Pearl Harbor memories remain for veteran

LYNN – When he gazes at the World War II-era destroyer USS Cassin Young in Boston on Sunday, Emery Arsenault will think about the Sunday morning 73 years ago when Japanese pilots raced by him on their way to kill Americans and catapult the United States into war.Arsenault, a 93-year-old Peabody resident who lived most of his life in Lynn, was assigned to a radar station in the Hawaiian hills early on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941 when the Japanese launched a surprise attack aimed at crippling U.S. naval power in the Pacific Ocean.?Six or seven of us were on a 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. shift. We were getting ready to shut down. All of a sudden, the screen lit up from one end to the other. Shortly after that, Japanese torpedo planes flew over the tree tops. We could see the pilots and the co-pilots. They started strafing our position and all we had for defense were our rifles with about five rounds,” Arsenault recalled.Assigned to Battery E, 64th Coastal Artillery, Arsenault and his comrades jammed their rifle butts into the ground and started firing at the planes roaring overhead.?I don?t know if we hit anything,” he said.Arsenault, who was born in New Bedford and joined the military two years before Pearl Harbor, said military personnel in Hawaii knew the United States was “not on the best of terms” with the Japanese, but an attack was unexpected.More than 2,000 military personnel were killed in the attack. Arsenault said he joined other soldiers in digging foxholes and preparing for a Japanese invasion that never came.?We were there three days,” he said.He spent the rest of the war in Hawaii and the United States and worked after the war for Trans World Airlines before retiring to care for his late wife, Lauretta. Arsenault lives with his daughter, Anne Mullen, and is the father of two other daughters, Louise Best; a New Hampshire resident, and Laura Connolly of Wilmington.Along with other veterans, he traveled with all expenses paid to Hawaii in 2011 for 70th anniversary ceremonies marking the attack. Mullen said The Greatest Generation Foundation, a Colorado-based organization, paid for the trip. Arsenault said he is looking forward to Sunday?s ceremony in Boston.?The memories are fading away but they pop up in my mind once in a while,” he said.