By Betsy Gilbert
They say that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but Charles Chambers must have missed class the day that life lesson was being taught. As a young Navy man during World War II, Chambers ship was the first to be hit and sunk in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Less than a year later, his ship was hit and sunk in a pre-dawn sneak attack by the Japanese. Chambers came out of both incidents without a scratch.
Just lucky I guess, deadpans the spry 85-year old. Surrounded by pictures and mementos of the Navy days in his home at Westminster Village of the Mid-South retirement community in Blytheville, Arkansas, Chambers smiles at the irony of the place he’s called home for the past six years. Just after WWII, he also called this place home, but in those days, it was a major Army Air Force Base where Chambers and his wife lived in one of the little wooden houses dotting the base. Their first child was born here.
Memories of his Naval adventures are as fresh in Chambers mind today as they were more than a half century ago. He remembers the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feelings. My ship, the battleship USS California, was hit at 8:00 a.m., he recalls about December 7, 1941, the day FDR accurately predicted would live in infamy. We were first, because a four-star admiral, the Commander of the Battle Force of the Pacific Fleet, was on board and they really wanted his ship. Right after we were hit, the battleship docked directly behind us was hit, then the one behind that and the one behind it. I remember it was complete chaos.
That attack took 2,403 American lives, some 400 from the 1,100 sailors on the California. Chambers was one of the fortunate ones and he relives every moment through the eyes of the twenty-two year old he was then.
I was down in the evaporator room, where fresh water was made, he says. The explosion knocked everything over and we were trapped down there for an hour and a half. We opened one of the two escape routes, but water gushed in. The second one was blocked by debris, so we pounded and pounded until someone heard us and opened it. Once we were freed, we jumped into the water and swam to a little island about 200 feet away. I wasn’t hurt, but I’d never been so scared in my life and haven’t been since.
Swimming through the dark waters, slick with oil from the explosion, turned the survivors into a ragamuffin group. All of their belongings went down with the California and they were left with only the oil-soaked clothes on their backs. But they were alive.
I stayed in Pearl Harbor for eight days and they were miserable, Chambers recalls. The Japanese planes had also bombed cane fields and stirred the mosquitoes up, and they were eating us alive. Almost all the battleships were hit, so we were all in the same shape. We had no clothes, no place to clean up and no place to sleep. Men from the smaller ships that hadn’t been hit shared what they could with us in terms of a change of underwear and what shirts and pants they could spare, and shared their sleeping quarters as best they could, but it was a mess. Those eight days felt much longer, but hope came six days after the attack when a sign was posted instructing the men to sign up for duty on other ships. Chambers chose the Astoria, a heavy cruiser that took short-timers back to the States and needed engineers to replace the ones being discharged.
He gratefully said goodbye to Pearl Harbor as the Astoria left port to patrol the islands of the Pacific. The next six months of relative quiet for the young sailor came to an abrupt halt when the Astoria sailed back to Pearl Harbor to prepare for the Battle of Midway, the largest naval battle in history.
We had 32 hours to prepare and just before we took off, I looked up to see my 19-year old brother standing in front of me, Chambers recounts. He had just joined up and this was his first assignment out of boot camp. The battle lasted six days and he was put to work as a messenger, answering telephones and delivering messages throughout the ship.
Here’s my kid brother, who’d never been out of McRae, Arkansas, watching the greatest battle in the history of the Navy from up on the bridge of the Astoria.
His little brother might have been excited, but Chambers was worried. Along with their mother, they were the only members of a small family and war, as they say, is hell. After the historic battle, the older brother went to his captain and requested that one of them be transferred off the ship. The captain responded with Well, you’re going to miss your brother, because he’s going and you’re staying put. The younger Chambers spent the next six years at the port directors office in Honolulu. The elder saw more action. A few months after Midway, the Astoria was landing troops in the South Pacific and was sunk in a pre-dawn sneak attack by the Japanese that took down four ships in all. Again, luck was with Chambers, who was down in the engine room at the time of the attack and was unhurt. Others were not so lucky.
While the Astoria took six hours to sink and lost about a third of her men, the three other ships went down quickly and lost almost everyone on board.
The captain was on the stern with all of us survivors and just before we jumped into the water, he said that if there was ever anything he could do for any of us, all we had to do was ask, Chambers says. Then a steamer picked us up and we zigzagged all the way back to Honolulu without a battleship to protect us, slowing down and speeding up to avoid detection. The Japanese knew we were there, but they just couldn’t pinpoint us.
That marked an end to Chambers death-defying war adventures. He went back to Arkansas for 30 days leave, returned briefly to Long Beach, California, then got transferred to submarine school in Connecticut. When he got out, he was sent to patrol boat duty in Bar Harbor, Maine. It was a far cry from the South Pacific.
Bar Harbor is where all the rich folks in New York keep their yachts, he describes.
As a matter of fact, the yacht club had been converted to a naval base for the duration of the war. So here I was, a country boy from Arkansas, surrounded by wealth.
The stint was made much more pleasant by visits from his wife Norma, who was a small-town Arkansas girl herself and enjoyed great adventures taking the train alone up to the east coast to see the man she still calls Chambers. Evenings out in Manhattan made life during wartime a lot less stressful for the young couple.
After that, it was off to destroyer school in Canada and back to the west coast, working as an engineer on aircraft carriers. He barely escaped what would have most likely been a suicide mission into Japan when the Japanese surrendered before the mission was carried out. Again, that country boy luck. The war came to an end and Chambers, who had never considered a military career, looked at his almost 10 years with the Navy and decided it was too much time to just throw away. He stayed in until 1957, assigned to recruitment duty in Arkansas and living on the base that is now his retirement village home.
After I retired, I was still a young man, so my family and I moved to Frasier (a suburb of Memphis) where we built a house and I went into the hardware business with my wife’s brother, Chambers reports. We sold it after about seven years. I worked as an engineer for a local company for the next three years, then got on with the City of Memphis as a safety inspector for twelve years. After that, I retired for good, and after 40 years in the house we built, we decided to move back up here to Arkansas.
These days find Charlie Chambers living the quiet, good life of retirement among the mementos of a part of his life that was anything but quiet. He attends a Pearl harbor Survivors Group reunion each December 7 in Memphis, along with a dwindling crowd from the tri-state area of Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee and enjoys the story swapping among now-gray former young seadogs.
Its been an interesting life, he smiles with the greatest of understatement.
Published in U S Legacies Magazine June 2005
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