by Craig Nelson
In the mess hall at the food line, someone looked out the window and saw an explosion. “Boy, that lieutenant sure hit hard!” he said. “That’s no crash,” Private Henry Woodrum shouted. “It’s the Japs!” The crowd inside rushed to get out, so clogging the doors that Woodrum had to jump over a steam table, run through the kitchen, and get out the back. He stopped on the loading dock, looked up, and saw a plane coming right at him. Then a bomb fell from its belly, the shock of its explosion so close and so huge it threw him back inside the building and into a pantry, where vegetables rained down on his body.
Many of the Chinese cooks tried to protect themselves in the freezer room. Another bomb hit, killing them all.
Bugler Private Frank Gobeo didn’t know how to play the call to arms, so he blew pay call. The men swarmed from the barracks. Another strafing run was so low that an attacking plane’s landing wheels got wrapped up in telephone wires and power lines. Wheeler’s commander said one was so close that when the pilot smiled at him, he could see the gold, shining, in his teeth.
Switchboard operator Private 1st Class Robert Shattuck was driving in for duty when he was hit. One of his legs was chopped up by shrapnel, and he died quickly.
Master Sergeant Arthur Fahrner was trying to get dressed and report to base from his house in Pearl City, but he couldn’t find a collar insignia. His wife kept insisting he put on a tie. “We’re at war,” he told her. “You don’t wear a tie to war.”
Wheeler’s antiaircraft defense was a couple of guys from the base fire department who’d spent six hours learning how to operate a .50-caliber antiaircraft machine gun mounted on top of the firehouse. Since they were busy fighting fires, that gun was manned by a guard from Wheeler’s stockade, helped by its prisoners.
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Having dropped their loads, the dive-bombers now joined the fighters to strafe. Nineteen dived from the west, and then from the east, and then from both directions at once, crack-shot targeting the hangars and the barracks. Wheeler recruits who had heard one disparaging remark after another about the Japanese now got a firsthand look at their abilities when another group of planes appeared, directly over their heads. Wilfred Burke: “It was the first time I had ever seen a plunging dive-bomber, and it was an awesome sight. Nothing in warfare is more frightening. Hurtling down on us was the dive-bomber being followed by another, while six or seven more were in echelon awaiting their turn. The leader pulled out right over us in a spectacular climbing bank.” First Lieutenant Frederick Cooper of the Seventeenth Air Base Group was also impressed: “The formation was perfect, and the timing on the dropping of the bombs are so perfect that I could follow them down in the formation right to the ground, right to impact.”
Private Henry Woodrum got up and ran toward the Fourteenth’s headquarters and came across a building site, with trenches dug for the foundations. Clouds of bullets kicked up just before his feet. He found some refuge behind a pile of lumber and turned back to look. Woodrum: “Down the ramp to my left, a P-36 exploded, hurling flaming debris upon an operations tent, which blossomed with petals of flame. A man ran from the tent, jumped into an old Plymouth, but drove only a hundred feet or so before a strafing aircraft machine-gunned it into another flaming hunk of metal. The GI jumped out of the car, his clothes smoking, and ran into a building unharmed.”
Other men joined Private Woodrum in using the wood for cover. One of them, “a skinny crew-cut kid about twenty years old, crawled to the end of the pile with his upper body protruding beyond it, exposed,” Woodrum remembered. “ ‘You better get back here, you’ll get hit out there!’ I said. ‘Naw, I can see ’em coming from out here. I’m all right.’ He began to laugh, treating the newborn war as a joke, but a few minutes later, he suddenly gasped and rolled half over, his body rigid, quivering before he flopped back on his belly and died, gagging on unspoken words and blood, the toes of his shoes kicking bare places in the dirt alongside my head. We tugged his body slowly back toward us, behind the lumber, protection he no longer needed. The dead body’s muscles relaxed, emitting strange gurgling sounds. The smell of fresh, warm blood merged with other smells.”
Japanese gunners had seen the men hiding and were now targeting them. The barracks were about thirty yards away, and they decided to run there. One was cut down by strafer fire, but Woodrum made it to safety and survived.
