Herbert Bullock, the Preacher Who Survived Pearl Harbor

This article was published in 2003 in "The Pilot" newspaper in Southern Pines, N.C. Herbert Bullock worked at Gulistan Carpet Company in Aberdeen, N.C., at the time this article was published. He died a few years after that. 

Pearl Harbor Naval Base, Hawaii – Sunday, December 7, 1941: Herbert George Bullock of Southern Pines, N.C., was there. 
 
“We’d just come off fleet maneuvers two weeks earlier,” says Bullock, who served as a third class petty officer on the USS Raleigh.  
 
His ship, a 7,050-ton Omaha class light cruiser which was damaged by a torpedo and near-missed by a bomb, survived the battle in which the U.S. sustained about 3,700 casualties and saw 18 ships sunk or badly damaged and 170 planes destroyed.
 
“We’ve been out dancing and drinking in Honolulu,” says Bullock, 82, who weighs 137 pounds and stands 5 feet-9 inches tall. He still works part time as a security guard and serves as an elder at Aberdeen’s New Hope Church of God in Christ. “We stayed in Honolulu on Friday night, and I said, ‘We’d better go back to Pearl Harbor.’”
 
Pearl Harbor Naval Base lies west of downtown Honolulu on Oahu Island. Bullock rode a bus to Pearl Harbor.
 
“Motor boats would take sailors to ships,” he says. “We got back to the ship about 9-10 p.m., Saturday night. One man went to the USS Arizona. I got to bed about 11.”
 
Bullock, who “had a hangover,” intended to return to shore on Sunday, but his plans changed around 7:55 a.m. 
 
“My mother always was a praying woman; when she called, I came,” Bullock says. “Before we got hit, what woke me up was my mother calling me, ‘Herbert.’ And I heard ‘boom, boom, boom.’ I thought some big shot was coming to visit the ship. I said, ‘Let me go see what’s up.’”
 
Clad only in underwear, he ascended the hatch.
 
“We’re being attacked by the Nipponese,” an officer yelled.
 
“Who’s the Nipponese?” Bullock asked.
 
“The ‘Japs,’” the officer said.
 
“Everybody was running everywhere,” Bullock says. “Sirens were going; I saw 2 Zeroes flying from Diamond Head. One fired a torpedo, and I felt the jolt when it hit the middle of our ship. We closed off the damage. After that first attack, they sent another wave.” 
 
The USS Raleigh’s commanding officer, R.E. Simons, reporting on the Dec. 7, 1941 attack, wrote: “Shortly after 0900 a glide-bombing attack came in, which met with a warm reception. Many near misses fell about the ship. Only one bomb hit.”
 
A bomb fell through an oil tank and pierced the skin of the ship below the water line, detonating on the harbor’s bottom, about 50 feet from the ship.
 
“In its flight,” Simons said, “this bomb went over the heads of the gun crew of #7 3-inch gun and also passed very close to our two large tanks containing 3,000 gallons of high-test aviation gasoline. This plane machine-gunned the ship also.

“I saw some planes shot down,” Bullock says. “Nobody died on my ship. Two Japanese suicide subs stayed right around our hospital ship. The USS Arizona went down.”

Richmond Roots

Born in Richmond, Va., on June 12, 1921, Herbert Bullock grew up “Baptist” with one older sister and a younger brother and sister.
 
“I believed in having fun,” Bullock says. He laughs and reminisces. “Mama said to me, ‘If you don’t stop the way you’re doing, you’re gonna die with your shoes on.’”
 
His father worked in a cigarette factory.
 
“He made a lot of Lucky Strikes,” Bullock says. “I used to smoke a lot of them.”
 
Bullock enjoyed bike-riding and skating and wanted to play football but couldn’t gain weight.
 
“I used to shine shoes,” he says. “People—mostly white people—would bring shoes for me to shine when I was 10 or 11. I even gave my mother some money.”
 
His mother wanted him to attend college, but he graduated from Richmond’s Armstrong High School, moved to Washington, D.C., and worked on a James River excursion boat.
 
“I sold food and everything on that boat,” he says. “It had bands. Cab Calloway played at times.”
 
The idea of “travel” attracted Bullock to the Navy. He served as a steward for officers and felt that some officers talked to him more than they did to their staff members. After Pearl Harbor, he served in the Pacific arena.
 
“When the war ended, I was near Okinawa, on the USS Wyndham Bay,” Bullock says.
 
After leaving the Navy in late 1946, he worked at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., where he met Matilda Hadley, a Raeford, N.C., native who worked in naval research. They married and bought a home in Washington and raised twin sons.

Mother McCrae

In the early 1950s, Bullock met “Mother McCrae.”
 
“I used to have parties at my house,” Bullock says. “This old neighbor lady, Mrs. McCrae, talked to me about the Lord—she’d call me ‘Son’—and I tried to make her mad.
 
“She’d have prayer meetings at her house, but her husband drank, so I’d get him all feeling good, and he’d go home and raise hell at the meetings. Mrs. McCrae was a ‘holiness’ lady. She just got nicer. I finally told her, ‘Mother McCrae, I’m going to church with you.’”
 
Bullock and his wife attended McCrae’s church but sat near the back “to hide.”
 
“I saw people singing, praying, and enjoying the Lord,” Bullock says.
 
As the service ended, the minister saw Bullock and addressed him from the pulpit: “Mr. Bullock, would you like to say something?”
 
“Whatever this is y’all got, I’m gonna get it,” Bullock told the congregation.

Preaching and Praying

Bullock recalls that some thought he had become sick and was preparing for death. 
 
“When I got saved and started going to church, all my friends thought I was going to die,” Bullock says. “Some of them were influenced and became ministers.”
 
Bullock received ordination in the Church of God in Christ in 1956 and is still a card-carrying elder in the denomination. He and his wife lived in Union, N.J., before moving to Southern Pines in the 1970s. He worked as a pastor and a chauffeur and also worked with William “Buzz” Hicks at Theatre Antiques in Southern Pines. Bullock’s wife died in 1987.
 
“Mr. Bullock tries to help everybody and loves people,” says Evangelist Thelma Ingram, Bullock’s pastor at New Hope Church, Aberdeen, N.C. “He prays for them and cares about souls.”
 
“When they attacked Pearl Harbor,” Bullock says, “it caused Americans to put aside differences and get together. We as a people—I’m talking about black and white—we ought not to be against one another.
 
“And the young people—they just want somebody to love them. The rest of my life I’m going to preach and pray for the young people and help them back to God. If God gives me strength, I’m going to help them. If God can fix me, he can do the same for our young people.”