As world remembers World War II’s end, a local Pearl Harbor survivor recalls its beginning

LA CENTER – On Sept. 2, while the rest of the world marks the 70th anniversary of World War II’s end, at least one local resident will be remembering the day it all began.

Ray Vinnedge, of La Center, was an 18-year-old seaman stationed on the USS Cassin when the Japanese attacked the United States Navy base at Pearl Harbor, shocking the American public and propelling the U.S. into a second world war.

Now 92, Vinnedge rarely talks about his memories of that day.

“It feels good to remember, though,” he says. “It’s good to get it out.”

In late July, Vinnedge agreed to talk about his Pearl Harbor experience with The Reflector. When we arrive, Vinnedge is sitting on his back porch, surrounded by photos and news stories of the Dec. 7 attack. He is a peaceful man who has lived a good, productive life. We talk about his childhood in California, about his mother, Luella Rose, who raised three spirited boys on her own, and then Vinnedge remembers his first few months in the Navy.

He was barely 18 when he arrived in Pearl Harbor, his whole life still ahead of him.

“We knew we’d be fighting the Japanese,” Vinnedge says. “But we thought we’d be fighting at sea. We never expected to be attacked at Pearl Harbor.”

On Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the U.S. Navy base of Pearl Harbor, in Oahu, Hawaii, Vinnedge was just a few months into his 18th year of life. He’d joined the Navy a few months before, at the age of 17, hitchhiking 25 miles from his home in Corona, CA, to the closest Navy recruiting office.

“I wanted to help my mother,” Vinnedge recalls. “My father had left her alone with three boys and she did all she could for us.”

When he found out that the Navy would take him a year earlier than the other military branches – and pay him $21 a month to boot – Vinnedge didn’t hesitate.

“I signed up and told them to keep $10 each month for me and send the rest to my mother,” Vinnedge says. “And I kept that arrangement, even when I made a lot more than $21 a month. I didn’t need the money – what are you going to buy when you’re at sea? – but my mother did. When I was discharged five years later, I was still getting just $10 a month from my paycheck.”

A bit of a heartbreaker

Looking at photos of Vinnedge from the 1940s, it is obvious that the still-charming man was probably a bit of a heartbreaker. He was handsome, dedicated to his family and full of life. When Vinnedge got into the Navy, he requested placement on a Destroyer, the fast warship that defends other Navy vessels against attacks by submarines and aircraft.

“I played football and had a girl on each arm,” says Vinnedge, laughing and remembering himself at the age of 17. “I was full of hell. That’s why I picked a destroyer!”

It was on the deck of that destroyer, the USS Cassin, that Vinnedge found himself on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941 when the Japanese launched their surprise attack, sending 353 Japanese fighter planes, bombers and torpedo planes to bombard the Pearl Harbor naval base.  

At 7:30 a.m. on the morning of the attack, Vinnedge was below deck with the rest of his shipmates, enjoying breakfast in the mess hall and preparing for another normal day in the Hawaiian sunshine.

“It was another beautiful day,” Vinnedge recalls. “There was nothing out of the ordinary.”

At 7:48 a.m., Vinnedge emerged from below deck and looked toward that blue, cloudless Hawaiian sky. A few hundred yards away, he saw something wasn’t right. A plane was coming toward him and it wasn’t like any plane he’d ever seen before.  

“I could see it, a torpedo plane with a big red circle on it, flying about 50 feet above the submarine base,” Vinnedge recalls. “I just started yelling to everyone, ‘The Japs are attacking! They’re attacking!’”

The chaos that ensued has been well documented – the Japanese planes came in two waves, striking ships that were in drydock and therefore unprepared to fight back. In the end, the Japanese forces sank or heavily damaged 188 U.S. aircraft, eight battleships, three cruisers, three destroyers, one anti-aircraft training ship and one minelayer. The attack killed 2,403 Americans and wounded another 1,178.

Remembering the attack

When Vinnedge remembers that day, he remembers it in surreal fragments. Because his destroyer was in drydock, its gun stations – designed to take down attacking aircraft – weren’t prepared for an attack. Instead of manning an anti-aircraft gun station – the destroyer’s five-inch guns were tucked away in lockers when the attack began – Vinnedge and his shipmates were reduced to shooting at the attacking Japanese planes with machine guns. Losses on the Japanese end were light, with 29 planes and five small submarines lost and 64 Japanese servicemen killed.

What Vinnedge remembers of those first moments is this: He ran to warn his shipmates, to bring them up from the mess hall. Then there were bullets and shrapnel raining down on him, hitting the destroyer’s metal deck and sending up huge plumes of black smoke.

“No one had a hard hat on and there were bullets coming down,” Vinnedge says. “I wouldn’t say we were scared or terrified. We’d been brainwashed and we knew we’d fight eventually … we just didn’t expect it to happen that day, at Pearl Harbor. I’d say we were more bewildered than scared.”

It is possible that Vinnedge, along with many of his mates, were simply in shock – acting on instinct that day. At one point, Vinnedge found himself on his hands and knees, thrown to the hot metal deck with his ears ringing.

