Enterprise man remembers Pearl Harbor Day

It was a day that changed his life forever, a 91-year-old Enterprise veteran remembered Friday about Dec. 7, 1941.

Chester Faulkner was a 23-year-old Army Infantry soldier stationed at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii when the Army post and nearby Navy base at Pearl Harbor were attacked that Sunday morning. “I was still in bed,” said Faulker, who was the squad’s leader at the time. “The windows started rattling so hard.”

His squad members thought the intense sound and rattling was due to training operations nearby, he said. “When we looked out and saw that round red emblem on those planes flying overhead” is when the reality set in for the soldiers. More than 2,000 Americans were killed during the attack and more than 1,000 were injured, Faulkner said. The Americans also lost a large number of their battleships and nearly 200 aircraft that were stationed in the Pacific region.

More than 60 Japanese servicemen were killed, injured or captured and the Japanese Navy also lost five midget submarines and 29 aircraft during the attack. “We got on the roof and just started firing,” Faulkner said. The soldiers in his unit were later moved to the north shore of the Island where they remained for 15 months, Faulkner said. “We slept on the ground, we didn’t have showers.”

The day after the attack, the United States declared war on Japan and entered World War II. Shortly afterward, Germany also declared war on the United States. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was called a “date which will live in infamy,” by President Franklin Roosevelt in a speech to Congress, said Robbye Walton. She is a widow of an Alabama Pearl Harbor Survivors Association Chapter Two member.

Walton and Grovene Blair’s husbands were charter members of the Wiregrass Pearl Harbor Survivor Association. Both are widows now and Thursday at Blair’s Enterprise home they recalled their memories of Pearl Harbor Day. “The war until that point was something that was just ‘over there,’ ” Blair said. “We never dreamed our boys would go over there.” Their husbands, both Pearl Harbor survivors, had not seen each other in 50 years until they met by chance in an Enterprise church parking lot. “They recognized each other instantly,” Blair said. “They became like brothers.”

Blair was living at home in Merkel, Texas, in 1941 when word of the bombing came. “It was two weeks before Russ had a chance to write,” she said. “It was a very long two weeks.” Walton was living and working at Fort Campbell, Ky., when word of the bombing came over the radio, she said. “We all kept glued to the radio after that.”

Both of their husbands were among the 14 charter members of the local survivors association group that met every three months since it was chartered March 30, 1998. There were 20 Wiregrass veterans eligible for membership in the group, said Blair. Fourteen group members were the charter members and others joined later. The group has disbanded because its membership over the years fell below the required five members. Faulkner is the single Pearl Harbor Survivor Association member in Enterprise, she added.

“Yes, I have been to a lot of funerals,” Faulkner said Friday as he recalled deceased survivor association friends. “We were the generation that survived The Great Depression and World War II. “

Moultrie Sessions, Sr., was a 19-year-old college student at the University of Alabama and had just returned to campus with his visiting parents and his roommate when word of the attack on Pearl Harbor came over the radio. “Our world changed completely,” he said. “We all knew were going into the military.”

Sessions was an Army Reservist who was activated in March 1943. He went to the induction center in Atlanta and ultimately was enrolled in the Army Specialized Training Program in Brooklyn, N.Y. Sessions’ unit transferred to Belgium, where he fought in the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Mountains region of Belgium. The weather was bitter cold, Sessions said, with temperatures of 10 degrees below zero. “America lost a lot of troops,” he said. “Our division had 8,000 casualties, mostly men with frozen feet.”