Presentation Date: March 25, 2004
Two Pearl Harbor Survivors SR CHIEF QM Mickey Ganitch, US NAVY (RET) and LT CMDR Marv Recknor, US NAVY (RET)
Both are eye-witnesses of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor December 7th, 1941. SR CHIEF QM Mickey Ganitch, US NAVY (RET) and LT CMDR Marv Recknor, US NAVY (RET).
Both are eye-witnesses of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor December 7th, 1941
LT CMDR Marv Recknor, US NAVY (RET)
* Enlisted as Apprentice Seaman in 1938 @ Portland, OR
* Assigned to USS San Francisco; Stayed Aboard 3 1/2 Years Until Mid-1942
* 26 Years Active Duty
* On-Board USS San Francisco During Attack at Pearl Harbor
* Helped Commission New Ship USS Sperry in 1942, as QM; Ran-Up First Flag
* Commissioned as Naval Officer 1944, Rising to LT CMDR
* Forty Years After Commisioning USS Sperry, Ran-Down Flag at Decommissioning
in San Diego, 1982
* Remains Active with SIRS-Alameda, Red Cross, Elks, etc.
SR CHIEF QM Mickey Ganitch, US NAVY (RET)
* Enlisted January, 1941 @ Oakland, CA
* 23 Years Active Duty
* On-Board USS Pennsylvania During Attack at Pearl Harbor; Bombed
* Stayed With Ship Through Re-Fitting in San Francisco and Beyond During Pacific
Invasions
* 22 of 26 QMs Killed On USS Pennsylvania During Japanese Torpedo Plane Attack
* Numerous Civilian Jobs After Navy Retirement
* Remains Active with Disabled American Veterans, Pearl Harbor Survivors, etc.
"We stayed at battle stations all night. I was on the bridge almost all the time, and it seemed like the water around the Arizona burned all night."
Two of the thousands of US Navy personnel on duty at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 spoke at the Golden Gate Wing's March dinner meeting about their experiences on that fateful day in world history.
Lt. Commander Marv Recknor, US Navy (Ret) had enlisted as an Apprentice Seaman in 1938 in Portland, Oregon. He had been assigned to the battleship USS San Francisco, and was aboard the heavy cruiser as she was docked for an overhaul.
Sr. Chief Quartermaster Mickey Ganitch, US Navy (Ret) had been a farm boy from Ohio, who took to heart Horace Greeley's call to "Go west young man." Mickey came west, to boot camp in San Diego, following his Oakland enlistment in the Navy.
"Somebody told me if you'd like a dry place to sleep and warm food, join the Navy. If you join the Army or Marines, maybe you'll have a warm place to sleep, maybe you won't."
Ganitch says there had been a lot of talk going on about a pending war with Japan. On that Sunday morning in December, he was on the USS Pennsylvania, flagship of the US Pacific Fleet. Mickey was getting dressed that morning for a football game ashore, when he says, "Japan came on at us."
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor followed months of political jousting between the United States and Japan, and was the culmination of extensive planning and training by the Imperial Japanese Navy, kept secret from western intelligence operations. As Ganitch and Recknor explained, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) had assembled an attack fleet in the Kurile islands less than two weeks previously - - six aircraft carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, nine destroyers, eight tankers and three submarines.
The fleet steamed undetected in bad weather, almost due east from the Kuriles to 200 miles due north of the Hawaiian Islands. If they had run into any passenger liners or freighters, they'd have been spotted. But winter's freezing rain and wind kept civilian and military ships and planes from the northwest approach to Hawaii. An hour before the air attack, the destroyer USS Ward spotted and fired on a Japanese submarine on the southern approach to Pearl Harbor... but no general alarm was sounded at the naval base. By six o'clock in the morning on December 7th, the Japanese carriers had launched more than 350 aircraft on courses toward the heart of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, as well as at Army and Marine bases to the east and western shores of Oahu.
