Bruce Atwater: World War II Veteran and Pearl Harbor Survivor
Tue, 12/04/2018 - 11:23am
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By Bonnie Kirchman
The Leader-Record
Bruce Atwater, a new resident of Cornerstone Assisted Living in Bagley, has a lifetime of interesting experiences. In his 97 years, he has worked as a lumberjack, taught English in several schools, served on city council, and raised a family of five children. He was also a witness to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, an event he vividly remembers.
Growing up in Winnipeg and Minnesota, Bruce had hardly set foot out of this region before deciding to enlist in the Coast Guard on October 21, 1941. Following a brief training at Port Townsend, Washington, he ended up on the USS Castor headed to Honolulu. He was assigned galley duties, doing kitchen chores such as peeling potatoes while suffering from bouts of seasickness. Bruce arrived at a Navy reception ship at Pearl Harbor in the first days of December 1941.
Sunday, December 7, 1941 was supposed to be an off-duty day for Bruce and his fellow Coast Guard members. Instead, they were assigned the duty of cleaning up after a party at a hall opposite Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor Naval Base. As Bruce was beginning his task, he looked to his left and saw a plane with a funny insignia heading toward the ships in the harbor.
“I never felt so helpless” is how Bruce described his frustration as he watched the ships being torpedoed by Japanese planes. He saw the USS Oklahoma turn over after being hit. The USS Arizona blew up before his eyes. Bruce could hear PA announcements commanding the men to stay where they were so they wouldn’t hinder the efforts of those trying to fight off the surprise attack. Bruce remembers standing with broom in hand as he witnessed the attack that would bring the United States into war.
But as soon as the first wave of bombing ended, Bruce returned to the Navy ship. His first detail was in sick bay. Here, he helped clean up wounded sailors to prepare them for surgery, encountering many who suffered from burn injuries and shock. Bruce’s second detail was in the galley, where meals were served to troops from the bombed ships. It was a struggle to keep up with the men who came nonstop in lines four deep from four o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night. Through this, they all coped with rumors that the Japanese had landed and would soon be invading. The men were quickly issued rifles to be used in the event of an invasion, but they soon found out the guns hadn’t been cleaned and would have blown up had they been fired. On December 10th, Bruce left Pearl Harbor for Pier 4 at Honolulu. Driving out of the area, he noticed that although the harbor was much calmer, there was still chaos as ships continued to burn.
For much of the time in the early days after he left Pearl Harbor, Bruce was on guard duty. He didn’t particularly care to stand watch, so when a volunteer was sought for typing duty, Bruce quickly raised his hand. He first was a yeoman striker, copying log books. After three weeks, he became a yeoman 3rd class. He also worked with secret codes in a coding center and soon became a yeoman 2nd class.
As yeoman aboard the USS Reliance, Bruce was part of a project testing new sonar equipment. They went out with a submarine to do the testing. During the tests, they noticed there were actually two submarines below them. The U.S. submarine was sent back to safety, as the men aboard the Reliance waited for four hours to receive permission to drop their depth charges on the remaining submarine. Bruce said they knew they needed a speed of 15 knots to drop the depth charges but the Reliance’s top speed was 12 knots. Despite the risk, they dropped the depth charges on the enemy submarine. Even with backup from destroyers, the submarine got away. Bruce later learned that there was a Japanese submarine that had recorded damages from a Coast Guard ship.
“I was only in harm’s way about three times in the first two years. After that I was okay,” is how Bruce summarized his experiences during World War II. But Bruce encountered many challenging situations. When he first arrived at Pier 4, conditions were so overcrowded that he slept in the machine shop on a cot and shared a toilet with eighty-five people. While driving officers at night in blackout conditions, he had to navigate the vehicles with light coming from only a 1 inch by ½ inch slit in the headlights. On Bruce’s trip back to the mainland after two years, the food consisted of Spam and jam sandwiches and dehydrated eggs. It was so bad the cook didn’t dare show his face on deck.
Bruce’s sense of humor helped him to cope with tense situations. On one of Bruce’s first nights doing guard duty, he was walking along a fenced area. As the moon set, it became very dark. He set his gun against a tree so he could light a cigarette. As he was striking his match, he heard sounds in the grass nearby that seemed to be coming closer to him. Grabbing his gun, he was surprised to hear a sudden “quack” from the grass. Bruce said, “I could have kissed that duck!” Another time, Bruce was traveling by ship with Army troops. Many of them were violently seasick. Bruce, by this time an experienced ocean traveler, told them, “Land is one mile away. Straight down.”
When the war ended, Bruce continued to serve, assisting in the discharge of reserve yeomen and then working as a recruiter in Miami. When he was discharged on December 10, 1946, Bruce said he “hightailed it back to Minnesota”. Friends convinced him to enroll in college at Bemidji State and he graduated in 1950 with a degree in English. He taught at International Falls, Williams, Esko, and Warroad. In Warroad, he and his wife raised their children-Steve, Susan, Jonelle, Sarah, and Bill. Before moving to Bagley, his most recent home was in Bemidji. Bruce has returned to Pearl Harbor several times, once with all of his children. He hopes to travel back in 2021, the 80th anniversary of the historic attack he witnessed as a young man