Pearl Harbor veteran: We were scared ... but not afraid. There's a difference.
Seaman Second Class Charles T. Sehe went from breakfast to chaos the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, as he rushed up the stairs of the USS Nevada into smoke, flames and explosions.
“I ran to my battle station ... oh my God ... it was unbelievable,” he told an interviewer in April.
As Japanese planes decimated U.S. Navy battleships and destroyers in a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that forced the U.S. into war, the then 18-year-old Geneva native darted to his position at the searchlight platform.
“I could see the whole harbor,” the now 92-year-old recalled last week. “Planes were coming, crisscrossing each other.”
Without waiting for orders, Sehe and his shipmates sprang into action for themselves.
“We were mostly teenagers — from 17 to the oldest who was 23 years of age. We were scared ... damn scared ... but not afraid. There's a difference.”
A torpedo ruptured the Nevada but somehow the battleship kept going — the only one to get underway during the attack — although her slow pace gave dive bombers an easy target.
On board, “there were about 11 major fires. You'd put out one fire, then go to another, and when you came back the other one would reignite,” Sehe said.
Taking in water, the Nevada sank in shallow water but was repaired and headed back to battle with Sehe aboard in 1943. After his baptism by fire, the teenager grew up quickly, participating in the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944 and attacks on Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945.
The spring of 1945 brought the Nevada damage from a suicide bomber and artillery shell, so Sehe welcomed a cease-fire. He recalls the incongruity between the brutality of war and theatricality of the formal surrender ceremony with “starched white uniforms signing a formal treaty.”
Back in America postwar, the G.I. bill opened up a new world for the self-described “Depression-era kid” whose father was a laborer in Geneva.
A 1940 graduate of Geneva High School, Sehe and other veterans found transition on the peaceful campus of North Central College in Naperville, where he found studying science “difficult” at first.
“That was challenging ... sitting in class listening to some idiot talk about crayfish and clams,” Sehe said.
North Central College frowned on smoking or drinking so Sehe and his comrades would “go down to the taverns with our textbooks and study until 2 a.m.”
One professor told the former soldiers, “We don't want the elderly veterans sitting among the youngsters in class.”
Sehe persevered, excelling in zoology and botany and earning postgraduate degrees at the University of Iowa before becoming an anatomy professor at Minnesota State University in Mankato.
He recorded his memories of Pearl Harbor for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library's oral history project in April.
Sehe retired in 1990 and lives in Mankato.
“I'm now an adopted son of Nevada,” he said.
The Nevada governor's office recognized Sehe in October with a ceremony at the USS Nevada memorial in Carson City.
“It was overwhelming,” he said.
• The Associated Press contributed to this report.