Former Navy gunsman Robert Brown, 91, was on the battleship Maryland retrieving gunpowder below deck on Dec. 7, 1941, when bombs exploded around him.
But Brown and his crew were the lucky few whose ship did not go down during the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
“I remember that awful feeling of just not knowing what was going on,” Brown said. “We knew it was enemy fire, but we didn’t know how to respond or how the other ships were doing.”
The ship next to the Maryland turned upside down, preventing rescuers from getting to the Maryland and trapping Brown and his crew inside their vessel. They were stuck for one month.
“There was nothing to do but wait,” he said. “We were all going a little crazy.”
When the crew was rescued, they were taken to Bremerton, Wash., to wait while their ship was repaired.
“From Bremerton we operated up and down the Coast, in and out of SanFrancisco and finally Long Beach before we were sent back to Pearl Harbor,” Brown recalled. “It had been cleaned up quite a bit in the last several months and all the battleships were floating again.”
Brown said he didn’t spend much time in the heat of battles and never shot a gun at anyone.
“Mission operations for ammunition ships are different from all other vessels,” he said. “It’s much more relaxed in discipline, living conditions, bunking, eating, working and combat expectations.”
Brown tried many new things during his time in the war.
“I landed a boat, operated cargo booms and sat in the co-pilot seat of a B-24 bomber carrying passengers back to the states,” he said.
Despite the good experiences, Brown acknowledges the hardships many went through during the war.
“It was a war that from 1937 to 1945 killed 18,000,000 people,” he said. “Most of those 18,000,000 dead were civilians killed in bombing or shelling attacks or military brutality of some kind.”
After the Japanese surrendered in 1945, Brown married his long-time love, enlisted in the Navy Reserve and moved to Bremerton to work as a civilian in a shipyard. Brown was a member of the Pearl Harbor Survivor’s Association before it shut down in 2007 due to members being unable to serve as administrators for various health and age reasons.
He loves to talk about his time in the Navy and proudly wears a hat reading, “Pearl Harbor Survivor” on his head almost daily.
“Surviving Peal Harbor is what I am most proud of,” Brown said. “I knew I wanted to sign up for the Navy when I graduated high school. I did it and never regretted that decision one day of my life.”
Renton’s veterans are served by a number of organizations including American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, with posts in downtown Renton and Skyway. Renton also has a new Veterans Affair’s office that helps homeless veterans find a place to live.
For more information, call the American Legion office at 425-271-1439 or the VFW office at 425-255-9010.
