Click here for link“I’d just made third class on Dec. 3,” he said, “and as the most junior petty officer in the crew, I pulled the duty Saturday night.”
Zarli wasn’t even supposed to be in Pearl Harbor that fateful morning — he wasn’t a permanent part of Swan’s crew. His real command, a diesel submarine, left on patrol nearly two months earlier and he’d been too sick to accompany his shipmates.
“So I got stashed in various jobs — the first was as the engineer on an admiral’s barge where I got to meet [William “Bull”] Halsey and [Chester] Nimitz among others — then it was on to the Swan,” Zarli said.