JOPLIN, Mo. — They’re gone now, nearly to a man, those veterans who were generous enough to tell me their stories over the years.

From 1991 through 1995, as the 50th anniversary of major battles and campaigns of World War II approached, I interviewed many of the men who were there, telling their stories in special sections The Joplin Globe put out in 1991, again in 1995 with all that we subsequently learned, and again for the 60th anniversary of the attack at Pearl Harbor in 2001.

How many stories did we tell over the years? Hundreds, probably, ranging from a Pittsburg, Kansas, State University professor who was born in France and who ended up fighting on the Russian front, to a paratrooper who dropped into France as part of the D-Day invasion, to men who witnessed that attack on a quiet Sunday morning in Hawaii 75 years ago. 

For some of the survivors, telling their stories was both painful, and important. A final duty.

One man had told his story only once before. Another died before I could interview him, but his wife shared with me a hand-written letter running many pages that described a harrowing life-or-death decision he had to make at war’s end, and the agony that haunted him into old age because of it.

I kept track of some of these veterans, visited a few when opportunity presented itself, and noticed their names periodically in the obituaries. 

The further I dug, the more astounded I was to learn that men with ties to Joplin and nearby towns were everywhere during the war, from the quarterdeck of the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor to the gangplank on the USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay for the surrender of Japan, and everywhere in between. Some were living in Southwest Missouri when the war began, others settled there after the war for one reason or another. The presence of so many men in so many far-off places is testimony to the enormity of that war.

Ordinary men living ordinary lives

The attack on Dec. 7, 1941, set in motion events that saw 5,000 men and women pass through the local recruiting office during the next four years; many never came home. These were, until that day 75 years ago, ordinary men living ordinary lives, men like Pvt. Elton Wright, who worked for the DuPont Powder Co. in Joplin. He was killed in action in Germany in 1945. He was the third war casualty and second fatality that family suffered. And R.J. Frankenstein, who went from playing center on the Joplin High School football team in 1941 and serving as mayor for the annual senior class “City Day” to joining the paratroopers in 1942. He was killed in action in Belgium in 1945.

Or Alfred Akers, who became a personal favorite of mine. He was orphaned at age 8, with no next of kin, and for most of his life had taken care of himself. When war broke out, he was working at the Milford Miller Produce Co., living in a room nearby. No one thought Akers would make a good soldier. He had dropped out of school. AP reports from the time noted he had trouble staying in step after he enlisted. “Wilder than a new beer,” his fellow soldiers said of him. But in combat, the self-reliant Akers proved to be a born leader, rising to sergeant. Twice wounded, he received the Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster, Bronze Star, Silver Star and numerous other honors.

One member of his platoon said of Akers: “If it was dangerous, he’d do it himself.”

Akers was 28 years old when he was killed in action in Italy in 1945, but that was not to be his last heroic act. Throughout the war, Akers had been buying war bonds, and he instructed the men in his unit to make sure, “in case anything happened to me,” that the money went to orphans. They did as he asked.

Some of these men were already in the service when the United States found itself at war. Lt. Orman Casey and Lt. John Playter were both serving in the Philippines, which Japan not only attacked but also invaded 75 years ago. Both men survived the Bataan Death March. Casey died while being transported on a prison ship that was attacked in 1944. Playter also was on a prison ship at one point that was attacked and sunk, but he and several companions made it to shore and were rescued by Filipinos, and with their help he ultimately made his way back to the United States.

That’s the way it went for four years.

During the summer and into the fall of 1944, rarely a day passed that the Joplin papers didn’t carry news of at least one local man killed in battle, and often there were several battlefield obituaries.

What follows are some of the accounts of those interviews from men who were at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and the story of one man who was first in line in Joplin the next morning to enlist.

‘That ain’t the Navy!’

At 7:55 a.m., on the day that lives in infamy, Apprentice Seaman Carl Christiansen, 19, was on the quarterdeck of the USS Arizona, waiting for his brother, Edward, 20, a baker third class on the same ship. The two were getting ready for a trip to the beach that morning, a photo op to send to their family back in Columbus, Kansas.

“It was the first liberty we had together,” Carl recalled in one of his many interviews with the Globe.

A Joplin man, Walter Roberts, also was on the Arizona that morning.

Nelson Glidewell, from Carthage, Missouri, was a 25-year-old Navy signalman on the USS Oklahoma in Pearl Harbor that morning, cutting a friend’s hair. Diamond native Clifford Goodwin, an electrician’s mate, also was on board that battleship.

Dick Ferguson, 21, was a member of Battery “E” 64th Coast Artillery Regiment stationed at Fort Shafter, a U.S. Army base in Honolulu. He was getting ready to go for a morning swim.

Byron Lengquist was a flight engineer from Riverton, Kansas, stationed at Hickam Field.

