From his station behind a .30-caliber machine gun, Richard Pauls fired at the swarms of Japanese planes that had descended on Pearl Harbor.
Moments before, he had been returning to his ship, the USS Medusa, from breakfast. But a series of explosions, alarms and gunfire sent everything around him into chaos. Bombs went off around him. Bullets nearly hit the ship.
Pauls didn’t have time to think about what was happening around him on Dec. 7, 1941. But 75 years later, he recalls it being another part of his entire wartime experience.
“I still say I’ve been in worse,” the 94-year-old said.
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Pauls, who now lives in Franklin, survived that terrible attack on the U.S. and went on to fight throughout the Pacific theater during World War II. He had enlisted in the Navy in 1941 after graduating from Fairland High School because he wanted to see the world.
He did his basic training at the Navy’s boot camp facility in Great Lakes, Illinois, before being transported by train to California and sent to Pearl Harbor in 1941.
He was stationed on the USS Medusa, the top repair ship in the U.S. fleet. The crew was manned by specialists who could fix any aspect of a ship, from electricians to welders to ship fitters.
“We could almost build a ship with all of the people we had,” he said. “We had all kinds of lathes and milling machines.”
Pauls was a water-tender, the supervisor of the fire room. His job was to ensure that the boilers didn’t overheat.
On the morning of Dec. 7, Pauls was eating breakfast in the mess hall and had returned to the ship when the the first explosions started across the harbor.
He still remembers when the bomb that sunk the USS Arizona went off, exploding in the ship’s ammunition room and immediately destroying the vessel.
“We were clear across the island, in front of Pearl City, but I could feel the concussion from where I was,” he said.
Sailors scrambled to their battle stations. Pauls took his place behind a .30-caliber machine gun on the port side of the Medusa.
The crew of the Medusa was given credit for taking down three Japanese planes, as well as a two-person submarine that had entered the harbor.
Following the attack, Pauls was transferred to a division working on amphibious vehicle landings. He trained in the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.
With the U.S. officially at war, the military knew they’d have to island jump through the Pacific in order to defeat the Japanese, Pauls said.
He participated in the vicious invasions of Guadalcanal, the first major U.S. offensive and victory in the Pacific, and the Bougainville campaign, which secured the strategically vital Northern Solomon Islands in late 1943 and 1944.
The key to those amphibious landings was to go into battle with a shrieking, roaring onslaught.
“Do you know what creates fear? Noise. I’ve been in some of the battles, and when those tanks go in, they turn the sirens on. The more noise, the more fear,” he said.
He was injured slightly in the chest in Bougainville, but otherwise emerged unscathed throughout the war. When the Japanese surrendered in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945, Pauls was stationed at Okinawa.
After the war, he returned home to Indiana, where he worked running a laboratory for Citizens Gas in Indianapolis.
For many years, he was not allowed to talk about what he’d seen and experienced at Pearl Harbor during his time as a sailor. But over the past few decades, Pauls has made it a priority to educate others about what happened that day.
He gives talks throughout the community on his experience, teaching school children, civic organizations and other audiences about the attack and how it changed life for himself and everyone in the U.S.
Many years, he also has traveled back to Hawaii for special events. His health won’t allow him to fly to Hawaii this year. Plus, the area has changed so much during the past 75 years.
“When you go there now, driving through downtown is just like driving through Indianapolis,” he said. “They don’t have the hula dancers like they used to, and they don’t have the luaus on the beach. It’s not the same.”
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Richard Pauls
Age: 94
Home: Franklin
Military service: 1940 to 1945 in the U.S. Navy
Occupation: Worked for Citizens Gas in Indianapolis overseeing a laboratory.
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