Radar showed a large group of planes headed southwest to Oahu, but the data was interpreted as a flight of USAAC B-17s, and not an air armada of IJN "Val" dive bombers, "Kate" torpedo planes and bombers and Zero fighters. Japanese spies had charted the positions of ships on Battleship Row and elsewhere in Pearl Harbor. But Ganitch pointed out that his ship, the Pennsylvania had been moved overnight into drydock for repairs on her screws. While the first attack left the Pennsylvania unscathed, planes in the second IJN wave found the battleship with a 500 pound bomb. The warhead exploded two decks deep, about 45 feet from Ganitch.
Ganitch, dressing for a football game later that morning, had put on all his pads and uniform, except for his helmet and spiked football shoes, and was headed forward and up ward on the starboard side of the ship, when the attack began. He says on the battleship's tripod mast he'd climbed to get to the crow's nest, the next day, he saw all kinds of machine gun bullet knicks from a Japanese plane's strafing passes. Mickey doesn't know when those bullets were zipping around the superstructure, but he says, "they didn't get me. I think God had other plans for me. Anybody who says he wasn't scared that day is a liar. We were all scared, but we did what we were trained to do."
"I was the lookout, so I was up in the crow's nest. I had a bird's view of everything. What a mess it was. Just like a bad dream. The ships burning... "The USS Nevada tried to get out of the harbor. It got partly out there until the Japanese started concentrating on it - - torpedoing and bombing it. And it looked bad, because if that ship had been hung up in the middle of that harbor channel, no one would have gotten out of there."
Instead of risking blocking the harbor channel, the Nevada's captain chose to run the battleship aground. Ganitch says one of two destroyers (the Cassin and Downes ) in drydock in front of the Pennsylvania was hit about the same time as the battleship. "The destroyer started burning and keeled over on the other destroyer there. Word came out to flood the drydock and put out the fire. That sounded good, except that the oil that came out of the destroyer got on top of the water caught fire. So it got pretty hot all around us there."
Marv Recknor, aboard the San Francisco , also had a ringside seat to the attacking Japanese torpedo planes. "We were tied up to the dock, starboard side to, and the planes came over our fantail, and they came in quite low. My battle station was on the bridge and our bridge was 54 feet above the water. When I got up on the bridge, looked out and and saw the torpedo planes, I could look almost right into the face of the pilots coming. They weren't looking at me of course, they were concentrating on their run to drop their torpedoes.
Marv says one of the most awesome sights of that day was the Oklahoma . After the battleship took several torpedoes, she rolled over where she was moored. "From my ship, I could see all of Battleship Row and it was an awesome sight to see the bottom of a battleship as she turned over. The people were inside, they were getting out and sliding down the bottom into the water to get away. Some of them didn't get out, of course.
"We had a fellow in our (Pearl Harbor Survivors) chapter who was an ensign aboard the Oklahoma. He said as they went down, his stateroom filled with water and the only way to get out was through a porthole. As the water got up, he told his roommate to get out and he'd hold the porthole open. His roommate was a little broad across the beam and he couldn't get through the porthole. So this fellow had to go out, up through the water, and he had to leave him there." At 0810 hours, a single bomb struck the battleship Arizona , just starboard of the number 4 turret. A huge blast ripped through the warship and sent and a fireball skyward.
"The explosion of the Arizona was a tremendous affair. We thought for a long time that they had taken a rather large bomb down through the stack and it had exploded inside. But it turned out that they took a rather large bomb and it went through the deck, exploded in a magazine and practically blew the ship apart." "My ship was in for extensive repairs and a month or so before had offloaded all of our ammunition. We had small arms fire, but we didn't have any antiaircraft fire. When the planes started coming in so low, there were several of us quartermasters on the bridge. We got rifles and finally got some ammunition and started shooting at the planes with rifles. Whether we hit any or not, no one knows. But they were that close, coming across."
"We were tied up, starboard side to, and early in the battle there was a large explosion on our port side when a large bomb dropped. It didn't hurt the ship, but it blew a lot of debris and crud into the air . The concussion knocked me off my feet, and as I was on my knees on the bridge, a fighter plane came over about that time. It sprayed the ship with machine gun fire and I could hear the bullets hitting our superstructure. "The war hadn't been started very long, just a few minutes, and I realized not only are these guys sinking our ships, but they're trying to kill me. And you take an immediate dislike to people who are doing things like that to you."
