Pearl Harbor eyewitness

Photo by Paul Robeson, Reporter

BRINGING OUT HIS BLUES: Melvin Fisher holds his dress blue uniform which he wore on his discharge from the U.S. Navy after World War II. Fisher was aboard a ship docked in Pearl Harbor on the day Hawaii was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941.

“Smoke, fire and explosions woke me in my rack (cot),” said Mel Fisher.

A member of the Veteran of Foreign Wars (VFW) Post 9650 in Anderson, Fisher recently reminisced about the Sunday morning 66 years ago on Dec. 7, 1941, when he was sleeping by an open hatchway on the USS Whitney (AD-4), a destroyer tender built in 1924, as it was anchored in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

“We had no idea what was happening,” Fisher said. As a destroyer tender, his ship was moored alongside a group of five destroyers, well away from the big gun battleships that received the biggest barrage of “fish” (torpedoes) from low-flying Japanese aircraft.

“Depending on where you were or what ship you were on, everyone has a different picture of what was happening. It was a different fight looking from the bow or the stern or from port or starboard, Fisher said, using nautical jargon to refer to the front, rear, left and right of his ship.

“Our ship was strafed by Japanese planes, but there was no damage and no one was hurt,” he continued.

Fisher also chuckled when he talked about something that happened. He prefaced it by saying, “It wasn’t funny then, but what happened made we think about it later.”

“We saw a fish go right through the stern section of a ship where all their canned good supplies were stored. We watched as cans in the compartment, which had water in it, began to lose all their paper identification wrappers. When they opened cans later on it was a guess as to what was inside.”

Fisher had joined the navy prior to WWII and, six years later, after the war was over, he was honorably discharged. Now 85, Fisher said there are “around 21 or 22 Pearl Harbor survivors” in the North State.

“There are so many of us that are not vertical anymore,” said Fischer sadly.

Fisher joined the U.S. Navy in May of 1940 in Huntington Park, where he lived with his family. After midshipman’s school in San Diego, he was assigned to the USS Whitney at Pearl Harbor.

After Pearl Harbor, Fisher was assigned to the battleship USS Indiana (BB-58).

Following a shakedown cruise in Casco Bay, Maine, the new battleship went through the Panama Canal to Pearl Harbor in October 1943 and joined the support forces for the invasion of the Gilbert Islands.

The battleship protected the aircraft carriers supporting U.S. Marines during the fight for Tarawa. In late January of 1944, the USS Indiana bombarded the Kwajalein atoll for eight days prior to the Marshall Island landings in February of that same year.

The Southern Californian first came to Shasta County during his summers at school to work with the Forest Service’s CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) in the Coffee Creek area in 1939 and moved to the Jones Valley area in 1979.