Called To Serve
Robert Pennoyer ’43 recounts his time in the Pacific during World War II
BY KRISTIN DUISBERG
Robert Pennoyer ’43 skipped the Sixth Form and entered Harvard at age 17. After working six straight terms at Harvard without a vacation, in October 1944 he received his degree, his Navy commission and orders to join the Naval cruiser USS Pensacola somewhere in the Pacific.
Lieutenant (J.G.) Pennoyer was part of a crew of 1,000 that came under heavy attack during the Battle of Iwo Jima, sustaining nearly 150 casualties in the opening moments of the engagement on Feb. 19, 1945, and surviving days of kamikaze attacks at Okinawa. At the end of the war, he was part of a unit that helped occupy Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido and was the first American to set foot on the island. Noting that he perceived no sense of revenge from either side, he says, “I was proud to be an American, and proud of the sacrifice [my fellow Americans] were willing to make and did make. I learned in life that you can’t do anything significant alone.”
A grandson of J.P. Morgan, Pennoyer went on to earn his J.D. from Columbia University in 1950 and became assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York under President Dwight Eisenhower. Now 97, Pennoyer shared stories with Endeavor Films in 2021 about his time in the Pacific and what he continues to carry with him eight decades after his service. “To be with young men from all over the country … to learn to work with them, to learn about their essential decency … I loved them,” he says.