Pearl Harbor vet recalls 'Day of Infamy'

Even after 69 years and much against his will Gene Powell of Palatine can still see, hear and smell every detail of the attack on Pearl Harbor while on duty with the U.S. Navy that fateful Sunday morning.

“I've been trying to forget it ever since it happened,” he said Tuesday.

Powell had been in the Navy about two years by Dec. 7, 1941. He was working in food service aboard the temporarily dry-docked U.S.S. Pennsylvania and on hand for the usual delivery of ice cream for that Sunday's dinner.

“I saw the first three planes come down,” Powell remembered Tuesday, from his room at the Lutheran Home in Arlington Heights, where the otherwise independent 92-year-old is mending from a broken leg.

“The third one I knew wasn't our plane. As I ran up the gangplank, someone shouted, ‘Start carrying anti-aircraft ammunition!'”

And so, though it wouldn't have been among his tasks in a regular battle, Powell found himself running up and down stairs for the better part of an hour relaying the stored ammunition to the weapons.

Though he'd go on to serve in the Navy for 21 years, seeing action in World War II and the Korean War, Powell said no other battle affected him as much as that one.

“That was the closest I came to losing my life,” he said. “I was really scared because I knew that was the beginning of a war. I didn't know where were going or what we'd be doing. Everyone was white-faced. Everyone was scared.”

The Pennsylvania suffered a bomb blast that required a couple months' repairs at the naval yard in San Francisco.

While an accounting of the dead took longer aboard the ships that were away from shore, Powell knew which friends he'd lost within hours. One friend's death was confirmed only by the tattoo found on a severed forearm.

He'd later hear that the Japanese driver of the ice cream delivery truck had simply dumped his shipment and driven off that morning instead of waiting around for his bill to be paid.

“One thing I know, that bill never got paid,” Powell laughed ruefully. “But we did eat (the ice cream) after the battle was over.”

Though both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 saw the United States attacked from outside without warning, Powell believes the nation's reactions to both events were quite different.

“When Pearl Harbor was bombed, I don't think there was ever a nation on Earth where everyone wanted to jump in and help every civilian wanted to help,” he said.

“We didn't see that with the World Trade Center,” Powell continued. “It's a question I've often wondered, but I don't know the answer what made that change?”

He speculated the nation's togetherness during World War II might have been forged during the Great Depression a big factor in what had inspired him to join the Navy in the first place.

Powell was born and raised in Virginia, but stayed in Illinois after he retired from the navy in 1961 having been last stationed at Great Lakes Naval Base.

After that, he went to work for the state of Illinois, performing sanitary inspections of food processing plants for the Department of Public Health. He retired from that job in July 1987.

One of his daughters, Judy Powell, confirmed his assertion that he's avoided talking about his wartime experiences during most of her lifetime.

But she said he's opened up a bit more in recent years out of a sense that these experiences are an important thing for later generations to know about.