He saved photos of ‘a date which will live in infamy’
Barney Jordan displays photographs of the U.S. Navy fleet at Pearl Harbor before the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7, 1941.
Barney Jordan looks at a map, printed on silk, of the Pacific Theater. He said the Navy chose silk rather than paper because it was more durable.
This photo from Barney Jordan’s collection shows Pearl Harbor on the day of the Japanese attack.
A photo from Barney Jordan’s Pearl Harbor collection shows the immediate aftermath of the attack.
The remains of a one-man Japanese submarine on the shore at Pearl Harbor
Many have watched footage of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on newsreels, movies or television documentaries.
To review the horror inflicted that day, Barney Jordan only has to lift the lid on his box of loose photographs from the Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific Ocean Area, or page through a thick album he compiled.
Jordan, who turned 90 in October, grew up in the Piney Forks neighborhood of Allegheny County’s Snowden Township long before it was renamed South Park. Drafted in 1944, he was stationed in Honolulu at the intelligence center, where he attained the rank of photographer’s first mate, third class. Reconnaissance photos were vital to commanders’ strategizing, and propaganda pamphlets attempted to advance Allied objectives.
He mostly developed film and printed photographs, but he also had a chance to work on his skills behind a camera, recording the marksmanship of battleship gunners’ target practice as they aimed at a flag towed by a tugboat.
“We’d synchronize them,” Jordan said. “The battleship was 15 to 20 miles away.”
Two big pictures are marked, “Pearl Harbor, pre-war.” Jordan also has many photos of smoke billowing from American battleships Dec. 7, 1941.
“These are official photos,” he said of the depictions of the American fleet in Pearl Harbor being bombed. “We just accumulated them.” Very few of the photographs carry notations, but some aerial photos carry captions identifying their terrestrial targets.
Before Jordan was discharged from the U.S. Navy in 1945, he mailed a box of black-and-white photos to his home.
They depict both the Pacific and European theaters of war, with some aerial photos showing crippled Allied planes plummeting toward earth trailing smoke and flames. “Possibly they could have jumped with a parachute if there was an opportunity,” he said.
In one photograph, an American serviceman holds up the burned torso, head and partial arms of a Japanese kamikaze pilot.
“We developed these for the Air Force,” he said.
A check online for an archival photograph of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of the South-West Pacific Area; President Franklin D. Roosevelt; and Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the U.S Pacific Fleet, aboard a ship at the Honolulu Conference in July 1944 shows Roosevelt smiling. In Jordan’s photo, with the men seated in identical order, the president looks stern.
The trove also shows lighter moments: Honolulu street scenes; a bell-bottomed sailor showing off two pineapples in a field; a USO show’s gyrating dancers; and celebratory parades after the war’s end. Jordan also has photos of the Japanese surrender ceremony and the booklet in which they were compiled and printed. The commemorative collection also includes a picture of the searing event Dec. 7, 1941, that drew the United States into World War II.
Jordan declined to re-enlist in the Navy and returned home, retiring as a crane operator for U.S. Steel’s Irvin Works in 1985. He and his wife of 64 years, Mary Alice, live in Union Township. They visited Hawaii for their 25th wedding anniversary.