Freeman K. Johnson, now 106, says he never saw the Pearl Harbor attack firsthand—he was below deck repairing a boiler on the USS St. Louis—yet he has become the last face of the day as Memorial Day approaches.
CENTERVILLE, Mass. — On May 6, 2026, Freeman K. Johnson sat in a living room crowded with Navy photos, challenge coins, and ribbons from places he visited during World War II. He is 106 now, and his memory still moves with the clarity of the day it was forged.
But the Pearl Harbor attack—what so many people picture as flash and chaos—never reached him the way it reached others. On the day of the Japanese bombing, Johnson, then serving aboard the USS St. Louis, was far below deck helping repair one of the ship’s boilers.
He never witnessed the surprise attack. He never heard his shipmates firing antiaircraft guns at the attacking planes, including the shooting down of a torpedo plane. By the time Johnson was topside, the St. Louis, a light cruiser, had evaded midget submarines and “safely get out to sea,” he said.
“While all the rigamarole was going on topside, I was inside a steam drum. Couldn’t see anything, absolutely nothing,” Johnson said. The words come in a gravelly voice that still carries the surprise of how ordinary his role felt at the time.
He calls himself a sailor—“just a swabbie”—not an officer. Johnson said he didn’t learn details he wasn’t meant to know.
“We were way out to sea, way out. You couldn’t see any land at all. All you saw was ocean,” he said. “I was just a sailor, just a swabbie, I was not an officer. They don’t tell you anything if you don’t need to know. And I didn’t need know it. So they tell you nothing.”
When local schools asked him whether he’d been scared during the attack, Johnson offered a different kind of answer—one rooted in being too busy and too unaware to panic.
“You’re not scared. You’re too busy to be scared,” he said, his voice rising. “Besides, you don’t know what you’re scared of. You can’t see anything. What are you afraid of?”
Johnson became the country’s oldest living survivor of the Japanese bombing after the death in December of World War II Navy veteran Ira “Ike” Schab. who was 105. With Schab’s passing. there remain only 11 survivors of the surprise attack. which killed just over 2. 400 troops and propelled the United States into the war. The United States mourns the nation’s fallen service members on Memorial Day, which takes place Monday.
For years, the remembering has happened in public. Each year there is a remembrance ceremony at the military base’s waterfront for Pearl Harbor survivors. About 2,000 survivors attended the 50th anniversary event in 1991. In recent decades. the attendance has thinned: only a few dozen came. just two made it in 2024. and none made the trip to Hawaii last year. Those numbers are a stark contrast to the estimated 87,000 troops stationed on Oahu on that day.
Johnson has often been reluctant to put himself at the center of the story. For most of his life, he avoided the spotlight and talked little about surviving the bombing. His wife, Ruth, however, believed the moment mattered enough to press for recognition. Johnson said she called the Navy after hearing something of her own. telling him the Navy “thought that was something special” and that “the girl laughed at her.”.
Now, as the oldest survivor, his life in Centerville carries a kind of national weight—one he didn’t seek. He showed up at his 106th birthday party in a limousine and was mugged by television cameras. He gets letters from all over the world and is routinely called a hero wherever he goes out.
Part of what makes Johnson’s presence so striking is how much detail he can still summon. He is hard of hearing and needs a walker to get around, and he suffers from congestive heart failure. Still, he says he can recall his wartime experience down to the smallest detail.
Before Pearl Harbor, he faced uncertainty too. Johnson told the story of being a 19-year-old unemployed and living at home in Waltham, when he feared being drafted. He said he signed up for the Navy because he felt it would be less physically taxing than the Army.
“As a kid, I walked. If I wanted to go somewhere, I walked or took my bicycle. But I didn’t want to walk from France to Germany,” he said, sitting in a recliner, dressed in an oversized flannel shirt and waving his hands like an orchestra conductor.
“It’s a long way carrying a knapsack with you … Water for a day, food for a day, a 9-pound Springfield rifle all on your back and walking through the mud,” he said. “No thanks. That’s why I joined the Navy.”
Even as the world remembers Pearl Harbor as a single day, Johnson’s recollections spread out across the war and beyond. He said his memories have less to do with the battle itself on the St. Louis and later aboard the USS Iowa, and more with the ways those ships were folded into history.
He helped commission the Iowa, and he recalled the battleship’s preparations in November 1943 before transporting President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Tehran Conference alongside British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
He described how the ship was equipped with two elevators and a bathtub. Johnson said all the ammunition and much of the oil was removed to lighten the ship as it made its way down the Potomac River to pick up Roosevelt. He said it was reloaded before the ship headed out to sea.
“It was a big meeting,” Johnson said, remembering that the crew was photographed with Roosevelt. “I don’t know what they talked about, but I didn’t need to know. We picked him back up, brought him home.”
Johnson also witnessed the war’s end aboard the Iowa. He said he was on the Iowa’s mast watching the surrender ceremonies about a mile away in Tokyo Bay aboard the USS Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945.
“I could see the boats coming up with the Marines escorting the Japanese onto ship and sitting around a table,” he said. “It was all over. That was the end of the war. A bunch of us got together — the war is over. Let’s go home.”
Now, the person helping him tell those stories is his daughter, Diane Johnson. She is often by his side, and the two live together. They both take a trip each Dec. 7 and often attend Pearl Harbor remembrance events, including the 65th and 80th anniversary in Hawaii. Diane. Johnson said. poses questions to draw out his memories and nags him that he has “a responsibility” to share the story—especially for children who know little about the bombing.
“It’s kind of overwhelming when you think of it. Well, the 106 is what gets me,” she said. “When I think about his history, he’s at the beginning, he’s at middle, he is at the end when he witnessed the surrender. It’s something.”
Johnson’s visibility has increased in recent years. Diane Johnson said she began getting more attention after she heard a local television report suggesting the last survivor in the state had died. She called to correct the record, and that effort helped raise his profile. Johnson also started making regular appearances in the Cape Cod St. Patrick’s Parade, often leading from the front.
“I wish more people were like him today. He just gets on and doesn’t complain about anything,” said Desmond Keogh, the chairman of the parade who has accompanied Johnson. “It’s what this country was all about. They were just a different generation. They did what was best for their country.”
For all the ceremony and attention tied to Pearl Harbor. Johnson himself doesn’t frame it as the defining moment of his life. He said what matters most happened after the war: getting married to his late wife and having three daughters. He also worked for years in a machinist shop. then in a convenience store. and finally delivering meals to seniors—jobs he said he retired from. with the last one beginning and ending at the age of 90.
“Pearl Harbor just happened. I can’t put it any other way,” Johnson said.
Pearl Harbor Freeman K. Johnson Centerville Massachusetts USS St. Louis Memorial Day USS Iowa World War II survivors