RAY CHAVEZ, the oldest U.S. military survivor of the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that plunged the United States into WWII, died Wednesday. He was 106.

Chavez, who had been battling pneumonia, died in his sleep in the San Diego suburb of Poway.

He was the oldest survivor of the attack that killed 2,335 U.S. military personnel and 68 civilians.

Hours before the attack, Chavez was aboard the minesweeper USS Condor as it patroled the harbor’s east entrance when he and others saw the periscope of a Japanese submarine. They notified a destroyer that sunk it shortly before Japanese bombers arrived to strafe the harbor.

By then Chavez, who had worked through the early morning hours, had gone to his nearby home to sleep, ordering his wife not to wake him because he had been up all night.

“It seemed like I only slept about 10 minutes when she called me and said ‘We’re being attacked,’” he recalled in 2016. “And I said ‘Who is going to attack us?’”

“She said ‘The Japanese are here, and they’re attacking everything.’”

He ran back to the harbor to find it in flames.

Chavez would spend the next week there, working around the clock sifting through the destruction that had crippled the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet.

Later he was assigned to the transport ship USS La Salle, ferrying troops, tanks and other equipment to war-torn islands across the Pacific, from Guadalcanal to Okinawa.

Although never wounded, he left the military in 1945 suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder that left him anxious and shaking.

Returning to San Diego, where he grew up, he took a job as a landscaper and groundskeeper, attributing the outdoors, a healthy diet and a strict workout program that he continued into his early 100s with restoring his health. (SD-Agencies)