At approximately 8:10 a.m., a bomb
struck the USS Arizona
By Nathan Schaeffer, Public Affairs
Specialist, VA Medical Center, Muskogee, Okla.
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Shortly before 8 a.m. on Sunday,
December 7, 1941, Lonnie Cook had just taken a shower and had plans to spend a
day of “liberty” in Honolulu. Standing in front of his locker in Turret 3
aboard the battleship USS Arizona, he heard a rumbling in the distance.
“We didn’t think much about it,”
said Cook, who is 94 years old and one of only nine USS Arizona survivors still
living.
“The chief turret captain came all
the way from Chief quarters and tumbled into the bottom of the turret and said
the Japanese are bombing us.”
Cook and the 17 Sailors in Turret 3
fired on the Japanese planes overhead with their 14 inch guns. But at
approximately 8:10 a.m., a bomb struck the Arizona which was anchored at Pearl
Harbor Naval Base.
“I was on the shell deck where they
store the projectiles,” said Cook. “I was on the ladder going up when it blew
up. It knocked all the lights out and it knocked a lot of things loose,
projectiles loose.” The ship erupted into flames and smoke came pouring into
Cook’s turret.
“I went on up in the gun mount and
it was smoky and the people in charge thought they were gassing us,” said Cook.
“They gave the order to go out on deck and most of the machine gunning had
slowed down by then.”
As the Arizona sank, Cook helped
rescue as many Sailors as he could. “We took all the people we could out of the
compartments,” he said. “People came out of there with so many burns, if they
called me by name, I couldn’t even tell who they were.”
With the deck of the ship almost at
sea level, the order was given to abandon ship.
Navy Veteran Lonnie Cook, 94
Volunteered
to go back the next day
“We went out on deck and took life
rafts down off the side of the turret and put them in the water,” said Cook.
“It had sunk down about 15 or 18 feet. We had been busy and didn’t notice it.”
Cook, one of the lucky survivors, spent the night in a bomb shelter on nearby
Ford Island. The next day, he volunteered to immediately go back to sea.
“Nobody seemed to be telling us what
to do and there were eight or 10 of us out of the Arizona gun crew that heard
they wanted people to volunteer to go on destroyers,” said Cook. “We told them
that if they would put two or three of us together on a destroyer, we’d
volunteer. So they agreed and I went on the USS Patterson.”
During the remainder of the war,
Cook also served aboard the USS Alywin, USS Pringle and USS Hall. He also took
part in the Battle of Coral Sea, Battle of Midway and invasions of the Marshall
Islands, Philippines, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.
“All we had to worry about was
submarines, mines, and suicide planes,” said Cook about life at sea in the
Pacific.
Today, Cook lives in the same town
where he grew up, Morris, Okla., with his wife Marietta. He has received his
health care at the Jack C. Montgomery VA Medical Center in Muskogee,
Okla. since 1994.
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