Veterans Museum features WWII testimonies

 

Other items in today’s column include:
* Political bytes
* Recommended reading
* In memoriam

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO –  World War II testimonies of the living, and the honored dead, were on display Tuesday, Feb. 11, at the Veterans Memorial Museum in Balboa Park.  Stu Hedley, 98, a survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, lectured on his experiences of December 7^th, 1941.  Elsewhere, on video tape, Sy Brenner, a Jewish medic who fought in France and was imprisoned in Nazi Germany, told the story of “The Night I Was Killed.”

Hedley had been serving on the USS West Virginia on the day of the surprise Japanese attack on American forces stationed at the base near Honolulu, Hawaii.  Nearby, the USS Arizona and the USS Oklahoma were destroyed, and a portion of the bilge of the West Virginia was propelled under the bilge of the nearby USS Tennessee.  Hedley said he thought the West Virginia  would capsize and sink, but said a quick-thinking ensign ran to the starboard side of the ship and opened up the sea valves, enabling the ship to stabilize.

The Navy enlisted man had been assigned to a gun turret as the attack was unfolding. Ordered to escape by a junior officer, “I was ready to dive and to swim to shore,” he told a small but captivated audience at the museum.  However, an opportunity presented itself to “go up on the starboard side, run across the gun barrels and jump down” to a deck of the USS Tennessee.  The water between the port side of the Tennessee was aflame, so he stripped down to his underclothes and made sure to jump, not dive, into the water, so he could get quickly below the surface.

“When I broke surface , it was the hottest air I ever breathed my life,”  he recalled.  “It took two surfacings to get to the beach.”  An ambulance took him to a Spanish-style dispensary with a second-story deck running around an open courtyard.  His wounds were being treated when, at 9:35 a.m., a second wave of Japanese planes hit.  “I yelled ‘Down!’ and we were under cots, beds, even chairs,” Henley recalled.  Glass was shattered everywhere by machine guns; it took 12 minutes for the dust to clear. We could not see a speck of red left on the Red Cross of the building.”  Ordered to return to his ship, he grabbed a hose, and a fellow sailor operated the nozzle, when  they heard “Boom! Boom! Boom!”  Hedley and his shipmate thought they were again under attack.  But in fact,“the heat was so intense that the air blew out the portholes,” he said. “It took 45 minutes to cool that compartment down.”

Once that assignment was completed, he asked his officer for permission to check his locker.  In it he saw “my whites, blues, pea coat, sweaters, hats, socks, shoes, everything.  But the minute I touched anything, it disintegrated!”  The only thing he was able to save was a half-pence that had been presented to him a few months before by a sailor aboard a visiting British battleship. The sailor predicted the U.S. would be in the war soon, and Hedley recalls that he disagreed, saying the U.S. role would continue to be leasing ships and providing war material to Britain.

Henley recalled that at the time he was under attack, he said to a shipmate that if he survived the day, he probably would make it all the way through the war.  In fact, he was privileged to witness the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

Sy Brenner (1922-2015) is remembered by many in the Jewish community as an active member of Tifereth Israel Synagogue, and as one who was honored in 2012 in San Diego as the  “POW Veteran of the Year.”  On a videotape that can be seen on a monitor at the museum,  he told how on Nov. 29, 1944, while in the Vosges Mountains in France, he and another infantry man ran into six German tanks, which promptly blew up the farm house in which they had sought to hide.  When his body flew to the ground, everyone thought he had been killed, but as it turned out he had just been knocked out.

“The Germans picked us up, and we had a death march back to Germany which took 12 days without food or water,” he related on the video tape.  “In the prison camp, the German commandant noticed that I was wearing a Red Cross band.”  Ascertaining that Brenner was a medic, the commandant “put me in charge of the surgery, and when I said that I wasn’t qualified to be a surgeon, he said, ‘You are qualified to be anything I say you are.’  I had many patients…. The first patient I had, I had to amputate his toe; the worst thing for me was having to amputate a man’s leg.”

Brenner did not mention on the videotape that someone from his platoon, seeing that he was barely alive before his capture, intentionally broke off the part of Brenner’s dog tags with an “H” for “Hebrew,” which was how Jews were then identified.  Brenner believes that if his unknown benefactor had not done that, the Germans would have summarily executed him upon learning his religion.

He did discuss on the video what prisoners ate at the camp.  In the morning, he said, prisoners were served a cup of ersatz coffee and “some black bread which had slivers of sawdust in it.”  They had no lunch, and “at dinner we got boiled grass or weeds, whatever it was.”

At the time of his liberation, “I weighed 97 pounds and had lost most of my hair.   I was in eight hospitals after coming home.”

Brenner wrote a memoir of his experiences, which he titled The Night I Got Killed.

 

[Editor’s Note: Stu Hedley died on August 4, 2021 at the age of 99.  Here is a story printed about him by Times of San Diego: https://timesofsandiego.com/military/2021/08/04/stu-hedley-dies-at-99-pearl-harbor-survivor-stayed-alert-never-lost-faith/]
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Political bytes
*Michael Bloomberg has been endorsed for President by the Majority Leaders in both houses of the California Legislature, Democrats Ian Calderon of the Assembly and Bob Hertzberg of the state Senate.

*The New York Post reports that Jews are increasingly turning away from the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, largely because of his anti-Israel rhetoric and choice of Linda Sarsour as a campaign spokesperson.

*Escondido City Councilwoman Olga Diaz says voters are like business owners who are looking for a new employee.  In a reference to opponent Terra Lawson-Remer, she asks: “Would you hire the person who has lots of theories or the person with actual experience, who has been doing the job for over 10 years, and understands the complexity of your business? “

*In the increasingly heated race in the 50^th Congressional District, Carl DeMaio has accused his fellow Republican, Darrell Issa, of “lying” about cutting social security benefits.  He said Issa at a forum called for gradually increasing the age of when a person becomes eligible to collect benefits, but denied in robo-calls to constituents that he favors cuts.

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Recommended reading

8newsnow reports that a Las Vegas man has pleaded guilty to plotting to set fire to a synagogue.

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In memoriam
*Ralph Berman, 93, died Feb. 9.  Funeral services will be conducted at 11 a.m., Thursday, Feb. 13, at Temple Emanu-El, 6299 Capri Drive, San Diego, with Rabbis Devorah Marcus and Martin Lawson co-officiating.  Am Israel Mortuary reports that interment will follow at El Camino Memorial Park, 5600 Carroll Canyon Road, San Diego.

*Beth Jacob Congregation reported the death of Kitty Silverman, who is survived by her husband Raphael Silverman, and children Philip Silverman, Deborah Brookler, Barbara Friedman and Linda Hirshleifer.  The funeral will be conducted at 11 a.m, Wednesday, Feb. 12 at Home of Peace Cemetery, 3668 Imperial Avenue, San Diego.

 

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Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com. Obituaries in San Diego Jewish World are sponsored by Inland Industries Group LP in memory of long-time San Diego Jewish community leader Marie (Mrs. Gabriel) Berg.