On the 82nd anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, we share the history of a young Navy man whose diary is making its way across the Pacific Ocean. The journal offers a glimpse of the 23-year-old sailor's life leading up to the attack.
Joseph Saffa's original diary is in a museum in his hometown of St. Louis, but a copy is headed to Hawaiʻi in hopes it may be considered as part of the record for the Pearl Harbor National Memorial. He was stationed on a destroyer, the USS Chew, at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
His nephew Dennis Saffa of St. Louis reached out after hearing a recent story on The Conversation about the retirement of historian Dan Martinez. Dennis Saffa wanted to get a copy of the diary to Martinez.
Saffa said his uncle, who died in 1984, never mentioned to his family that he was at Pearl Harbor.
"Then this diary was discovered after his death among his possessions and all of us in the family were very amazed by it," Saffa said. "He wrote a very detailed diary where he would tell you what he had for breakfast, and 'today we did a big load of laundry' and 'how we did at artillery practice,' very detailed."
When the attack began, he was on shore leave, enjoying his time in Honolulu. He quickly caught a cab back to the harbor.
"When he got there, he talks about the Japanese planes coming in so low and machine-gunning, he said 'I'd have to run 10 feet and dive, run 10 feet and dive,' and then by 8:55 a.m. that first wave had ended, so he was trying to report to his destroyer, Chew, which was already underway."
For a man who usually wrote in so much detail, Joseph Saffa wrote little about Dec. 7, 1941. The journal entries stopped one week after the attack.
This story aired on The Conversation on Dec. 7, 2023. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1. This story was adapted for the web by Sophia McCullough.
