Oldest Pearl Harbor survivor, 106, shares memories as witnesses fade

Freeman Johnson turned 106 in March and now stands as the oldest living survivor of Pearl Harbor, a living thread to Dec. 7, 1941, as the generation that saw the attack disappears. He lives in Centerville, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and his recollections preserve details that official ceremonies and textbooks cannot.

On the morning of the attack, Johnson was serving as a Navy fireman aboard the USS St. Louis, a light cruiser moored in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He was below deck repairing one of the ship’s boilers when Japanese planes came in. Johnson did not witness the assault directly. By the time he got topside, the St. Louis had evaded midget submarines and was heading out to sea.

The attack killed more than 2,300 people and pulled the United States into World War II. National Archives records say the U.S. suffered 3,435 casualties, while 188 planes, 8 battleships, 3 light cruisers and 4 miscellaneous vessels were lost or severely damaged. More than half of the Pacific Fleet was in Pearl Harbor that morning, and by 10 a.m. 21 vessels lay sunk or damaged, a scale of destruction that Johnson has carried with him for more than eight decades.

For much of his life, Johnson avoided the spotlight and rarely spoke publicly about surviving Pearl Harbor. In recent years, he has begun sharing his memories with schoolchildren and at public events, a shift that matters as firsthand witnesses vanish. He was honored at a birthday celebration on March 18, 2026, at the Barnstable Adult Community Center in Hyannis, Massachusetts.

Johnson became the oldest surviving Pearl Harbor veteran after Ira “Ike” Schab died in December 2025 and Clarence Lane died in February 2026. With only 11 Pearl Harbor survivors still alive, Johnson’s testimony has become more than personal history. It is one of the last direct accounts of what it meant to endure the attack from below deck, aboard a ship that survived while so many others did not.