“They started closing that hatch. And I decided to get out of there.” A split second decision likely saved David Russell's life.
Pearl Harbor survivor and World War II Navy veteran David Russell, 101, reads a birthday card while talking about his time aboard the USS Oklahoma and his life after the war on Monday, Nov. 22, 2021, in Albany, Ore.
“They started closing that hatch. And I decided to get out of there,” Russell, now 101, said in a recent interview. About 30 survivors and 100 other veterans from the war are expected to observe a moment of silence at 7:55 a.m., the minute the attack began.Survivors, now in their late 90s or older, stayed home last year due to the coronavirus pandemic and watched a livestream of the event instead., a nonprofit founded by former NFL Linebacker Donnie Edwards that helps World War II veterans revisit their old battlefields.
“Those darn torpedoes, they just kept hitting us and kept hitting us. I thought they’d never stop,” Russell said. “That ship was dancing around.”“You had to walk sort of sideways,” he said. In the first two days after the bombing, a civilian crew from the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard rescued 32 men trapped inside the Oklahoma by cutting holes in its hull. But many others perished. Most of those who died were buried in anonymous Honolulu graves marked as “unknowns” because their remains were too degraded to be identified by the time they were removed from the ship between 1942 and 1944.
Russell remained in the Navy until retiring in 1960. He worked at Air Force bases for the next two decades and retired for good in 1980.
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