The Last Witnesses: America’s 13 Remaining Pearl Harbor Survivors

The Tuba Player Who Trained for His Final Salute

Ira “Ike” Schab, now 105, recently spent six weeks in physical therapy for one specific goal: to stand and salute KFOX TV at last year’s Pearl Harbor remembrance ceremony. The former Navy bandsman, who played tuba aboard the USS Dobbin, gingerly rose from his wheelchair and raised his trembling hand as destroyers and submarines passed by in the harbor.

On the morning of the attack, Schab had just showered and put on a clean uniform when he heard the call for a fire rescue party KFOX TV. What he saw topside was chaos incarnate—Japanese planes overhead and the USS Utah capsizing before his eyes. The musician quickly found himself in a daisy chain of sailors passing shells to anti-aircraft guns, his fingers that had plucked tuba strings now feeding ammunition to gunners desperately firing at the sky.

More than anything that day, Schab remembers being scared and wondering about his brothers, one of whom was also on the island. He made it his mission in recent years to attend ceremonies not just for himself, but for the shipmates who couldn’t make it anymore.

The Farm Boy Who Refused to Hide

Earl “Chuck” Kohler was 17 when he disobeyed direct orders to shelter in a ditch CNN. As bombs rained down on Ford Island, the son of a sharecropping dirt farmer made a split-second decision: he wasn’t going to wait out this fight in a hole.

Kohler was in an airplane hangar writing a letter to his mother when he heard the approaching aircraft, followed by a tremendous roar as bomb fragments and window glass crashed into the back of his head, ears, neck and shoulders CNN. Despite being threatened with a court-martial for defying orders, he ran to retrieve a 50-caliber machine gun and ammunition, then helped shoot at the attacking warplanes.

“Maybe I was a dumb farm boy,” Kohler later reflected, “but I know this is the beginning of that war they’d been talking about and waiting for, and I know that if I’m going to lose my life here, I don’t want to lose it in a ditch.”

What affected him most wasn’t his own close call with death—it was watching those ships explode and capsize, knowing that with every one of those events, hundreds of lives were being lost.

The School Board President Who Fought Two Wars

Ken Schubring, now 103, can still identify the aircraft that attacked Pearl Harbor by their model numbers WTVR. “I knew they were Aichi 99’s and they had a red circle underneath the wing and a red circle on the fuselage, and that was Japanese,” he recalls with the clarity of someone who lived through something unforgettable.

Schubring had just finished his guard duty and gone to breakfast when shortly before 8 a.m., an explosion shook their bunkers WTVR. The sky filled with dive bombers, and he hit the deck, crawling to a nearby ditch.

After Pearl Harbor, Schubring became a flight engineer on B-29 bombers, flying missions over the Pacific. He was on a bombing run over Osaka when the radio announced Emperor Hirohito had asked for an armistice. The war was over.

But perhaps his most important battle came after he returned home to Athens, Georgia, where he became school board president and fought to integrate schools in the turbulent post-war South WTVR. The stance brought criticism and social isolation. “People probably never speak to me again for the rest of their life,” Schubring remembered. His son recalled, “I remember getting called a lot of bad things, but my dad never wavered.”

At 103, Schubring still keeps up with current events and offers a perspective we desperately need: “In spite of conflict, division, or whatever’s going on, I still think it’s the greatest country on earth.”

The Mess Cook Who Just Wanted to Dance

Bob Fernandez thought he’d joined the Navy to see the world and go dancing. At 17, he was working as a mess cook on the USS Curtiss that Sunday morning, planning to go dancing that night at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki CBS News. He was bringing sailors coffee and food during breakfast when everything changed.

Through a porthole, Fernandez saw a plane with the red ball insignia painted on Japanese aircraft fly by, and he rushed down three decks to a magazine room where he and other sailors waited for someone to unlock a door storing shells so they could begin passing them to the ship’s guns CBS News. “I felt kind of scared because I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” he later said.

