(13 Dec 2024)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Lodi, California – 19 November 2024
1. Robert Fernandez showing picture, and patch
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Robert Fernandez, Pearl Harbor veteran:
"Yeah, I felt kind of scared because I didn’t know what the hell is going on. Neither did anybody else, I guess. And so that’s the way it was, you know? Run for your life."
3. Pictures, medals of Fernandez as a young man
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Robert Fernandez, Pearl Harbor veteran:
"It went boom. I was mess cooking that day. The guy said, ‘Let’s go. We got to get out of here.’ And so we took off."
POOL
ARCHIVE: Pearl Harbor, Hawai – 7 December 1941
++BLACK AND WHITE++
++MUTED++
5. Footage of the attack on Pearl Harbor
SSOCIATED PRESS
Lodi, California – 19 November 2024
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Robert Fernandez, Pearl Harbor veteran:
"They were passing them out, passing them out, so they passed them to me. I passed them to somebody else, so we could pass them up to those big guns."
7. Various of memorabilia
STORYLINE:
Bob Fernandez, a 100-year-old survivor of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, died this week a short while after deteriorating health prompted him to skip a trip to Hawaii to attend a remembrance ceremony marking the 83rd anniversary of the attack.
Fernandez died peacefully at the Lodi, California home of his nephew, Joe Guthrie, on Wednesday. Guthrie’s daughter, Halie Torrrell, was holding his hand when he took his last breath. Fernandez suffered a stroke about a month ago that caused him to slow down but Guthrie said doctors attributed his condition to age.
Fernandez was a 17-year-old sailor on board the USS Curtiss during the Dec. 7, 1941 attack that propelled the U.S. into World War II. A mess cook, he was waiting tables and bringing sailors morning coffee and food when they heard an alarm sound. Through a porthole, Fernandez saw a plane with the red ball insignia painted on Japanese aircraft fly by.
He rushed down three decks to a magazine room where he and other sailors waited for someone to unlock a door storing shells so they could pass them to the ship’s guns. He has told interviewers over the years that some of his fellow sailors were praying and crying as they heard gunfire up above.
“I felt kind of scared because I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” Fernandez told The Associated Press in an interview weeks before his death.
Fernandez’s ship, the Curtiss, lost 21 men and nearly 60 of its sailors were injured. The bombing killed more than 2,300 U.S. servicemen. Nearly half, or 1,177, were sailors and Marines on board the USS Arizona, which sank during the battle.
There are 16 known living survivors of Pearl Harbor, according to a list maintained by Kathleen Farley, the the California state chair of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors. All of them are at least 100 years old.
Fernandez’s death would have brought the number to 15 but Farley recently learned of an additional survivor.
Fernandez had been planning to return to Pearl Harbor last week to attend an annual commemoration hosted by the Navy and the National Park Service but became too weak to make the trip, Guthrie said.
He was “so proud” of his six years in the Navy, all of it aboard the USS Curtiss, Guthrie said. His casual clothes, like hats and shirts, were all related to his service.
Fernandez worked as a forklift driver at a cannery in San Leandro, California after the war. His wife of 65 years, Mary Fernandez, died in 2014.
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