Hero's Son Makes Trip To Where His Father Died

HONOLULU - He did not return for nearly half a century. He could not return for nearly half a century.

But this week, Franklin Van Valkenburgh returns to Pearl Harbor, to the place where his father - also named Franklin Van Valkenburgh - died a hero aboard the famed ship he commanded: the USS Arizona.

The son will be wearing the Naval Academy ring his father wore Dec. 7, 1941, the ring that was plucked from a mound of human ashes, the ring that he carried with pride later in World War II aboard a ship named for his father.

The ring that has not been off his finger in nearly 50 years.

The son, now 72, will wear that ring as he visits the Arizona Memorial later this week and stands above the ruins of a once mighty battleship, above the remains of his father and 1,101 other sailors still entombed there.

And this is what he knows he will be thinking:

"I am very, very proud of my father and of all the men who were here that day.

This is something that has been on my mind for many, many years.

A man with my name, my father's name, should visit this place."

All over the island of Oahu this week, veterans who survived the attack - and relatives of those who did not - are visiting the old sites, reliving the awful memories, trying to come to terms with what happened here.

Before it is too late.

They all have their stories, but no one's story is more touching than that of Franklin Van Valkenburgh, the son of the father who would rather die than leave his command post.

And did.

Retired himself now from the U.S. Navy, the son has not been back to Pearl Harbor since 1946.

Then, the wrecked Arizona stood "like a pile of junk" in the harbor, he said.

He was a 26-year-old naval officer and hardened by what he had seen and experienced in World War II.

But he found himself imagining what it must have been like that day the Arizona exploded, that day his father died, and he averted his eyes, and he never returned.

"It was just too emotional," he said.

"You look at the wreckage that was still there and you think of the stories you heard. It was just too much."

Now, time is running out, so he accepted an invitation from the organizers of this week's 50th anniversary observance of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The San Diego resident will visit the memorial that now stands over the ship, then deliver a speech Thursday.

"I decided it was time I was at the memorial," he said.

"Just to see it. It's just something I have to do now."

His father, Capt. Franklin Van Valkenburgh, 52, skipper of the Arizona, died when the battleship was hit by a 1,760-pound, armor-piercing bomb shortly after the Japanese attack began.

The bomb ignited the ship's ammunition stores and fuel supplies.

The Arizona exploded in a massive blast, sinking in less than nine minutes, taking with it 1,177 of the 1,375 men on board. Also among the dead was Rear Adm. Isaac C. Kidd.

The explosion was so powerful it blew debris hundreds of yards in all directions.

It was viewed by many as the most dramatic moment of the entire attack on Hawaii.

Both Capt. Van Valkenburgh and Adm. Kidd later were awarded the Medal of Honor, posthumously.

At one point during the attack, Capt. Van Valkenburgh rejected suggestions that he withdraw to an armored conning tower. He insisted on remaining on the bridge, at his command post.

A picture of the captain, taken a month or so before the attack, shows a dignified officer dressed in Navy whites, his determined eyes staring away from the camera, as if peering far out to sea. His cabin on the Arizona is filled with books.

This is what one of his crewmen told author-historian Paul Stillwell of the captain:

"It didn't take an act of Congress to make him a gentleman," because he already was one.

At the time of the attack, the son was a civilian working in Long Beach, Calif., rejected by the Navy because of poor eyesight.

Four months later, he received a waiver, was commissioned as a naval officer and ended up serving on a destroyer that saw action at Iwo Jima and elsewhere.

The ship's name: the USS Van Valkenburgh.

"Of course I was very proud of that," he said.

"I saw it as a job that I had to do, getting on that ship and going into action.

"It's going to be a very emotional thing," Van Valkenburgh said, quietly and hesitantly.

"I've always wanted to see it and yet I don't want to see it."

And then, the son who now is an old man said again:

"It's going to be a very emotional thing."