For Navy personnel as well as for those on embattled Marine and Army air and infantry bases on Oahu, the remainder of December 7th was filled with despair, anger and uncertainty as to whether the air strike was actually preparation for a land invasion. "We stayed at battle stations all night. I was on the bridge almost all the time, and it seemed like the water around the Arizona burned all night. We tried to darken the ship. There was a lot of oil around, maybe a foot deep, and it was burning." Both Ganitch and Recknor noted the irony of the Japanese having failed to hit the fuel oil tanks on the southeast side of Pearl Harbor, near the harbor channel.
"If they had put a few bombs in there," says recknor, " it would have set the war back awhile, because we depended on those a lot during the war for fueling the ships." Ganitch added, "The closest oil, if those were burned, was in the states, at least two thousand miles away. So they figured it would have set back the war at least about six months, having to transport fuel out there."
Only days after the attack, the San Francisco was quickly prepared for war. "It took us about a week, in fact exactly a week, recalls Recknor. " The following Sunday we got underway, joined a task force and made an emergency run to Wake Island, to try to save it. Before we got there, Wake fell, so the admirals in charge turned us around and we came back."
The San Francisco steamed at about 33 knots, which allowed it to be used as part of the fast carrier attack fleets that ultimately ruled the Pacific Ocean. Recknor says those who served on the cruiser had a brag about her capabilities, "If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch."
Repairs for the Pennsylvania took significantly longer. After a refitting which included modifications to her superstructure and antiaircraft gun updates Pennsylvania took part in many major Pacific naval actions: invasions of Attu, Kiska, Makin, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Saipan, Guam, Linguyan and Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, and the Battle of Surigao Strait. Ganitch, having grown up in rural Ohio, where the biggest ship he'd seen was a ferry boat, got the thrill of handling one of the largest pieces of machine then known to man.
"One of the Quartermaster's jobs was to steer the ship. I steered the Pennsylvania under the Golden Gate Bridge about fifteen times. For a farm boy I thought that was pretty good. She was so slow, built in 1916. We could do about nineteen knots, downhill with a tail wind. That's about all we could do."
The battleship missed Iwo Jima because its main guns had fired so many rounds they wouldn't fire straight and had to be replaced. The main guns from the Oklahoma replaced Pennsylvania's heavy batteries. They were never fired at the Japanese, though. "On August 12, 1945, the ship was back at Okinawa," says Ganitch, "when a Japanese plane came in. At eight-thirty at night, the lights were on and nobody fired a shot at it. It aimed its torpedo for the closest big ship it saw, the battleship Pennsylvania . The torpedo hit the starboard propeller and everything went up, in the living quarters of the quartermasters. I had 26 quartermasters and I lost 20."
Pennsylvania's hull was patched at Okinawa, and under the battlewagon's own power eventually made its way back to the United states. One year after the war, in 1946, Pennsylvania was among the target fleet assembled for the nuclear bomb test at Bikini Atoll. Ganitch was in charge of the livestock put aboard the ship, and had to return to the ship after the blast. "Afterwards," he says, "I was told to throw away my clothes and take a good shower. That's the protection we had there for the radiation. Evidently it didn't matter too much, since I have four children, fourteen grandchildren, seventeen great grandchildren and one great, great grandchild."
After retiring from the Navy with 23 years of active duty, Mickey Ganitch held several civilian jobs. Today, he keeps busy with Disabled American Veterans, Pearl Harbor Survivors. Marv Recknor rose to the rank of Lt. Commander in his 26 year Navy career. As Quartermaster, he helped commission the USS Sperry in 1942, and ran-up the ship's first flag. Forty years later, in 1982, Recknor ran-down the flag at the Sperry's decommissioning in San Diego. Today, he's active with SIRS-Alameda, the Red Cross and Elks.
Pearl Harbor Survivors Association
Both men are members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. This group reached its peak membership of 13,000 members about ten years ago, at the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. The association now boasts 6500 members with about 100 members in Bay Area.