Malvin Keith Hicks, 90, a Chalk Bluff resident since his 1984 retirement from the oil business, is one of a dwindling group of Pearl Harbor attack survivors.

An “old salt” who served in the U.S. Navy more than six years during World War II — “Mutt” as he is known by his family — recalls how growing up in Depression-era Central Texas toughened him for what would prove to be a life of adventure.

The son of Hunter Primrose Hicks (1890-1959) and Ola Victoria Adams (1896-1986), Mutt was born in Hamlin, Texas on Jan. 29, 1920. When he was a toddler, the Hicks clan moved to the rural community of North Prairie in Falls County.

Malvin Keith Hicks, a decorated veteran of World War II, was an “old salt” at 25 when he mustered out of the service in 1945.

The third of six siblings, he helped his sharecropper pop farm the land of Dr. M.M. Shankle, and attended classes in a three-room schoolhouse until he was ready for Chilton High, where he graduated in 1939.

That fall he joined the Navy, enlisting in Dallas and shipping out to San Diego for his basic training. In early 1940, he was assigned to the USS Cummings, DD365, of Destroyer Division Six. It joined other ships assigned to the Pacific Fleet, which was based out of Pearl Harbor.

Japanese attack

So it was at that island paradise when the Texas farm boy witnessed hell on earth, early the morning of Dec. 7, 1941.

It was a “rope yard” Sunday — a nautical term for when sailors break from their usual chores to mend clothing or hammocks with macramé — he recalled. The Cummings was on “cold iron” status, having just entered floating dry dock the day before, for installation of radar equipment.

Mutt and three of his comrades from the repair shop were drinking coffee after breakfast when they saw planes maneuvering above them. They looked over the stern toward Hickam Field, thinking it not odd at all for the Army Air Corps to practice as one sailor remarked, “The fly boys are putting on a show today.”

When torpedoes were dropped and they recognized the emblem of the rising sun on the strange aircraft, the sailors realized this was no drill. It was war.

The alarms were sounded and the men assumed their battle stations.

“My job was ammo loader, assisting the gunner,” Hicks said, in the nest for the .50-caliber machine gun located above the machine shop. But because of the dry dock situation, he recalled, it was difficult getting enough electricity to power the weapons. The triggering mechanism had to be fired using rawhide mallets.

The engine crew tried heroically to get up to steam, completing a normally two-hour task in less than 30 minutes so the ship could get away from the conflagration going on around it.

“We were lucky,” Mutt said. Despite a lethal rain of bombs surrounding it, the Cummings only suffered three injuries. Its neighbor in dry dock, the USS Shaw, meanwhile, wasn’t as fortunate; it lost its bow in the explosion of the forward magazine, killing two dozen sailors.

The USS Nevada, Hicks said, was the only ship on battleship row that managed to get underway during the attack. He lauded its skipper (Lt. Commander Francis J. Thomas) for coolly piloting his ship through the channel despite it being torpedoed. When an enemy dive bomber dropped a bomb down the stack, he wisely made a hard right to beach the craft on an island, rather than allow it to block the harbor.

“We went to sea that day, looking for (the enemy), but couldn’t find them,” Hicks said. “We saw some oil slicks, but we didn’t know if we’d sunk two subs we were shooting at.”

The attack killed almost 2,500, including more than 50 civilians. Another 1,000 were wounded in the attack.

Message to family

The Cummings stayed out to sea for 10 days before returning to Pearl Harbor, where it was to escort a convoy of hospital ships across the Pacific to San Francisco. It arrived on Christmas Day.

Hicks, who had been unable to contact his family to even let them know he survived, used his four-hour liberty to try and get a message to them.

“At the telegraph station, I had to re-write the message five times, because of the censorship at the time,” he said. “I finally ended up with ‘I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year — Mutt.’ They’d know I was still breathing!”

He learned years later that the message arrived just as the family was sitting down to Christmas dinner — undoubtedly the best gift his worried folks could have hoped for that year.

After the war, Hicks married his sweetheart, Mary Radle, on June 4, 1945, and worked almost 40 years in the oil industry for Humble Pipeline Co. and Humble Oil.

They have a son, two grandsons and two great-granddaughters. They retired to Chalk Bluff in January 1984.

tjryan@wacotrib.com

757-5746

A drawing from the National Archives illustrates the positions of the American Pacific Fleet on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. The concentration of battleships and other military watercraft made for easy pickings by the Imperial Japanese air force. (NARA.gov image)