Lakewood Lore

Remembering the day of infamy

Vivid images remain for those who were at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941

Lakewoodite Andrew Petko was there when the sun came up at Pearl Harbor on that horror-of-horrors Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941.

“I was on a stakeout, reading an old Readers Digest in the cab of an Army truck parked at Hickam Field,” said Petko, a private who had enlisted two years earlier.

“I came on duty at 6 a.m. to start my six-hour shift. In the rear of the truck, I had a 30-caliber machine gun covered with canvas.

“But is wasn’t a Jap air attack that we were expecting. It was the fear of sabotage by local Japanese,” he went on to explain.

Just before 8 a.m., Petko heard explosions. He jumped out of the truck, saw great billows of black smoke rising from the harbor, and leaped to his gun just in time to aim it at a Japanese torpedo plane coming in low overhead.

“I was able to fire one burst,” he said. I believe I hit him in the tail but couldn’t tell whether I knocked him down.”

Next, two Japanese Zeros spotted Petko. They climbed up into the sun behind his back and then swooped down on him.

“They missed me. I fired back. Again, I couldn’t see the result, but some of my buddies later told me I got one,” he recounted.

Soon the targets moved out of reach and all was bedlam. But he stayed at his gun in the bed of the truck until the attack was over. By 10 a.m. the skies overhead were clear.

“Later a truckload of us soldiers were taken to the harborside where we walked post to guard vital installations, including a transformer station.

“You bet I was scared,” he commented. “But not at first. Only after I realized what had happened. I lost a lot of friends.”

Fixed indelibly in the memory of the Lakewood GI, who was only 26 at the time, was the carnage he saw the following morning.

“I’ll never forget walking out on a pier where a corpsman was standing over a dozen naked bodies lying in a row,” Petko, who is now 76, recalled. “They all were dead. Some had tags on their toes.”

Eventually Petko wound up in the Philippines where he was seriously wounded when struck in the legs by Japanese mortar fragments early in 1945. In December of that year, he was discharged after spending 10 1 months in military hospitals. He was married to his Lakewood sweetheart, Mary Morick, while he was still hospitalized in Cambridge, Ohio.

He received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Purple Heart and a commendation form his commanding officer in Hawaii for courage, valor and total disreard for his own safety in defending Hickam Field. Petko is a member of Oahu Chapter I of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association.

Advised to give his weakened legs plenty of excercise, he took a post office job upon returning to Lakewood. After five years as a letter carrier, he joined the security department of Federal Reserve Bank in Cleveland from which he retired in 1974.

The Petkos live on Madison at Belle and are longtime St. Gregory parishioners there. They have a son, Andrew Jr., and a granddaughter, Heather.

Two other Lakewoodites -- Ernest (Tex) Phillips, 70, of Larchmont Avenue and George Vasko, 69, of Arthur Avenue -- were also in harm’s way at Pearl Harbor 50 years ago.

Both were aboard the heavy Cruiser USS Northampton, a Lancelot of the seas, which was attached to a task force including two other cruisers and nine destroyers. They formed a screen around the Carrier Enterprise, a blue-water behemoth under the command of Vice Admiral William F. (Bull) Halsey Jr.

The task foce was supposed to enter Pearl Harbor that fateful morning of the 7th, but because of a delay, it was 200 miles offshore when the infamous raid took place.

“We were held up due to a mishap when the Northampton was refueling our destroyers out at sea,” said Vasko, then a Navy seaman.

“A line snapped during the operation and wrapped itself around one of the Northampton’s propellers. We had to send divers down to cut it loose.”

The ships finallly sailed into Pearl the morning of Dec. 8.

Shortly before entering, word came over the Northampton’s loud speaker, Phillips, then a Marine private, remembered.

“It went like this: ‘All hands. This is no drill. Pearl Harbor has been attacked. Throw out all practice ammunition (blanks). Break out the live ammunition.’ ”

“However, I really didn’t know how serious it was,” Phillips explained, “until the crew was ordered to chop up the beautifully manicured admiral’s yacht, captain’s gig and officer’s launch and sweep them overboard to clear the decks for action. It made me sick.”

“Going into Pearl we knew what had happened but never imagined such vast destruction,” said Vasko. “There was no way to describe the havoc those Jap planes caused.”

Fires were still burning, bodies floating and wreckage everywhere, according to Phillips. “We worked so hard and fast reprovisioning and refueling so that we could leave the following morning that many of us collapsed from exhaustion,” he said.

The world soon learned Pearl Harbor’s appalling toll: 2,403 Americans killed, 1,178 wounded, 169 aircraft lost, three ships destroyed, 18 damaged.

Phillips and Vasko saw much action on the Northampton in the ensuing months, up until the night of Nov. 30, 1942, when, with both of them aboard, she took two Japanese torpedos and went down off Guadalcanal.

When the mortally wounded juggernaut was listing 23 degrees, Vasko slid down its starboard side into an oil-slick ocean where he was rescued by the destroyer Fletcher.

Meanwhile, Phillips swam nine miles through inky darkness in shark-infested waters to an island called Savo.

The next morning he was spotted on a beach there by a rescue plane and then picked up by a PT boat under the command of a handsome young Naval officer with a New England accent who, to this day, Phillips believes was John F. Kennedy.

This article appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post December 5, 1991. Reprinted with permission.

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