Local Pearl Harbor survivor talks about the ‘Day of Infamy’

“Have you ever had something happen to you that you wanted to forget about?” asked Lewis C. Shaw, Jr. during an interview with The Cannon.  “But no matter how much time passes, you can’t forget, and it is like it just happened yesterday.”
Shaw is a survivor of the Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, one of the great defining moments in American and world history. The event catapulted the United States into World War II.
Shaw was born in Eden, Tx in 1922, and graduated from Luling High School in 1939. He joined the military one year later at the age of 18.
“The world was at war and my father said, ‘Son, you should join the Navy so that your bunk won’t be in a muddy tent,’” Shaw said. 
He was the eldest of five children. His  youngest brother was only nine months old when he left for boot camp. Then he completed his training to become a Pharmacist’s Mate, and reported for duty on his first ship, the U.S.S. Oglala, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
The U.S.S. Oglala was a minelayer, built in 1903 as a Fall River liner to be used for hauling passengers on the Fall River in Massachusetts.
Therefore, it drew only three feet of water at the bow and the stern was completely above water aft of the screws.
The Oglala was tied outboard of the U.S. Helena, a light cruiser, at the 10-10 pier in Pearl Harbor. According to Shaw, most of the married crewmen’s families were living in Honolulu so they often brought them aboard the Oglala for a weekend cruise around the islands.  Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941 was scheduled to be one of those cruise days, and Shaw and his shipmates were preparing the ship to go out for a day of fun and relaxation with the families.
Like many fellow veterans, he remembers exactly what he was doing that morning.
“The corpsmen had moved out of the sickbay for the families to stay in, so I was taking a quick shower when I heard an explosion,” said Shaw.  “I looked out of a porthole and saw a plane drop what I mistook for a bomb.  It hit the water near a church boat (used for taking ship’s crews ashore on Sunday to church services). It seemed odd to me that a plane would waste a bomb on such a small boat.”

Then 19-year-old Shaw got a better look at the plane.

“I recognized the big red circle as Japanese at once. Suddenly I realized that what the pilot had dropped was a torpedo.  I watched it slide under Oglala and heard it explode in the engine room of Helena,” said Shaw.  “The Oglala suddenly tilted badly as the concussion blew a hole in her side.  Realizing she (Oglala) was sinking, I grabbed my trousers and threw them over my shoulder, and ran for the gangway. 

Shaw abandoned Oglala and ran towards Helena.  Along the way he encountered another crewmember.

“We had a rather large ship’s cook on Oglala, about six feet tall and weighing about 240 pounds. As he and I ran off Oglala side by side we saw bullets dancing across the wooden deck.  He suddenly dropped to the deck and I saw blood spurting from a hole in his neck,” Shaw said.

Shaw was 6’2” tall and weighed 195 pounds at the time, but said he was so pumped up that his smaller size didn’t matter. 

“I bent over, picked the cook up with one hand, and threw him over my shoulder and we continued moving to a safer spot on the Helena,” said Shaw.

As he describes the scene he also remembers how he felt to see and hear the bullets flying around him as he ran.

“When someone is shooting at you, you have tunnel vision, you’re just focused on getting to safety.  I was frightened, but I was very lucky, I never even got a scratch,” he said. “If a guy said he wasn’t scared that day he’s either a liar or crazy.”

Once on board the Helena, Shaw was able to control the cooks bleeding from his wound and kept him sedated with morphine until an ambulance arrived at about 4:30 p.m. taking him to the base hospital. 

“The next day I visited him and he was sitting up in bed like nothing had happened. The bullet had entered his right jawbone, clipping out a half-moon in the bone, exited the left side of his neck and blistered his left shoulder when it left his body,” said Shaw.  “All of this without injury to any major blood vessels, muscle, or nerves.”

The U.S. Fleet’s Pearl Harbor base was reachable by an aircraft carrier force, and the Japanese Navy secretly sent one across the Pacific with greater aerial striking power than had ever been seen on the World’s oceans. Its planes hit just before 8AM on 7 December.

Within a short time, five of eight U.S. battleships at Pearl Harbor were sunk or sinking, and the rest were damaged. Many other ships, including Shaw’s Oglala, and most Hawaii-based combat planes were also knocked out.  More than 2,400 Americans were killed.

Shaw experienced and witnessed many devastating and incredible events during and following the attack - one of them involving a plane and another, a submarine.

“I had stood on deck that Sunday and watched Helena’s five-inch guns shoot down a Japanese plane. The shell went through a tall brick smokestack at the Pearl powerhouse and brought the plane down before he (the pilot) had a chance to shoot at us.  I remember I could stand beside the gun turret and look through the hole in the stack,” said Shaw.

That evening he was assigned to a temporary hospital in the base officer’s mess hall. 

“We were busy most of the night taking care of the wounded. The Marine guards were very nervous in the dark and did a lot of shooting at various things during the night,” recalls Shaw. “We were visited by a guard looking for what he called ‘a German spy,’ but we hadn’t seen one. I never learned how his search ended.”

While assigned to the temporary hospital, Shaw and other medical personnel all dressed in white surgical gowns, and wore no rank insignias.

“At breakfast the next morning I was sitting next to an elderly surgeon and we were talking while we ate. He asked me what ship I was from and I said, “Oglala,” said Shaw.  “He said, ‘Well, you don’t have a ship, she’s sunk,’ and he asked where I’d like to be assigned.  I told him I had friends on Helena and would like to be assigned there. The next day my orders came in for Helena and I later learned that the man was the Pacific Fleet Admiral in the Medical Department.”

That same day, Shaw and some other sailors were walking on the beach when they spotted a periscope in the water.

“It was a Japanese two-man submarine that one of our destroyers had rammed. We waded out and pulled it up on dry land. Since we couldn’t get it opened, we left it with the two bodies still inside,” Shaw said.

Nearly fifty years later, Shaw returned to Pearl Harbor with his wife.

“A Marine guard let us on the base and we found the submarine still sitting exactly where we had left it in 1941,” said Shaw.  “The Navy had cut two holes in it, pulled the bodies out, poured concrete footings about three feet high and put the sub up on them.  We stopped and looked inside. 

“It was a rather eerie feeling to stand there and remembering how things had been earlier in my life,” said Shaw. “I told my wife that Pearl looked a lot smaller now than it had looked when I was trying to dodge Japanese bombs and bullets.”

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Shaw served on U.S.S. Helena. 

“After the Helena got a new engine room in Mare Island, we returned to sea just in time to help land the First Marine Division on Guadalcanal.  We later went through seven surface battles, and survived an estimated 35 air attacks - enough to get a Presidential Until Citation for all the action,” said Shaw. 

He was later assigned to the V-12 Officers’ Training and sent back to Texas Christian University. Then he learned that his ship had been sunk in Kula Gulf the night after he left her.  He considers it one of many close calls he encountered during his six years in the Navy.

“In battle, I think that a person sees only what happens in his immediate vicinity and after the battle we have time to absorb and sort our varied aspects of what happened in a general sense.  Time and memories tend to change one’s perspective also,” he said.  “Since our number one priority is survival, we tend to devote all of our energies on that.  It totally absorbs our thoughts and actions.  After every battle, we would gather in groups and sincerely discuss what we had seen and done.  There are as many different viewpoints and details as there are survivors. 

“As historians gather these many stories in order to get the ‘Big Picture,’ one can only hope they get the whole and truthful version of what really happened.”