Survivor just tried to forget

At 88, he finally talks about attack

John N. Pollok was out on deck that morning. It was right after breakfast, and he wanted a breath of air before going on watch down in the hot engine room.

Then he saw the planes coming in. When a machine-gun round hit the deck right in front of him, he knew Pearl Harbor was under attack.

"I got up and ran," he recalled, sitting last week in his Durham apartment surrounded by Christmas decorations and service memorabilia. "I was lucky I didn't get killed right then."

Pollok was a 21-year-old seaman aboard the USS Whitney, a repair vessel. He had joined the Navy in 1938, fresh out of Durham High School with thoughts of seeing the world and ambitions of earning a commission up through the ranks.

On that Sunday morning, 67 years ago today, he found himself firing a .50-caliber machine gun at Japanese Zeros while bombs and torpedoes went off all around him, ships exploded and sank and more than 2,400 Americans died.

"I did see the old Utah," he said. "Saw that hit with a torpedo and turn upside down, and about that time the Arizona blew up. They hit that with two torpedoes and I don't know how many bombs. ... I saw the West Virginia turn over. ... Saw the Shaw hit with a bomb, and it blew all to pieces."

There was no time to be nervous or scared or to think, he said. That came later -- the next day, and through the next week as Navy crews drilled into the hulls of capsized ships to rescue trapped survivors. Those who were saved, Pollok said, "were crazy."

"I tried to forget it," he said. "I tried my best to forget it."

John Pollok is retired now. He lives alone in a comfortable apartment, a widower since 2006 after 63 years of marriage to the former Kathran Richmond. He has outlived all five of his siblings, one of his children and a grandson. He had an operation for skin cancer not long ago -- a souvenir of Navy years spent outdoors under a South Pacific sun -- and his legs aren't as strong as they once were. But he nevertheless appears a hale and hearty 88-year-old.

"He is sharp as a tack," said a neighbor, David Searcy. "Very colorful."

At Christmastime, Pollok and his daughter, Kathy Bordeaux of Timberlake, cook holiday goodies and take platefuls around the apartment complex. In the summer, he grows tomatoes outside his front door and shares them around as well.

"A very kind and generous man," Searcy said.

One thing he has not been generous about, for the past 67 years, is what happened in the war.

"People would approach me," he said, "and want me to tell them what happened here, what happened there. I'd tell them, 'Look, I don't know, because I have forgotten. I tried my best. I didn't even tell my wife about this thing. She didn't know a thing about it. ...

"I just didn't tell it."

Dodging bullets

Last week, he relented, and agreed to an interview and photographs.

On the Whitney, Pollok's job in case of attack was to be in the repair party -- ready to go in case the ship was hit. The Whitney was moored near seven destroyers, but, aside from strafing, the Japanese left the ship alone.

"We put up such hot anti-aircraft fire that the planes veered away from us."

Pollok was part of that. He saw a machine gun standing idle at his station and started firing -- he had qualified on the .50-caliber just the month before.

"I can't tell you I shot down a plane, but I could see my tracers going right through the planes," he said.

It was a good thing the Whitney's gunners kept up the fire. Besides housing repair crews, their ship was carrying ammunition.

"We had 600-pound depth charges in our magazine, plus 200 torpedoes," Pollok said. "We were a bomb itself. If we had been hit with a torpedo, I wouldn't be sitting here."