Torch is passed to survivors' children
The first time Mark Banovich went to Pearl Harbor, he was 5 years old, holding his father's hand at the USS Arizona Memorial, trying to comprehend the grief around him.
"I remember there were parents of the men killed there. I remember one woman, a mother, who was restrained from jumping in the water," he said.
That was in 1966, when Mark's father, George Banovich, a Pearl Harbor survivor, brought his family from Manville, N.J., to Hawaii for 25th anniversary of the attack.
"It's amazing how time flies by," said Banovich, now 55, who now lives in Flemington. "Now, I'm going back for the 75th anniversary."
In those 50 years, the responsibility of remembrance has gradually passed from generation to generation - from the parents of those killed and the survivors, to the children of the survivors.
An official handoff began in 1970, when the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association gave its approval to a group of descendants to start their own organization. Two years later, on Dec. 6, 1972, the first chapter of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors (SDPHS) was formed in Florida. Today, there are 3,500 members.
Wayne Carson, of Plainsboro, was one of the first.
"My membership number is six," said Carson, 68. "My dad came home from a Pearl Harbor meeting and said they were forming a sons' and daughters' group and I said, 'Where is the application?' "
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Carson's father, Walter I. Carson, died on Dec. 8, 1990. On the day of the attack, he was a member of an Army anti-aircraft gunnery and was headed into the chow hall of the Scofield Barracks.
"He was walking into breakfast and they got strafed," Carson said. "He was walking with this other guy. The guy dove one way and my father dove the other way, and he never saw that guy again."
Carson has been to Pearl Harbor five times since 1976, three times with his father before his death.
"It's some feeling to stand there (at the USS Arizona Memorial), over the bodies of 1,102 men," he said.
Twice, he has witnessed Navy divers take cremation urns of former USS Arizona sailors who survived Pearl Harbor and place them in the ship.
"They wanted to be buried with their shipmates," he said.
Such was the emotional pull of Pearl Harbor for survivors - even if they rarely talked about it.
Robin Jones, 57, of Pompton Plains joined the sons and daughters survivors' group two years ago, in part to learn more about his father's experience at Pearl Harbor.
"My father never talked about it. Never," Jones said.
It wasn't until Jones was in his mid-20s that his father, Roland Jones, even told him he was at Pearl Harbor --aboard the USS Solace, a hospital ship, which was docked near the Arizona. It wasn't until after his father died in 1987, that Robin Jones pursued his Pearl Harbor story.
He got most of the eyewitness information from a boyhood friend of his father, who was also on the Solace.
"He told me how they had to constantly swab the decks with a drying agent because the men that were being plucked out of the water were bleeding and covered in oil," Jones said. "I can't imagine the horror of what they saw."
When Jones' mother died and the family cleaned out their Harrington Park home, they discovered an archive of letters, postcards and official correspondence documenting his father's career.
One was a one-sentence letter sent to Roland Jones after his discharge, announcing that he would receive a Navy Unit Commendation "for service on Dec. 7, 1941."
Another was the postcard all survivors sent home two weeks after the attack, with boxes checked that said they were either alive and injured, or alive and uninjured.
"Remember, for many families, this was the first news they got about their sons after the attack," Jones said.
Jones also discovered the first letter his father sent home after the bombing. In it, he referenced Saburo Kurusu, who pretended to be brokering a peace deal with the United States while the Japanese were plotting the sneak attack, and Minora Genda, one of the top pilots who planned it.
"Kurusu and Manura (sic) & all the rest of the Japanese will rue the day they pulled that filthy trick," he wrote. "I only hope someday I can stand on Kurusu's neck and say 'Remember Pearl Harbor, kid.' "
That is precisely the point of the sons' and daughters' group.
"People are increasingly clueless about our history," said Carmen Harding, 73, of Brookeville, Md., who is the editor of the SDPHS newsletter called "Offspring."
"Our main goal is education," said Harding, whose father Robert Van Druff, 97, is one of the estimated 2,000 Pearl Harbor survivors still living. "We want people to understand what these men went through, so it won't happen again."
For Jones, Banovich and Carol Michaels Thomas, 60, of Long Valley, belonging to the group has educated them about their own fathers' experiences.
"My father was an Army medic," said Thomas, "and all his records were lost in the fire. (A 1973 fire at the national records archives in Overland, Mo., destroyed millions of service files.) All I knew was he said he got thrown up against a wall when the bombs were dropping."
Thomas Michaels died in 1990 at 67, before his daughter could truly understand the value of his experience.
"You know, when you're a kid, you don't want to hear it," she said. "But I wish now I was more interested. I regret that, and I joined the group to learn more about what happened there."
Jones shares the same regret.
"I think that's the message here," he said. "I started asking questions too late."
For Banovich, he was fortunate that his father and father-in-law, Joseph Patero, were good friends and very involved in the Manville VFW.
"I learned a lot about my father's experience," he said. "And I felt guilty about tuning him out when I was younger."
He was able to write a short bio about his father, which read like an abridged version of the war in the Pacific, to be published in the sons' and daughters' 75th anniversary program.
George Banovich, an Army infantryman, was at Pearl Harbor, fought on the Makin Islands and was wounded at Guadalcanal and the Battle for Luzon. He earned three Purple Hearts and two Bronze Stars, as well as other combat commendations. He died in 2014 age 92.
Mark wanted to visit Pearl Harbor with him one more time, for the 50th anniversary, but his father "had some cancer issues back then," he said.
This trip to Hawaii for the 75th is one he wished he could have made with his dad.
"I have a deep need to understand this history," he said. "And I hope I live long enough to make it to the 100th."
Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.