by Craig Nelson
Aviation Machinist Mate 3rd Class Guy Avery was sleeping on a bungalow’s porch and woke up to the roar of a plane. All Gus could think was “To hell with the army.” But the sound of this plane was odd, so he went to the window and saw “Zeros just beginning to fan out over the heart of the station and opening fire promiscuously.” He yelled to the rest of the men in the house, “The Japs are here! It’s war!” One said, “Well, don’t worry about it, Avery. It’ll last only two weeks.” Guy Avery: “We were struck first of all and about seven minutes before Pearl Harbor. Our OOD called nearby Bellows Field to warn them and ask for help, but his call was regarded as a practical joke.” Kaneohe contractor Sam Aweau also called Bellows and Hickam to warn them, but no one took him seriously.
Kaneohe’s commander, Harold “Beauty” Martin, worried about how his brand-new staff—303 sailors and 95 marines—would react under fire, but he was impressed: “It was remarkable. There was no panic. Everyone went right to work battling back and doing his job.”
Lieutenant Cy Gillette was showering at home in Kailua. The phone rang; his wife said it was his duty officer, ordering him to base on a Sunday. Gillette thought it was nothing and took his time shaving. Then a second call told him Kaneohe’s planes were on fire. He jumped into his convertible and raced over to find the only planes not destroyed were the three out on patrol. His men were running away from Japanese machine gunners, pieces of pajama showing from under their uniforms.
He joined a group of sailors smashing the locks on the armory, grabbed a Thompson submachine gun, and ran across the runway, getting strafed every time he found himself out in the open. An ensign right next to him was killed. Gillette: “One moment we were running next to each other, and the next he was down on the tarmac.”
Seaman “Squash” Marshall outran a Zero’s guns for a hundred yards. His friends cheered when he survived.
Five pilots jumped into a car, caroming through strafing attacks to get to their planes and fight back. They reached the airfield and jumped out of the car to see that every one of their planes had been destroyed. Then, their car exploded.
Oswald Tanczos: “Suddenly, I noticed the gunner sitting behind the pilot had spotted us standing in a group. He turned his machine gun toward us. I yelled, ‘Let’s get out of here! I think that guy is going to shoot at us.’ We turned and ran to take cover in the mess hall as he sprayed the ground right on our heels. Luckily he didn’t hit any of us. . . . I took cover under a double sink about six feet long and the bottom about sixteen inches off the floor. I filled the sink with six to eight inches of water to deflect any bullets. . . . I guess about twenty to thirty minutes had passed since it all started when I heard one of our trucks stopping on the street outside. I said to the guys, ‘I believe they’re dropping off the rifle ammunition.’ So about six or eight of us went out. Sure enough, there it was. We picked up a bandolier of ammo, which was about a hundred rounds, five to a clip, and walked across the street to our tent where our rifles were hanging on our cots. . . .
“All at once a bunch of Jap planes from the Pearl Harbor area appeared over the horizon coming straight at me. They seemed to sway from side to side, then opened up with all of their guns. I tell you it sounded like a hailstorm concentrated right on me. White tracer bullets were whizzing by me all around. Some were so close it was like popping a whip in my ear. It shook me up. I felt that I was trapped out there. Each time they flew over, I would empty my gun of the five rounds it held. Don’t think I wasn’t scared. I guess this is when I started praying for my life. In my simple way I asked the Lord to look after me, and it seemed like immediately I felt at ease or like a shield had come over me. After that I had no fear when I saw and heard all those bullets passing by me.
“One plane to the far left was bearing down directly in line with me. When he turned on his guns, the incendiary shells were coming out of the propeller shaft at the rate of one per second. The shell shots left a red trail, and I calculated that the fourth one was going to hit me in the right shoulder. I stepped aside to let it pass. It exploded about twenty feet behind me as it hit the ground.
“I heard a whining, like bombs falling. I decided to lie down and curl up into a ball to make myself the smallest target. . . . Later I learned that someone in the nearby area was shooting antiaircraft shells [and] instead of the antiaircraft shells hitting the planes or exploding in the air, they were falling on us. On top of that, someone had goofed. They forgot to arm those shells before they shot them.
“After the last of the three shells dropped, I started to shiver and shake. I thought how stupid I had been to put myself in the line of fire! Yet, I felt a certain satisfaction that I had stood up to them and come out of it without a scratch.”
Eyewitnesses remembered that five or six Japanese fighters led by Lieutenant Tadashi Kaneko attacked the control tower, and then the four planes floating in the water. Five or six more Zeros, led by Lieutenant Masao Sato, destroyed the planes housed on the ramp.
