Pearl survivor is a true Marine
NEARLY 60 YEARS before the attack on New York’s twin towers, thousands of Americans died at another “Ground Zero.”
When Japanese aircraft bombed, torpedoed and strafed American bases in Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Coeur d’Alene resident Ray Garland was among the wounded.
A Butte kid, he’d decided the Marines offered a more promising future than the copper mines. So, after a short stint with the Civilian Conservation Corps, Garland enlisted with the U.S. Marine Corps at a temporary recruiting station in Butte’s Finlen Hotel.
“I liked the Corps’ history,” he says, “and those blues were a good-looking dress uniform. They’d attract the ladies.”
That was on July 21, 1941, and after boot training in San Diego concluded in October, Pvt. Garland was assigned to the Marine detachment on the battleship USS Tennessee. He served as a guard and helped man the ship’s 5-inch batteries and 50-caliber machine guns.
On Dec. 7, the Tennessee was moored inboard of the USS West Virginia and about 75 feet from the USS Arizona.
“I was coming off the 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. watch, on deck to help raise the colors, when the first wave of … planes came in, dropping bombs on Ford Island,” Garland remembers. “They were as close to us as that house across the street.”
The Tennessee opened fire as the enemy planes began attacking the ships. Soon, the battleships West Virginia, Oklahoma and California took torpedo hits. The Oklahoma capsized; the California and West Virginia listed, the latter against the Tennessee, pinning Garland’s ship to a quay.
The Arizona took several large bomb hits, at least one of which penetrated the ammunition magazines, causing a huge explosion in the forward part of the ship.
The Arizona’s foremast fell, and burning powder, oil and debris were thrown onto the Tennessee as the Arizona settled by the bow. Intense heat from the sinking ship plus the burning material hurled from it started fires on the Tennessee.
About an hour after the attack began, Garland was below decks, manning a fire hose with a sailor. There was an explosion – Garland thinks water from the hose struck exposed wiring – and he was knocked unconscious.
He awoke in the sick bay with burns to his eyes and face. He doesn’t know to this day what happened to the sailor with whom he’d been working the hose.
After a three-day confinement, Garland was back at work. He recalls manning pumps to drain water from portions of the sunken Arizona to retrieve records that went down with her.
In terms of the 2,403 lives lost at Pearl Harbor, the Tennessee’s casualties were relatively light: six dead, 19 wounded. And since the vessel suffered relatively little damage, she was soon in the fight.
During the next two years, Garland captained an anti-aircraft gun as the Tennessee participated in the Aleutian, Marshall and Gilbert Islands campaigns.
He rotated back to the states in the spring of 1944 and was stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C. when he learned of an opportunity to go to Washington, D.C. where, he said, “There were 10 women to every guy.”
So, he signed up for the Navy Bomb Disposal School to learn a trade now called explosive ordnance disposal at American University. By graduation, he hadn’t found a girl, but he’d learned enough to take him back to the Pacific where he took apart unexploded ordnance from island battles.
“We were the first Marines into Japan,” he recalls. “I spent two days at Nagasaki taking pictures of the damage caused by the atom bomb. The devastation was unbelievable.”
He adds that he felt sorry for the Japanese, many of whom, shortly after hostilities concluded, were starving.
Discharged in late 1945, Garland returned to Butte where he worked in the mines until he married and moved to Spokane two years later, where he went to work in a carpet store.
He also joined the Marine Corps Reserve that year “to earn enough money for house payments,” then was recalled to active duty in 1950 when the Korean War erupted.
By then, he’d fathered two boys.
Garland made the amphibious landing at Inchon as his battalion’s ammunition sergeant, then moved north with his unit until Chinese soldiers tore into them at the Chosin Reservoir.
The Marines and adjacent Army troops were driven south past the “Frozen Chosin.” During the movement – which Garland characterizes as an “advance in a different direction” rather than a retreat – he was hit in the left leg by a ricochet.
“I had a bad limp and frostbite, but I managed to walk out,” he says.
Discharged after nine months in Korea, he returned to the carpet business in Spokane until he moved to Coeur d’Alene in 1976. By then, he was the father of another child, a daughter.
When his first marriage failed, Garland wed Beverly Plumb of Coeur d’Alene and became a father to her two sons. He worked for several local carpet firms before he retired 20 years ago.
Somewhat reluctantly, he guides a visitor through his personal museum in the basement of his home. It includes a World War I-style helmet, the kind he was issued when he joined the Marines 63 years ago. There’s also a shadow box that contains his many decorations. Those include a Bronze Star – “for taking out a roadblock in Korea,” he explains – and two Purple Hearts for the burns he suffered at Pearl Harbor and the slug he took in North Korea.
At 82 and still fit, he looks back at his life, emphasizing the last 28 happy years of his marriage and his contentment with his family, which includes three grandsons and a granddaughter.
Like all Marines, he’s proud of his association with the Corps, but he’s even prouder that his children dedicated part of their lives to service: one was an Army captain, another a Navy lieutenant, and his daughter was a flight nurse who now runs a hospital emergency room in Seattle.
And Garland’s own service on behalf of his nation?
“Sure, it was tough at times, but it was a job to do.”