I was at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. I was a seventeen-year-old signalman aboard the USS Oklahoma. When the attack came, I was asleep in my bunk. The first thing I knew was the sound — this enormous roar, like the whole world was tearing apart. I ran topside and saw a Japanese plane so close I could see the pilot's face. He was young. He looked scared too. Then the torpedoes hit. The Oklahoma rolled over. I ended up in the water with oil all over me. I remember thinking: the water is warm. That's the thing I remember most — the water was warm. I got picked up by a destroyer that was itse...

I was born in Java, which was Dutch East Indies at the time. In 1942, the Japanese took me and 50,000 others and put us to work building the railway between Thailand and Burma. They called it 'the Railway of Death.' I was seventeen. I lasted 22 months. I survived because I was small and could fit into places where others couldn't — inside culverts, under railway cars. The Japanese engineers didn't bother with safety measures. If you fell, you were replaced. I watched men die from cholera, dysentery, malaria, tropical ulcers, and simple exhaustion. I saw men eaten by tigers at night. I worked w...

I was 19 when I volunteered for the U-boat fleet in 1942. I thought it was my duty. I went through basic training in Bordeaux — the U-boat pens there were massive, underground, concrete cathedrals. I made four patrols. On my fourth, in April 1944, a British frigate dropped a pattern of depth charges that shook us so hard that three of our crew urinated involuntarily. We could hear the steel hull screaming. The order came: 'Dive to 280 meters.' Our maximum rated depth was 200. We went to 280. The boat held. We escaped. I later learned that 75% of U-boat crews were killed during the war — the hi...