Death of California Pearl Harbor Survivor Warren Taylor, 95

From the Dec. 15, 2015, Davis (Cal.) Enterprise "Legal community mourns loss of retired judge, Pearl Harbor survivor" by Lauren Keene.

Judge Warren Taylor, 95 spent 21 years on the Superior Court bench in Yolo County, California.

He died December 6, 2015,, one day before the 74th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.  That day, he was on the USS Sumner.  Mr. Taylor remembered: "Everything I could see was exploding, shrapnel was falling on the harbor like rain, the harbor was covered by oil, some of it on fire.

"I was knocked on the deck numerous times, and at 8:03 a.m., when we shot down a Japanese torpedo plane, preparing to lay its torpedo about 200 yards off our fantail, I thought the Sumner was going to capsize from the explosion."

Warren Earl Taylor was born June 7, 1920, in Independence, Iowa.  His family moved to Ventura County, California and he graduated from UC-Berkeley in 1941.  He served in the Navy until 1944.

--GreGen