow and sitting on the bottom. Everything was really in a sad shape. It was torn up. There was bombing, burning, and people were in the water. Some boats were retrieving them. Everyone was leaving the ship. There were about a half-dozen of us getting some life rafts over the side to the men in the water. Some of them had been blown into the water and some of them had jumped.
A few of us remained on board ship. We had briefly discussed the powder magazines. The 14-inch powder was directly below us. Once in a while somebody would say something about it. We knew the magazines were overdue. They were going to go. And we knew that if they did go, that deck would blow us awful high. So we got all the rafts over, and because there was nothing left for us to do we jumped into the water.
The old boat boom on the starboard side had been blown or knocked loose from its anchoring. It was still attached but it was in the water under the oil and you couldn’t see it. I jumped in and hit it. I was almost knocked out, just about unconscious. One of the guys had helped me recover and encouraged me until I finally could swim on my own. I started out half cuckoo from hitting that boat boom. He stayed with me. We swam over to the boat landing through the oil. I don’t know how I made it. The good Lord was looking out for us.
When I got in that boat and looked back I got the full impact of what had happened in the harbor. I’ll tell you, I couldn’t believe I was alive.
Forbis’ Pearl Harbor reminiscences are excerpted from Naval Institute oral historian John T. Mason Jr.’s 1981 interview, which appeared in the anthology The Pacific War Remembered: An Oral History Collection (Naval Institute Press, 1986).
The U.S. Naval Institute’s Oral History Program has collected, organized, and indexed the recollections of prominent naval servicemen and servicewomen since 1969. To learn more about Naval Institute oral histories, visit the program’s web page at www.usni.org/heritage/oral-history. In late 1993, Secretary of Transportation Federico Peña began the process of selecting a new Coast Guard Commandant. Among the candidates was Rear Admiral Robert Kramek, who was serving as chief of staff at Coast Guard Headquarters. What follows is an edited excerpt from U.S. Naval Institute Oral History interviews Paul Stillwell conducted with the admiral on 5 December 2007 and 10 January 2008. Admiral Kramek died 20 October 2016.
A message came through in November 1993 that I was one of the admirals Secretary Peña wanted to talk to. The process was totally up to the Secretary. His office told us, “You’re each to prepare a one-page white paper saying what you’d do if you became Commandant of the Coast Guard, and then we’ll set up interviews for you.”
So I told my wife, Pat, who has always been my best adviser, about the process. She asked, “Well, how are you going to do this?”
“I’m going to sit down, and I’ll figure it all out.”
She said: “You know, we’ve been married for a lot of years now. I know that you need some help doing this.” So I went to a Coast Guard Academy classmate named Bob Caron, who worked in Coast Guard Headquarters as a civilian. Bob came in the next day, and he had a list of four or five people, and I got their ideas over a series of meetings. One of them said, “We’re going to have to train you on how to interview.”
My teacher was Dr. Dick Titlow, our management psychologist in headquarters. He gave me 16 hours of tutoring and pre-reading and strategy. He said, “You want to be the last one interviewed, because he won’t even remember what the first person told him unless he takes copious notes.” And he was right. Peña didn’t take any notes at all.
Barbara Strauss had been an analyst for me for years when I was the chief of staff and deputy chief of staff. She said: “You’re going to have to be very familiar with what Secretary Peña’s strategy is for the Department of Transportation in support of the President. Then you’re going to have to put a plan together before your interview as to what your strategy would be supporting those things to get there.”
After doing that, I went up to the Secretary’s office for the interview. I remember what day it was—the day before Thanksgiving. It was set for a Wednesday afternoon at 1400. Everybody was getting ready to get out of Washington. When Peña did show up, he looked at his watch and said: “I’ve got a flight out of Washington National at 5 o’clock to go home to Denver. How about coming back after Thanksgiving holiday for this interview?”
I couldn’t believe what came out of my mouth next: “No, sir. I’d like to do it now.”
So we went in, and we did the interview. He had the one-page paper I had prepared, and he asked me for specifics. I gave him the 30-second elevator-speech answer for each topic.
He said: “Well, I’ve got to run to the airport. We’ll let you know in a couple weeks how this turns out.”
I said, “You know, I’ve prepared a complete strategic plan for what I would do if I was the Commandant.”
The Secretary said, “Well, we don’t have time for that now, but I’d like to see that someday.”
I went back to headquarters. My team was in the room. “How did it go?”
I replied: “I didn’t get all the time; I didn’t get it all out. I told him that we had prepared a strategic plan.”
They said: “Right now, package it up. We’re going to courier it over to the Secretary at the airport.”
My response: “Ooh. You’re crazy.”
“Admiral, you’ve got to decide whether you want to do this or not. He gave you an opening. Send it to him.”
I did it. It was ready to go. Put it in an envelope, and as chief of staff I had a car and driver. I said, “Go over to National Airport, find Secretary Peña, and give it to him when he’s getting on the plane.”
After Thanksgiving his chief of staff, Ann Bormolini, told me: “I want you to come over here. The Secretary wants to see you.”
I replied, “Oh, man, maybe I got selected.” I walked in, and he was furious. He said: “I didn’t want any written data from any of you guys. You sent me a ten?page strategic plan. Where do you get off sending me something like that?”
I said, “You asked for it.”
“When did I do that?”
“When you were going out the door.”
“Well, I didn’t mean this,” he replied. “What do you expect me to do with this?” He was ranting and raving.
I said, “Do with it as you might, but that’s what I would do as Commandant.”
I was the only one invited back for a second interview. Then I was invited back for a third interview, and it was really tough. He closed the door, nobody else in the room. He was walking up and down. A bit of role-playing. I knew him from running road races, so I realized this was not his natural state. He said, “We vetted you everywhere, and we’re told that you push your stripes around, you’re arrogant, you push people around,” blah, blah, blah.
“I don’t know where you got that,” I said. “None of it’s true. I invite you to call any man or woman in the Coast Guard anywhere and ask them what they think about me. I’m the people’s candidate.”
He said, “We’ll do that.”
About three weeks later, he called me up and said: “I’m selecting you to be the Commandant. I’m going to submit your name to President Clinton and to Vice President Gore for approval.”