“I didn’t know how I got there, but I saw a railroad car piled high with life rafts nearby, so I got underneath, to get away from the bullets and shrapnel that were coming down,” Vinnedge remembers. “I stayed there for a little while and then it got calm. There were no more bullets. No more planes. The Japanese were preparing for their second wave, you see.”

During the attack, an incendiary bomb had landed between Vinnedge’s destroyer, the USS Cassin, and its neighbor, the USS Downes, both of which were in drydock with the battleship Pennsylvania. The bomb exploded the USS Downes’ fuel tank, drove the USS Cassin from her keel blocks and started massive fires on both destroyers. According to reports from that day, crews tried to fight the fires but were eventually forced to abandon both ships.

In the calm between Japan’s two-wave attack, Vinnedge evacuated the USS Cassin and ran to hastily constructed medical station, set up by the Army Nurse Corps.

“I saw these big vans pulling up and nurses came out of them with card tables,” Vinnedge recalls. “They were pulling out bandages and helping whoever they could.”

Vinnedge was badly burned, his hair singed and eyebrows gone, blisters covering his arms.

“I nurse took iodine and poured it all over my wounds, then a Marine truck pulled up and Marines jumped out with boxes of rifles. They gave me two rifles and I put them over my shoulders and we prepared for the second wave,” Vinnedge says.

Word of a land invasion

As he ran with his two World War I era rifles, trying to ignore the extensive burns on his arms, Vinnedge heard talk of a land invasion.

“That was the rumor,” he says. “Everyone thought their transports were coming, that the Japanese would be here by the next morning. And that they’d have bayonets. It wouldn’t have taken much for them to get us … we were injured and we didn’t have anywhere to go.”

Vinnedge waited all night, clutching his rifles and trying to forget the fact that he hadn’t had a sip of water since before the attack. He waited, thirsty, badly burned and shocked by the attack until the next morning – when the Navy shuttled him from Pearl Harbor onto another destroyer.

“A new destroyer came in and I climbed aboard, up a rope ladder with my rifle,” Vinnedge remembers. “I was a hell of a mess. Covered in black grease and dirty. An officer told someone to get me cleaned up and to take me down to the mess hall. They had a big ‘ol pot of soup there, so I had some of that and I changed into dungarees. And then it was just, ‘OK, we’re going out to sea!’ and out we went.”

Vinnedge spent the next four years at sea, fighting the Japanese from his anti-aircraft gun station and finding out what was going on in the war through the coveted Life magazines he picked up during his rare and brief breaks on land.

“We didn’t know where we were going or what we’d seen,” Vinnedge says. “I had to find out what was going on in Life magazine.” 

A return to California

After five years in the Navy, most of them at war, Vinnedge returned to California and discovered that his two older brothers, both of whom had joined the U.S. Army, had also made it through the war alive. Vinnedge found a job his loved, as a fire sprinkler fitter, and moved up the ranks, eventually becoming a foreman and then a superintendent. He married and had a daughter and two sons.

When his first wife, Verle Jean, became ill with cancer in the mid-1980s, Vinnedge retired and moved to La Center. He married his current wife, Maggie Vinnedge, 12 years ago and the couple have a bevy of grandchildren, great-grandchildren and even a couple great-great-grandchildren to shower with love and affection.

When he talks about Pearl Harbor, Vinnedge is transported to another time and place.

“It was a different time,” Vinnedge says. “We couldn’t keep journals or have a camera. It was all very secret. Not like today. Our mail was censored. Sometimes the mail wouldn’t make it to my mother for three or four months. She didn’t know if we were alright, or where we were. She just had to wait for our letters, and by then they were old.”

Many of the people Vinnedge met during his first days in the Navy didn’t make it out of Pearl Harbor.

“My neighbor survived though,” Vinnedge says. “He and I had gone to school together and joined the Navy together. He chose a battleship when I chose a destroyer. And I found out that he survived the attack, but I didn’t see him again until a class reunion many years later.”

As for the men he knew from the USS Cassin in Pearl Harbor, Vinnedge says their fates are a mystery. He assumes most of them survived the initial attack and went on to fight the Japanese in the Pacific Ocean theater, but says he never met up with another mate from the Cassin during his years at sea.

“I never did see another soul from the Cassin again,” he says. “I don’t know what happened to any of them.”

For people interested in reading reports and seeing photos from the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Vinnedge highly recommends the Life magazine 1991 Collector’s Edition on Pearl Harbor.

“It’s very good,” he says of the collected articles and photographs. “I found out things that I’d never known about that day.”

For more information about Pearl Harbor, visit www.pearlharboroahu.com or www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/pearl-harbor. To read more firsthand accounts of the attack, visit www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/pearl.htm.

Friends of the National WWII Memorial will host a 70th Anniversary Commemoration in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 2, to commemorate 70 years since the war’s end. To find out more about that event, visit http://www.wwiimemorialfriends.org/v-j-day-70th-anniversary.