Ira Schab, Pearl Harbor survivor, passes

Ira Schab, 105: originally a tuba player in the USS Dobbin’s band, died Saturday.

The 21-year old (born July 4, 1920) Mr. Schab expected a quiet Sunday morning. One of his two younger brothers, assigned to a nearby Naval radio station, was coming  to visit.

Schab had just showered and donned a clean uniform when he heard a call for fire rescue.

He went topside and saw another ship, the USS Utah, capsizing. Japanese planes roared through the air.

“We were pretty startled. Startled and scared to death,” Schab recalled in 2023. “We didn’t know what to expect, and we knew that if anything happened to us, that would be it.”

He scurried back below deck to grab boxes of ammunition and joined a daisy chain of sailors feeding shells to an anti-aircraft gun above.

It appears the Dobbin got off pretty lightly, with one bomb hit that took out one of their anti-aircraft guns, killing one and fatally injuring two more.

Schab spent most of the war with the Navy in the Pacific, going to the New Hebrides, now known as Vanuatu, and then the Mariana Islands and Okinawa, Japan.

After the war he studied aerospace engineering and worked on the Apollo spaceflight program as an electrical engineer for General Dynamics, helping send astronauts to the moon.  Military Times.com

Mr. Schab didn’t like to talk about the war, but in later years began attending Pearl Harbor events “To pay honor to the guys who didn’t make it.

Definitely a Navy family – Schab’s father was Navy, he and his younger brother were both in the Navy at Pearl Harbor, and  Schab’s son retired from the Navy as a commander.

As we have said before, there are maybe a dozen survivors left. Not surprising, given the attack was 85 years ago,

Fair winds and following seas.

Category: Navy, We Remember, WWII