Clyde Griffin of Admiral Baker GC in San Diego, a member of the exclusive fraternity of Pearl Harbor survivors, was featured in the November-December issue of FORE magazine.
Clyde Griffin was playing a trombone at the time. And he admits that he nearly swallowed it.
It was a tranquil Sunday morning in Hawaii, and he was in a folding chair on the fantail of the USS Nevada, playing the national anthem in a Navy band. But why were those planes diving in this direction? And what were those strange red dots painted on them?
In an instant, machine-gun fire was tearing up the wooden deck of the Nevada, barely 18 inches from where Griffin, a first class petty officer, was seated. And then the bombs and torpedoes started slamming into the battleships moored along Ford Island in Pearl Harbor, including the USS Arizona, which was directly in front of the Nevada.
“I think about it quite a lot,” Griffin, 91, said recently on the patio of the Admiral Baker GC clubhouse in San Diego. “Not as much as I used to. You go around picking up wounded, it really gets to you.”
That was his duty after he put down his instrument.
Griffin is “a living legend” around Admiral Baker, said John Bepko, a retired rear admiral who is president of the men’s club there and is also on the SCGA Course Rating Committee. “They love him here,” he continued. “We’re all military, active or retired, so we have empathy for what he did. He can’t buy a drink here.”
Today the nation marks the 70th anniversary of a day that still lives in infamy, and as it does so, it honors the members of a select and rapidly shrinking club. According to Bill Muehleib, president of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, there were 84,000 uniformed military personnel on Oahu when the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, plunging the United States into World War II. Of the 29,000 who went on to join the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, only about 2,700 remain alive today, Muehleib reported.
That Clyde Griffin was still alive even to see Dec. 8 is a miracle that he readily acknowledges.
The band of the Nevada alternated with the Arizona in playing morning colors, and on this day, it was the Nevada’s turn. The band formed up on the deck of the ship just before 8 a.m. and began playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” when the attack began, Griffin said softly. Almost immediately, a Japanese pilot strafed the band, tore up the flag that was being raised but somehow hit no one. Even more incredibly, the band played on.
Griffin played his trombone with blood streaming from his leg, as the bullets passing near him had sent deck splinters ripping into him. And the band played the entire anthem?
“Yes,” he says. “We were dumbfounded, you might say, and kept playing. But the last note was the shortest note in music history.”
As Griffin recounts the events that followed, a listener is likely to sit in stunned silence. He was trapped below decks in chest-deep water that was slowly rising. A ship’s doctor appeared out of nowhere and led him to safety, just as panic was setting in. The Nevada made a break for the open ocean, only to be hit by six 1,000-pound bombs and a torpedo that blew a 40-by-28-foot hole in its side, forcing the captain to run it aground in a cane field to avoid blocking the harbor entrance. He performed the grim task of bearing the wounded and dead off the ship on stretchers – or bunk-spring frames when they ran out of those; the explosions and the fires had wreaked unspeakable havoc on the victims.
In the days afterward, “I’d come out of that bed screaming sometimes,” Griffin said. And after being trapped in a dim compartment below decks, he said, “I’m claustrophobic right now.”
There was the understandable assumption that the attack would be followed by a land invasion, so Griffin’s next assignment was helping guard west-facing Nanakuli Beach in a “suicide squad,” a term he uses because “I had an automatic rifleman assigned to my squad and we were to go in close to the enemy and wipe as many as we could before being slaughtered ourselves.”
The day he received orders to report to Norfolk, Va., for shore duty caused him to throw his rifle aside and whoop for joy.
Griffin got back to Honolulu during the war for an enviable assignment: playing The Breakers on Waikiki Beach with his 21-piece band, to give soldiers and sailors a diversion from the horrors of combat. And when word of the Japanese surrender reached him, “I marched up and down Kalakaua Avenue for an hour and a half with my band.”
Griffin remained in the Navy through the Korean War, then made his way to San Diego to indulge his interest in golf.
He became a Class A PGA professional in 1963, served as a head pro at a number of area courses and for a time was owner of Tecolote Canyon GC. He’s been an SCGA member via the Admiral Baker club for more than 40 years.
Says Bepko: “I was a 14 handicap when I came out here. Griff helped me. He got me down to single digits, just giving me tips. He never charged me a penny, he just took me out on the golf course.”
But this rear admiral is still in Griffin’s debt. The two used to be on the same golf team at the club, and played every Tuesday. “I’m still into him, lifetime losses, for about $75,” Bepko said with a chuckle.
Griffin doesn’t play anymore because of various physical maladies, adding, “People say, ‘You don’t look 91,’ and I say, ‘I sure as hell feel it.’ ”
But he’s lived a long, full life since his close brush with the bombers 70 years ago. It’s something he has reflected on when visiting the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.
While the Nevada was making its run for the harbor entrance, he was knocked off his feet by the explosion that destroyed the Arizona. Visiting the memorial today, he said, “is the worst feeling in the world, walking over 1,100 men still in that damned ship. Still in there.”