Wilfred Burke was heading for the noncommissioned officers’ quarters, where he could take shelter behind a house’s wall away from the clear targets, when a bomb hit just behind him, killing several men. When he reached relative safety, Burke looked back to watch the methodical strafing of his wing’s planes. The air was filled with the smoke of burning oil, which grew so thick the Japanese couldn’t see some P-36 fighters parked at the end of the line.
When the first wave of the Japanese attack ended, Burke ran to his tent to get his helmet—a World War I tin hat with a lining that took half an hour to lace in—and on the way there passed by the spot where the bomb had exploded right next to him. At least six or seven men had died there, eviscerated on what had been just another sidewalk. A corporal ordered Burke to help with the wounded, who were being brought to a tent that had been riddled with gunshot. The men Burke tried to help included one with part of his head missing, and another whose belly had such a huge hole in it, his intestines were visible.
Every building on base now seemed either to be on fire or to have exploded in ruins. Operations officer Major Kenneth Bergquist realized that there was little to be done, so he arranged for a car and driver to get him to Fort Shafter and give General Davidson a full accounting. On the road, a string of planes strafed the car until it was forced to stop and pull over. As the driver hid in the brush, Bergquist crouched behind the rear axle, but the driver hadn’t set the brake and the car started rolling, so Bergquist duck-walked behind it, to stay undercover. The car was sprayed with bullets, but the major was safe. Finally during a lull, Bergquist jumped back into the car and drove off, forgetting all about the driver, who lay beside the road, wounded in the leg.
Wheeler’s casualties: thirty-nine killed and fifty-nine wounded. The base’s commander, Colonel William Flood, summed up one reason why the military was so shocked and unprepared: “To think that this bunch of little yellow bastards could do this to us when we all knew that the United States was superior to Japan!”
Adjacent to Wheeler was the army’s massive Schofield Barracks. Since Takeo Yoshikawa and his fellow Axis spies had not found any significant aircraft or other matériel there, the Japanese did not consider Schofield a priority target, but since it was so close to Wheeler, Japanese divers and fighters opportunistically strafed Schofield’s officers’ quarters, her hospital, and her quadrangles in an attack memorialized in the book and movie From Here to Eternity. Author James Jones: “On Sunday morning in those days there was a bonus ration of a half-pint of milk, to go with your eggs or pancakes and syrup, also Sunday specials. Most of us were more concerned with getting and holding on to our half-pints of milk than with listening to the explosions that began rumbling up toward us from Wheeler Field two miles away. ‘They doing some blasting?’ some old-timer said through a mouthful of pancakes. It was not till the first low-flying fighter came skidding, whammering low overhead with his MGs going that we ran outside, still clutching our half-pints of milk to keep them from being stolen, aware with a sudden sense of awe that we were seeing and acting in a genuine moment of history.”
Second Lieutenant Francis Gabreski had spent the night at a Schofield Barracks Officers’ Club dance and woke up around 0800. As he thought about getting to church, he heard a whine, an explosion, and then “something like machine-gun fire at a distance, and, well, that didn’t sound too pleasant. I heard an airplane flying over the rooftops so I ran out to look. The rear gunner was spraying the buildings with bullets. And I says, ‘Oh, my God.’ I says, ‘We’re at war.’ It dawned on me and the other dumbfounded men that this was an actual bombing and our airplanes and hangars w
ere being hit. Our second thought was, what we could do to help save the planes. So I immediately ran up and down the hallway trying to get the pilots out of bed and tell them that we’re at war, to get out of here and put on your flying suits and get down the line.
“Only partly dressed, we ran toward the flight line when a couple of pursuits came down on us with blazing guns. We hit the dirt until they’d passed over, got to the line, and physically began pushing and shoving planes away from burning aircraft and buildings. Altogether, we managed to salvage about thirty planes. One hangar that was set afire held .30-caliber ammunition. Inside the heat was so intense that cartridges exploded, sending tracers around men and planes. The last hangar held all the refueling trucks, completely filled with gasoline. We tried to move them but found no keys. So we had to leave them to the mercy of whatever set them off first, planes or fire. Nobody knew what was going on. We took off in twelve airplanes and went out over Pearl Harbor, which is about eighteen minutes away. Every antiaircraft fire that was still intact was up shooting at us, which logically they should have been!” Francis Gabreski would survive Pearl Harbor, transfer to the European theater, and in time become America’s greatest living ace.
