Living history: Vets share their tales - Entertainment, TV, Television - Navy Times

Living history: Vets share their tales

Harold Syfrett enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, later surviving a kamikaze attack and riding out a typhoon aboard the aircraft carrier Yorktown. Now, almost 70 years later, he will share his story with the online generation.

Syfrett, now 86, will join other vets in telling his story to Witness to War, a nonprofit website that collects and puts combat stories of World War II vets online.

While there are other efforts to capture veterans’ stories, Witness to War focuses on combat and works to engage younger people online. The interviews are edited down to concise, short clips.

“It’s all about how do you plug into the online generation,” said site director Tom Beaty, an Atlanta businessman.

Interviews are also catalogued by category. Visitors to the website can click on entries ranging from D-Day experiences to those of prisoners of war to surviving kamikaze attacks.

For Syfrett, who lives in Ladson, S.C., the bomb from the kamikaze was one of his most harrowing experiences. It penetrated the flight deck and exploded in a fireball on the hangar deck below, killing five sailors.

When Japan turned to suicide planes late in the war, “The first question we had was, ‘When would it be our turn?’” Syfrett recalled. “All the other ships we were operating with had been hit.”

Just as memorable was riding out the typhoon during the war, the only time sailors on the Yorktown could not sit down to eat, he said.

Now, when a storm threatens the South Carolina coast, Syfrett isn’t much concerned. “We’ve seen a typhoon, so what’s the big deal?” he laughed.

Witness to War has collected more than a thousand hours of interviews from 350 World War II vets, and the program is redoubling efforts to collect interviews before more vets pass away.

— The Associated Press