Ken Stevens arrives at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial on Dec. 7, 2023, for a ceremony commemorating the Japanese surprise attack 82 years earlier. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)
Ken Stevens, a sailor who witnessed the first bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor during the Japanese surprise attack in 1941, died Thursday in Powers, Ore. He was 102.
As a 19-year-old sailor aboard the USS Whitney, Stevens was stunned as he watched a Japanese plane drop a bomb in the first moments of the attack on Dec. 7, 1941.
His death was announced Friday by Pacific Historic Parks.
“My dad passed away peacefully this evening with all of us by his side,” his son Sam Stevens said in a message to Pacific Historic Parks, the organization said in a Facebook post.
“He was a fighter to the end but finally just ran out of gas,” his son said.
With Stevens’ death, only 13 veterans who survived the attack are known to be living, according to a tally maintained by Kathleen Farley, president of the California chapter of Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors.
Stevens was one of only two survivors able to attend last year’s annual commemoration held Dec. 7 at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial.
Stevens was born in Myrtle Point, Ore., on May 19, 1922.
He was raised on a dairy farm, where the family eked out a living during the Great Depression by selling milk and cream, Stevens said in a videotaped interview with Pacific Historic Parks on June 21.
At 18 and out of school, Stevens looked to the military as a means of stable income. He was drawn to the Navy in particular because he liked to fish, he said in the interview.
“It was work,” he said. “It paid $21 a month. And you had a place to live.”
After basic training in San Diego, he was assigned to the Whitney, a 484-foot-long destroyer tender.
Ken Stevens poses in his Navy uniform in this undated photo from the 1940s. (Pacific Historic Parks)
On the morning of the attack, the Whitney was moored beside five destroyers to provide them steam, electricity and fresh water.
Stevens was on the top deck and ready to head off to Waikiki on liberty. He saw aircraft coming over the harbor, an unusual occurrence on a Sunday morning, he said in the video interview.
He recalled thinking to himself at the time: “They’re practicing on the weekend? What’s the matter with them?”
“About that time, one of them broke off, and I saw the bomb drop,” he said. “The first bomb of World War II, I saw dropped there. It landed over on Ford Island on the planes so they couldn’t take off.”
Moments later the Whitney was strafed, and the crew was called to battle stations.
From his station in the fire room, he could hear the sounds of the attack, venturing out once to survey the scene.
“You could see the ships burning and the heavy black smoke going up,” Stevens told the Oregon-based newspaper The World in 2011.
“Men from burning ships swam for shore while men from shore raced to help,” he said. “There was a lot of oil in the water, black like tar. They had to swim through that.”
Stevens continued to serve in the Pacific until the war’s end, at which time his ship was among those that transported U.S. POWs back home from Japan.
He left the Navy in 1947, returned to Oregon and started a logging company. He married his wife, Phyllis, in 1949.
The couple were fulltime pastors at the Powers Church of God until they retired in 1997, according to a 2017 report by KCBY-TV in North Bend, Ore.
Stevens will be buried with his wife, who died in 2019, according to Pacific Historic Parks. Funeral services are pending.
