Robert Hambrick was stationed near Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 and witnessed much of the attack.

Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

Robert Hambrick, who left Eagle Rock at 17 to join the Army, was stationed near Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and witnessed the attack.

Robert Hambrick, in uniform

Robert Hambrick will never forget his 19th birthday. Life was good -- he was a soldier, living in Hawaii, running the kitchen at an Army fort near the beach, just a few miles southeast of the turquoise waters of a naval base called Pearl Harbor.

He baked himself a birthday cake a couple of days early. He frosted it and set it aside, waiting to cut into it on his actual birthday, Dec. 8, 1941.

He never got to eat that cake.

The day before, on the morning of Dec. 7, Hambrick rose early to prepare breakfast for the men of Fort Kamehameha.

"We were having Virginia baked ham that day," he remembered. He didn't get to eat that, either.

Just before 8 a.m. Hawaiian time, Hambrick heard enormous roars and rumbles resounding from the north, possibly coming from adjoining Hickam Field, the U.S. Army air base. Too loud to be a training exercise, he thought.

"Never heard anything that loud before," Hambrick said last week, reclining on a couch in the spotless living room of his Botetourt County home. The Japanese "were coming in low ... strafing, dropping bombs right down below us."

The attack on Pearl Harbor had begun. It was 67 years ago today.

Life took a swift, violent turn for Hambrick, who had quit school a year earlier and left his home in Eagle Rock. Job prospects were scarce for restless young men hungry for adventure and a steady paycheck. He was so young when he joined the Army -- barely 17 -- he needed his parents' permission.

Then, on Dec. 7, all hell broke loose. Hambrick couldn't see the explosions from his location, but he saw the planes, some swooping so low he spotted pilots in their cockpits, and he heard and felt the terrible explosions that rocked the harbor and the airfield. Within minutes, he saw great columns of smoke rise from the destruction within the harbor.

Of the more than 2,400 Americans who died in the attack, fewer than 10 were killed at Fort Kamehameha, four of them when a Japanese plane crashed into a machine shop.

Confusion reigned at the fort, which housed coastal artillery. Hambrick said that men scrambled to find shelter inside the mess hall, while more ran outside to get a look at the attack. No one knew what was happening at first. Despite rising tensions that had characterized American-Japanese relations in the late 1930s and early '40s, Hambrick said no one really considered the possibility of a Japanese attack.

"Everyone was confused," he said. "No one really knew what to do. I went outside and saw the planes flying real low."

Hambrick never fired a shot that morning. Within hours, his outfit was moved north.

"We took up a field position on the opposite side" of Oahu, he said. "They put us on the north side of the island with big guns right on the ocean front."

By nightfall, Hambrick had become part of a distinguished group -- he had lived through the attack on Pearl Harbor.

More than 84,000 soldiers, sailors and Marines survived the attack. That number of survivors is probably fewer than 7,000 today, according to James Evans, national secretary of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association.

Evans said that his organization still has 4,800 active members, not including an additional 2,000 remaining survivors who never joined the group. The group is still accepting new members.

"I got one just last week," said Evans, himself an attack survivor who now lives in Carlsbad, Calif.

According to Evans, fewer than 200 Pearl Harbor survivors live in Virginia. The total in Southwest Virginia is uncertain, but a few are known to live in and around the Roanoke Valley.

One of the most notable survivors -- a woman who would not have even been counted among the surviving servicemen -- died this year. Mary Ingles Barton Bullard, a Radford native and wife of a Navy pilot who lived on Oahu at the time of the attack, died Aug. 9.

Her husband was out to sea on Dec. 7, 1941, but as the attack raged and the large ships burned, Bullard drove her Model A Ford to the naval base to see if she could help.

Benjamin Lee Brown, a sailor who died aboard the destroyer USS Downes, is believed to be the only Roanoker who died during the Pearl Harbor attack.

Following the Japanese attack, Hambrick did not see Pearl Harbor for several months. When he returned in early 1942, twisted steel and iron were still being pulled from the harbor.

"They had dredged all the iron out of the bottom and piled the scrap as high as you could see," he said.

Hambrick was shipped back to California and reassigned to the 24th Infantry Regiment. The 24th underwent rigorous desert training in anticipation of fighting the Germans in North Africa.

Instead, the Army changed plans and sent the 24th to the Philippines, where Hambrick saw action on the islands of Mindoro, Mindanao and Corregidor.

He was one of five brothers who served during World War II. The other four Hambrick boys -- Rudy, Leslie, Jack and Bill (Robert Hambrick is third-oldest) -- served in Europe.

After the war, the young man who couldn't wait to flee Eagle Rock returned for good. Hambrick, who turns 86 Monday, was never drawn to veterans organizations after his service. He moved back to Virginia, married and eventually found a job at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Salem, where he worked as a nurse's assistant for more than 30 years.

He and his wife, Edrodean "Dean" Hambrick, have been married 62 years. They have lived in Botetourt County the whole time.

In 2000, they built a handsome brick house on the farm where Edrodean Hambrick grew up between Fincastle and Eagle Rock.

Robert Hambrick still cooks occasionally, practicing the skills he picked up while a young soldier. He cooked the Thanksgiving turkey and helped bake two pumpkin pies. Those, he got to eat.

He doesn't reflect much on his wartime service, although he broke out some old photographs and his Combat Infantryman Badge for his great-grandson's school report about World War II.

He knows that there aren't many like him left -- those who saw the planes emblazoned with the bright red sun, who heard the bombs, who survived the attack. He also knows that all the remaining Pearl Harbor survivors have at least one thing in common.

"You have to have some age on you," he said.