“As long as I live, I shall never forget my feelings and emotions when I saw and realized that these were Jap planes and that we were in for the real thing,” Schofield Army Hospital surgeon Major Leonard Heaton later said. “Something we never thought could ever happen to us here due to primarily our great naval force and implicit faith in such. There were many planes by now all over and around us. I remarked as must have many others before us in situations like this, ‘Where are our planes?’ Whereupon another Jap plane came down our street spraying everything and everybody with machine guns.
“We were now in the driveway of the hospital. The scene could have been lifted from the Atlanta hospital scene in Gone With the Wind. The hospital was already filled, and the overflow was lying all over the hallways and lawn. The horseshoe driveway was filled bumper to bumper with trucks and ambulances, all filled with the dead and wounded. The small new hospital had just opened and had neither equipment, doctors, or nurses to handle this flood. Little, if anything, could be done for the scores of wounded who sat or lay quietly around. Many were airman who walked in from the field after their planes were destroyed.
“A young doctor and nurse came out of the hospital door and shouted, ‘Don’t unload any more, we are full.’ He was clearly frantic from the impossible task facing him and the small staff on duty. The planes were still pounding the hangar and barracks area. Their machine guns never seemed to run out of bullets. Fortunately, by now, most of the men had found some form of protection. To the everlasting credit of the Japanese pilots, they did not bomb the hospital, which was clearly marked with a huge red cross on the roof. If they had, it would have been a terrible slaughter, since all the wounded and many rescuers were congregated in and around it.
“A medical sergeant came running out of the hospital door shouting, ‘Take them to Tripler, take them to Tripler.’ Tripler General Hospital was in Honolulu and was the largest military hospital in the islands. The lead trucks and ambulances in the driveway started pulling out. About four vehicles back, the line stopped. An ambulance was not moving. The doctor and I ran up to urge him to go on and get the line moving. The doctor stuck his head in the door. The redheaded young driver had his head in his arms resting on the steering wheel. The doctor grabbed him by the hair and pulled his hair up. No wonder he didn’t pull out. His face looked like raw hamburger. Blood covered his khaki shirt to his waist. One look and the doctor ordered two nearby men to pull the driver in with the wounded he had brought in the ambulance. He did not say a word or make any expression. I believe he was in shock. The driver lay limp on top of the others in his own ambulance without the benefit of a stretcher.
“We left the airman we brought in on the grass. I could not bear to look at him as I felt he was going to die.
“I ran toward a burning Ford sedan. The burning smell of flesh should have told me I could not help the men inside. The passenger was bent over forward. His clothes were burned off and his skin in a condition I shall not attempt to describe here. The driver will leave a picture in my mind forever. The car had been strafed and set afire. The driver was sitting behind the steering wheel still clutching a Thompson machine gun. His face was burned horribly and burned black skin outlined his facial bones. At my feet was a section of his skull and black hair. The wood stock of his gun was burned almost off and was still burning. If a report had to be made, it would simply be ‘Two soldiers in a black Ford sedan; one had black hair, both burned beyond recognition.’ ”
A great many of America’s servicemen at this moment were teenagers or young men, untried by life and untested by combat—of the forty thousand enlisted men on Oahu in 1941, the average age was nineteen. Novelist John Steinbeck would write of such raw troops, “They lack only one thing to make them soldiers, enemy fire, and they will never be soldiers until they have it. No one, least of all themselves, knows what they will do when the terrible thing happens. No man there knows whether he can take it, whether he will run away or stick, or lose his nerve and go to pieces, or will be a good soldier. There is no way of knowing and probably that one thing bothers you more than anything else. . . . Every man builds in his mind what it will be like, but it is never what he thought it would be.”
At 0930, during the middle of the second wave, Private Bob Kinzler’s company was ordered into trucks to defend the shore against a Japanese invasion. The recruits started discussing what it would be like to be hit by a bullet. One said, “Hey, I’ve heard the Japs only have .25-caliber ammo. Do you think that would hurt as much as being hit by a .30-caliber?” Many thought the smaller the bullet, the less the pain. But how much less would that pain in fact be? On the way to the battery, on a rise in the Kamehameha Highway, everyone could see Pearl Harbor, destroyed. Kinzler: “We wore World War One pie-plate hats, were lightly armed, and our average age was nineteen. We all thought we were going to die.”
