DECEMBER 7, 1941, LEST WE FORGET

LEST WE FORGET

"...a date which will live in infamy..."

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Bob Tierno, my co-author, is immensely proud of his dad, Rocky. Here’s one reason:

A Special Day

On January 6^th, 1941, in Pleasantville, New Jersey, Rocky Tierno celebrated his 18th birthday. On that same day, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard a hundred miles north, the Navy held a keel-laying ceremony for the last Iowa-class battleship it would build.

She and her three sister ships were the most heavily armed gunships the Navy would ever put to sea. Besides her other armaments, she carried three separate turrets, each holding three massive 16” guns capable of shooting a 2750-pound armor-piercing shell 24 miles.

Rocky’s plans were also substantial. He wanted to be an infantry officer but, since an appointment to West Point hadn’t been in the cards for an Italian boy from Jersey with his Irish congressman, Rocky enlisted in the United States Army four days later. I imagine he took a train to boot camp with other local recruits and I’ll bet they were excited about a future which awaited them somewhere.

After bootcamp and a few weeks on board a Navy ship, he debarked with other soldiers, sailors and Marines, walking down a gangplank, carrying his duffel bag, amazed at this paradise of palm trees, sun and sand. It wasn’t New Jersey.

He was assigned to the 3rd Engineering Regiment of the Hawaiian Division at Schofield Barracks, which would soon become the 24th Infantry Division. The novel, From Here to Eternity, by James Jones, is a great read if you’re interested in military life in Hawaii in 1941.

Months passed by and, on a Sunday in December, Rocky and a few friends attended early Mass. There was an agreement that, to aid in the esprit de corps between the Army and Navy, soldiers and sailors could alternate eating breakfast at each other’s mess halls. They left the church and made their way toward Battleship Row, for breakfast on the USS Arizona. They never made it.

The Attack

He witnessed the Zeros engulf Battleship Row in destruction. The Arizona was listing, afire, after a direct hit on its powder magazine. Over a thousand souls went down with her.

All eight U.S. battleships were damaged, with four sunk. The Japanese had concentrated on the battleships, since they posed the biggest threat to their plans to conquer Southeast Asia.

The brutality and deception were shocking. Within 24 hours, President Roosevelt addressed Congress, asking them to declare that “…since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7^th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.” Congress immediately declared war on Japan.

Rocky and the other men in A Co served for three days with an AA team at Hickam Field, then started building beach fortifications, still in place to this day, to prevent a land invasion by the Japanese.

After six months of this, Rocky, then a PFC, and the other enlisted soldiers in the Engineering Regiment were offered Army choices for their future: did they want promotions to sergeant and ship out to the Solomon Islands or become cadets at West Point or Annapolis?

In the battles to come, America would need both officers and men with combat experience, and Rocky knew he could lead them. He chose West Point. Guadalcanal is one of the Solomon Islands, so the outcomes for the men who made that choice were stark.

The Mighty Mo

Three years later, on Christmas Eve, 1944, the Iowa-class ship from Brooklyn, newly christened as the USS Missouri, arrived at Battleship Row and readied herself for her ocean battles to come. She supported the onslaught all the way to Japan, including at Iwo Jima, where her guns pounded the Japanese soldiers dug into Mt. Suribachi. Nine months later, as Adm. Halsey’s flagship, she bombarded Okinawa and Japan, too.

On September 2, 1945, in Tokyo Bay, the Missouri’s sailors and Marines got to witness the Japanese sign Articles of Surrender on her deck, bringing WWII to an end. That event is engraved on her deck to this day. Rocky had graduated as a second lieutenant in the infantry a few months earlier and soon shipped out for Tokyo.

Korea

In 1950-1951, Rocky was a platoon leader in Korea, earning a Combat Infantryman Badge, a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star (with a V device for Valor), while the Mighty Mo, from 1950 to 1952, was invaluable. It pounded the North Korean troops at the battles surrounding Inchon, and later the Chinese, too, when they entered the war to help in North Korea’s attempt to subjugate the South Koreans. 

After a storied career, the Missouri was decommissioned in 1955 and placed with the mothballed fleet at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Washington.

After 30 years in the Regular Army, Rocky retired to Pennsylvania as a Colonel in 1975 and was perpetually feted during the annual gatherings of the Pennsylvania Pearl Harbor Survivors. Like most men who’d served in combat, he didn’t talk a lot about it.

In 1985 the U.S. refitted the Missouri, recommissioned her and sent her on a world circumnavigation. Later, in 1991, she was the first American battleship to fire Tomahawk missiles into Iraq during Desert Storm.

From there she sailed to Pearl Harbor to take part in Operation Remembrance, the 50^th Anniversary of the Pearl Harbor Attack.

Passages

In 1999, after being decommissioned for the last time, the storied USS Missouri ceremoniously returned to Pearl Harbor, taking an honored place overlooking the shrine which had been built above the sunken USS Arizona.

In 2012, Colonel Tierno, 891/2 passed away. He is interred with his wife Carmela at West Point, where Bob arranges for a wreath to be placed on their gravesite each year.

The USS Arizona and USS Missouri are now in a fleet, forever, on Battleship Row, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The Mighty Mo’s 16” guns in Turrets 1 and 2 face forward, to carefully watch over the Arizona and the 1177 souls entombed with her, as the oil slicks from the Arizona float past Mo's starboard side.

Today,

December 7, 2019, the remains of Lauren Bruner, one of the last four survivors of the Arizona's sinking, will be interred with his shipmates on Battleship Row. The next-to-the-last man to escape her flaming deck, shot twice and badly burned by the explosion of the forward magazine, Lauren died earlier this year. He healed, and fought in seven more campaigns of the war.

He will likely be the last survivor, along with 43 others, who've chosen to spend eternity with their USS Arizona shipmates. Later today, Park Service divers will respectfully place his urn of remains inside the hull of the Arizona, then leave the shrine to its watery silence.

Rest in Peace, Colonel Rocky Tierno, and all the men who served during the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7th, 1941. We won't forget.

For more about honoring a veteran’s grave on December 14th, with Wreaths Across America, look here: