Veteran saw beginning, end of war

U.S. Navy Ensign Ken Landis was asleep at his apartment on the beach in Kahala when he got word that bombs were dropping on Pearl Harbor.

Landis said a neighbor banged on his door and shouted, “Turn on your radio!”

Landis, now a 90-year-old La Quinta resident, quickly complied.

“The voice said ‘Pearl Harbor is being attacked — this is no drill,'” said Landis, recalling the radio announcer's words that fateful day. “So I jumped in my car and drove to Pearl Harbor,” he said. “As I was driving I could see the Japanese planes strafing cars right in front of me. One in front caught fire. We were dodging the bullets.”

Landis raced into Pearl Harbor and immediately reported to the sub base and received orders from his commanding officer.“Adm. (Husband) Kimmel said ‘get upstairs and break down these messages,'” Landis said.Landis was on the admiral's staff, where he was assigned to decode intercepted Japanese messages.The messages proved to be nothing of note, considering he was witnessing, firsthand, the devastation of the attack — he didn't need to read about it in code.Landis soon found himself rescuing two badly injured men who had been on a destroyer in the harbor when the bombing began.

“Another guy and I were right at the water's edge and saw two young sailors coming out of a small boat,” Landis said. “Both of them were just about dead. We fished them out of the water. We saved them.”

Landis, who later attained the rank of lieutenant commander, was assigned to the destroyer escort, the USS McClelland, in 1944, where he served as executive officer and saw extensive duty in Adm. (William) Halsey's Third Fleet at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Landis was on a destroyer in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945 — the day the Japanese signed surrender papers on the USS Missouri, formally ending World War II.

“I never thought I would see the day it would happen,” Landis said. “Boy was that a sight.

“I saw the beginning and the end” of the war, Landis said. “Very few people were there the day it started and the day it ended.”

Landis co-wrote “Deceit at Pearl Harbor: From Pearl Harbor to Midway.”The book presents the argument that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other top government officials had been forewarned of the attack, but allowed the Japanese to strike first in order to gain the public's support for U.S. entry into World War II.