All this confusion may be hard to comprehend but it certainly makes sense. When George Bicknell called Fort Shafter to report that Pearl Harbor was under attack, the man who answered the phone said, “Go back to sleep, you’re having a bad dream.” When destroyer Reid’s Lieutenant Commander Harold Pullen first saw the carnage, he told a fellow officer, “My God, it looks like a movie set.” In his testimony before Congress, army engineer foreman Charles Utterback said, “The only thing I heard that morning, sir, was ‘They caught them asleep, by God.’ I think I heard that comment fifty times that day.”
In both the book and the film of Eternity, Schofield is portrayed as having been strafed by three planes for an hour, with a number of casualties. In fact, antiaircraft fire from Pearl Harbor dropped a dud shell into the kitchen’s flour barrel, some casings fell into the quadrangles, and perhaps one Japanese pilot, seizing a target of opportunity, fired some rounds on the men below. With two killed and seventeen wounded, Schofield was comparatively lucky that day.I
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Protected by the sawtooth range of Ko‘olau and far from the hustle and bustle of Honolulu and Pearl Harbor, Kaneohe Bay Naval Air Station housed thirty-six PBY-5 Catalinas—the navy’s signature reconnaissance seaplane—in the three squadrons of Patrol Wing 1. Early on that quiet Sunday morning, VP-14 division leader Lieutenant Murray Hanson got a phone call: “Lieutenant, this is the Comm Office. You’d better come up here. One of your pilots just sent a message to the commander in chief that he bombed a submarine one mile south of Ford Island. CINCPAC sent him a jig on it.”
The pilot was Ensign William Tanner, who’d helped USS Ward in attacking the midget sub by the entrance to Pearl Harbor at dawn. Murray Hanson: “I told him I’d be right up. I had just launched my planes to search at first light. I was killing time in our hangar, reading the morning paper, until the planes returned. I [was to] debrief the crews, service the aircraft, and secure t
he hangar. In naval communications parlance jig means ‘verify and repeat your message.’ The encoded contact report from my plane was so startling in its import that CINCPAC wanted him to recheck the encoding to make sure it had been done accurately and then repeat the message to him.
“The communications duty officer and I chatted and looked out the window toward Kaneohe Bay with the beautiful Ko‘olau mountains in the background. It hadn’t entered our minds that the message wasn’t just a garble. Not until ten seconds later. As we waited, we saw and heard aircraft flying low over the station. Then as one of the planes flew down past Lieutenant Northrup Castle’s station boathouse and over our seaplane operating area, one of our aircraft anchored out there burst into flames. Almost simultaneously the intruding plane did a chandelle, and as it rolled away from us, I clearly saw the meatball—the rising-sun insignia of the Japanese naval air arm—on the wing of the deadly Zero! It was now seven fifty-two a.m. in Hawaii on December seventh, 1941, and the dreaded but somehow expected moment had arrived—we were at war with Imperial Japan.
“The Naval Air Station, Kaneohe, was new. Many of the military had not yet heard of it. Obviously the Japanese had. Some of the buildings were still incomplete, and the station roads had not yet been paved. I ran downstairs to the station OOD’s [Officer of the Day] office shouting, ‘Japanese airplanes are attacking the station. Sound the alarm and call our commanding officer.’ It wasn’t news to the OOD, but he found that we had no working alarm on station. Our makeshift general alarm was the workmen’s steam whistle on the contractor’s timekeeper shack. Since it was Sunday, the shack was padlocked, and there was no steam for the whistle. No alarm! When I called my squadron commander, Lieutenant Commander Thurston B. Clark [not the historian Clarke, who was born in 1946], he was already awake and aware of the attack. He drove from his quarters to join me, his car strafed repeatedly all the way. He commandeered some guns from the OOD’s armory and went outside. Never will I forget the spectacle of the squadron commander and me crouching behind the administration building, trying to shoot out of the sky with our heavy, awkward, and inaccurate .45-caliber automatics, those four-hundred-mile-per-hour Zeros.”