The Curtiss lost 21 men and nearly 60 sailors were injured CBS News. After the attack, Fernandez swept up debris and stood guard with a rifle. When it came time to rest, he fell asleep next to where the ship’s dead were lying, not realizing it until a fellow sailor woke him up.

Many people called Pearl Harbor survivors heroes, but Fernandez never saw himself that way. “I’m not a hero. I’m just nothing but an ammunition passer,” he insisted.

After the war, Fernandez worked as a forklift driver at a cannery in San Leandro, California, married his wife Mary for 65 years until her death in 2014, and continued dancing well into his 90s CNN. He helped neighbors rake their yards and split firewood into his final years. His advice for living a long life? Stop eating when you’re full, march up stairs, and be kind to everyone.

Fernandez died just last week at age 100, shortly after declining health prevented him from attending the 83rd anniversary ceremony. His nephew said he thinks Fernandez would want to be remembered for bringing people joy.

The Last Man from the Arizona

Lou Conter became the last living survivor of the USS Arizona after Ken Potts died in April 2023. Conter was a quartermaster standing on the main deck when the Arizona was struck by a bomb that ignited the ship’s ammunition magazine, creating an explosion that blew off the ship’s bow and lifted the battleship out of the water Wikipedia.

Of the 1,512 crew members aboard, only 335 survived; 1,177 sailors and Marines perished Wikipedia, many of them still entombed in the submerged wreckage today.

But Conter’s story didn’t end that day. He became a naval aviator, flying 200 combat missions in the Pacific with the “Black Cats” squadron, and was shot down twice—once in shark-infested waters off the coast of New Guinea Wikipedia. When his crew panicked, he calmly instructed them: “Stay together, hold hands and kick slowly, ’cause there’ll be sharks around. If a shark comes too close, just hit it in the nose with your fist as hard as you can.”

Conter later became an intelligence officer, helped create the Navy’s first SERE program for survival training, and served as a military adviser to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson MOAA. He retired as a lieutenant commander in 1967 after 28 years of service.

Conter died in April 2024 at age 102, having outlived all his Arizona shipmates. He refused the label of hero. “I consider the heroes the ones that gave their lives, that never came home to their families. They’re the real heroes.”

The Ones We Can Still Honor

Ken Stevens, 102, who served on the USS Whitney KFOX TV, attended last year’s ceremony alongside Schab. The two centenarians sat in the front row, facing the waters where Battleship Row once stood proud before being torn apart in two hours of hell.

These 13 men—and we know so little about many of them because privacy and health concerns limit their public appearances—represent something we’re about to lose. They’re not just the last eyewitnesses to one of America’s most pivotal moments. They’re living reminders that history isn’t something that happened to other people in black-and-white photos. It happened to teenagers like them, kids who joined up thinking they’d see the world or have adventures, who found themselves passing ammunition with shaking hands while their friends died around them.

What’s perhaps most striking is what they all say when you ask them about being heroes. To a man, they deflect. They insist the real heroes are the ones who didn’t make it home, who never got to marry or have children or grandchildren, who never got to dance at the Royal Hawaiian or fight for school integration or fly missions over the Pacific or simply rake a neighbor’s yard on a sunny afternoon.

This year, for the first time in recent memory except for 2020’s pandemic restrictions, no Pearl Harbor survivors were able to attend the remembrance ceremony CNN

The reality we must face is painfully simple: soon there will be none left to attend at all.

That’s why their stories matter more than ever. Not because we should glorify war, but because we should remember that freedom has always required ordinary people to do extraordinary things. These 13 men are the last living links to a day that changed everything—when a generation of Americans stopped thinking about whether they’d get involved in the world’s problems and started thinking about how quickly they could sign up to fix them.

As Ken Schubring puts it with his 103 years of perspective: “Something like that, you can’t forget.” And thanks to these last witnesses, we won’t have to.