Lengquist told the Globe in 1991 that he was getting ready to leave the base and head into Honolulu when he heard explosions and assumed the commotion was the U.S. Navy on mock maneuvers. Then he heard someone shout: “That ain’t the Navy!”

Planes were coming in so low that many of these survivors said they could easily make out the Rising Sun painted on the planes.

“It was just utter chaos,” he recalled. “When you see this, you say, ‘What’s going on? Is it real?’ Yes, it’s real.”

Lengquist said he and others pried up a manhole cover at the airfield, and they disappeared below ground to escape Japanese strafing.

“There were about six of us who discovered that was a good place to hide during the attack,” he said.

“Our greatest fear was that we were being invaded,” he added.

“There was a lot of frustration, a lot of anguish.”

Glidewell said he watched the first bombs that were dropped, and at first assumed it was an accident until he, too, saw the symbols on the sides of those incoming planes. As he ran for his battle station, a torpedo hit the Oklahoma, then other torpedoes followed, causing the battleship to list steeply to port. All the time he kept his eyes on an open hatch above, but when men started “dogging down” those hatches, Glidewell — reasoning that he would rather risk court-martial or even being shot for abandoning his post than drown — made his way to the main deck aft.

“I was the last man out of there,” he said. “I went out the hatch just as they were getting ready to bolt it down.”

Glidewell said he was nearly killed by Japanese strafing.

“They were spraying us with shots before I got off,” he said.

Then, in an instant, he said, “Everything turned red. It kind of straggled your mind.”

He had just witnessed the explosion of the USS Arizona; he said he could feel terrific heat rising up from the ship.

Survivors and victims

Carl Christiansen was still waiting on the quarterdeck when the attack began. His brother had returned below just minutes earlier to retrieve something for their trip to the beach.

“Somebody hollered, ‘It’s the Japanese,’” Christiansen recalled years later. The Arizona was hit early in the raid, and an armor-piercing round set off 1.7 million pounds of ammunition and fuel stored in the ship.

“It wasn’t any great boom. The ship just seemed to raise right up and settled back in the water and sank,” Christiansen said during one of his interviews.

He said he tried to make his way to his battle station below the No. 4 gun turret when the attack began, but he and a handful of others found themselves trapped in a dead ship.

“It was completely dark,” he said, adding that large storage batteries damaged in the explosion began leaking chlorine gas into the compartment.

Someone — he never did find out who it was — led him and other survivors topside.

“We jumped in and tried to swim,” Christiansen said. But burning fuel and oil covered the surface of the water, turning the harbor into an inferno. The men used a life raft and attempted to plow the fiery scum out of their way, but they were unsuccessful and soon returned to the ship.

Christiansen said the Arizona had settled so deeply into the mud at that point that he and the others were able to climb onto the main deck without the aid of boarding ropes or ladders.

They waited there until rescuers in a captain’s gig plucked them off the flaming hulk, some of the few survivors of the Arizona.

Glidewell, meanwhile, had jumped into the harbor, and swam toward nearby Ford Island, escaping before a fourth torpedo hit the Oklahoma, rolling the ship over.

The explosion on the Arizona entombed nearly 1,200 men, including Edward Christiansen, whom Carl never saw again once he returned below deck. Also killed was Walter Roberts, the first Joplin man to die in World War II.

More than 400 sailors and Marines on the Oklahoma also died, including Goodwin, of Diamond. He was crushed by armaments and shells that broke away when the ship began its fatal roll.

Back at Fort Shafter, Ferguson said an announcement came over the radio: “Air Raid! Take Cover! Air Raid! Take Cover!”

He and others also expected an invasion to follow the aerial bombardment, and were attempting to get weapons from the rifle rack when a Japanese bomb hit the USS Shaw, blowing the bow off the ship.

“It threw shells everywhere,” Ferguson recalled in 2001. “One of the Shaw’s five-inch shells hit my battery and killed one man and wounded three others.”

In all, more than 2,400 men were dead, more than 1,000 others injured and burned, and 18 ships were badly damaged or destroyed, including five battleships.

Grim silence

Information was hard to come by on that day. The Joplin Globe put out a special edition the afternoon of Dec. 7, including this statement, ” … latest reports indicate the United States had won the first battle in the new world war.”

Of course, it was only a new war for Americans. The war in Europe had been raging for more than two years, the war in Asia for nearly a decade.

“There were no unusually large crowds on downtown streets last night,” the Joplin News Herald reported on Dec. 8, 1941. “Many persons remained up until a late hour, listening to their radios in their homes.

“As Joplin went to work this morning there was a noticeable atmosphere of grim silence on buses and on streets.”

 Andy Ostmeyer is the metro editor for The Joplin Globe.

Andy Ostmeyer is the metro editor for The Joplin Globe in Southwest Missouri.