One of the last survivors of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor has died. Ivan W. Atkins Jr. died at age 102 on Oct. 27. Atkins, who grew up on a farm in Indiana, was just 18 when he and two of his brothers were aboard the USS West Virginia on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, a year after they enlisted in the Navy, Stars and Stripes reports. Another brother, too young for the Navy, had joined the Merchant Marine. The three brothers were together on deck for a full-dress inspection when the attack began, with the West Virginia taking multiple torpedo hits almost immediately.
The ship's captain ordered the crew to battle stations, but chaos and damage prevented many, including Atkins, from reaching their posts. Atkins, assigned to a gun on a lower deck, managed to escape after the order to abandon ship by climbing a maintenance ladder to the top deck and jumping overboard. All three brothers survived and swam to shore, though they only learned of each other's survival the next day. Many other men burned to death from burning oil in the water as the ship sank, the Indiana Department of Veterans Affairs noted in a 2023 profile of the Atkins brothers, who all survived the war. The attack killed 106 crew members on the West Virginia.
Atkins continued his military service on a minesweeper and later as a gunner on the USS San Jacinto aircraft carrier. "He had an eye for spotting enemy planes, specifically kamikaze planes, on the horizon," the IDVA notes. "A tragic part of Ivan's experience was losing his gunmate six times during his deployment." Atkins received an honorable discharge in 1946. Atkins, who married childhood sweetheart Dorothy Mathers before he enlisted, is survived by seven of their eight children. After the war, he worked as a farmer and in woodworking factories.
When he returned from the war at age 24, he "placed his medals inside a cigar box and buried them in the woods, telling his wife, 'No man should ever be recognized for killing others,'" per the IDVA, which notes, "There was no access to post-war therapy then, and Ivan suffered from profound PTSD."
- "Back then, you didn't sit around and talk about your anxiety. You pulled yourself up by your bootstraps and did what you were supposed to do," granddaughter Tonette Ramion said in the IDVA profile. "My grandfather was killing Japanese kamikazes at age 19. I cannot imagine the impact that had on him or anyone else."
- "My dad had a fifth-grade education in a sheep shed," his son Alfred said in the same profile. "Literally, he had to walk to school one mile away through a field with a bull in it, which he had to strategically evade, and his school was inside a livestock shed."
- With his passing, the number of living Pearl Harbor survivors dwindles to about a dozen, with only one, 105-year-old Ira Schab, expected to attend this year's commemoration in Hawaii, Stars and Stripes reports.
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