Chief Aviation Ordnanceman John Finn, the son of a California plumber, had signed up for the service at the age of seventeen and was now a veteran of fifteen years and chief petty officer in charge of Kaneohe’s munitions. He was in bed with his wife, Alice, when he heard airplanes, saw one out the window, and then heard machine-gun fire. He dressed and drove to the base, at first sticking with the 20 mph limit until “I heard a plane come roaring in from astern of me. As I glanced up, the guy made a wingover, and I saw that big old red meatball, the rising-sun insignia, on the underside of the wing. Well, I threw it into second, and it’s a wonder I didn’t run over every sailor in the air station.”
Finn immediately saw that someone needed to take charge, and so he did. With no antiaircraft guns, Kaneohe was nearly defenseless, but no one could tell Finn that. When it became clear that the base’s planes couldn’t be saved, he oversaw taking out the burning aircrafts’ .50-caliber machine guns, then ordered metalsmiths to create tripod mounts so the guns could be used to defend the station. He ended up blasting away with a .50-caliber gun on a teaching bench for nearly two hours, trying to take down as many enemy planes as he could: “I was hoppin’ mad; I wanted to shoot every damned plane out of the sky. It was so thick in places you could almost walk on it. All our planes were burning. And then this plane comes down and disappears in the smoke. I said to myself, ‘When he gets out of that smoke, I’m going to let him have it.’ I swung my gun around to the center of that smoke, and that guy came barreling out of it. I was shooting right down and hit the propeller hub. I got off maybe eight rounds. I think he came to get me but his plane slammed into a hillside. . . . I had tons of ammunition, everybody kept bringing me more ammunition to shoot. I could’ve shot for six months and never reloaded!”
When, at 0830, the second wave of two strikes from nine horizontals and assorted fighters appeared, Finn was caught, exposed, on the parking ramp. “I can still remember walking around that gun cussing everything in the world, kicking and screaming and hollering. I was not the cool, calm, collected hero. I was madder than hell. . . . I got shot in the left arm and shot in the left foot, broke the bone. I had shrapnel blows in my chest and belly and right elbow and right thumb. Some were just scratches. My scalp got cut, and everybody thought I was dying: ‘Oh, Christ, the old chief had the top of his head knocked off!’ I had twenty-eight, twenty-nine holes in me that were bleeding. I was walking around on one heel. I was barefooted on that coral dust. My left arm didn’t work. It was just a big ball hanging down.” Even so, John Finn refused to leave his post until given a direct order, then refused anything more in treatment than basic first aid, so that he could oversee rearming crews when the three VP-14 then on patrol returned. “The worst was little tiny pieces in my knuckle joint, elbow here and there. Tiny little things, you couldn’t see ’em, and oh my God, did they hurt. But basically . . . it just wasn’t my day to die.
“You’ve got to give those Japs credit. They did a wonderful job militarily. And just ’cause they snea
ked in on us . . . I grew up with the idea, I think some old Southern general said, you get there first and you don’t tell nobody you’re coming!”
Admiral Chester Nimitz would award John Finn the Medal of Honor for his valor at a ceremony aboard the USS Enterprise.
Zero Lieutenant Fusata Iida was piling bullets into the naval air station’s armory when he saw, from a side door, ordnanceman Sands trying to fight back with a Browning automatic rifle. Running out of ammo, Sands yelled out, “Hand me another BAR! I swear I hit that yellow bastard!” Using the building as a shield—a shield now peppered with Japanese bullets—Sands was able to keep just out of Iida’s fire, which enraged the Japanese pilot, who headed straight at the American, determined to kill him. Instead, Sands filled the oncoming Zero with lead, hitting at just the point of weakness in the acclaimed fighter—its gas tank.
From the smell, and from his gauges, Iida knew he was going down. He had lectured his fellow airmen that any plane that failed should be used as a bomb, and now he was going to follow through. He would suicide-crash directly into Sands and the armory.
Pilot Iyozou Fujita: “Lieutenant Iida communicated with hand signs. He pointed to his mouth, which meant fuel, and he pointed down and waved ‘Good-bye.’ And he did a half roll and went down.” But Iida missed the building and smashed into the road. Arthur Price: “We managed to recover some paperwork from his plane. Included was a map. . . . We later learned that it indicated our water tank was a fuel farm. Those pilots had just peppered the hell out of that tank during the attack but couldn’t set it on fire.”
After the war, Iyozou Fujita would fly for Japan Air Lines, sometimes piloting the popular Tokyo–Honolulu run. He said that coming into Oahu gave him “uneasy memories.”
• • •
Directly to the southeast of Kaneohe was the Air Corps’ Bellows Field, home to the Eighty-Sixth Observation Squadron and, at that moment, hosting the Forty-Fourth Pursuit Squadron for gun class. Around dawn, the sleeping tents were roused by a sergeant yelling that Kaneohe was “blown all to hell.” At 0810 a phone call from Hickam said that they “were in flames” and needed a fire truck. But like so many others on December 7, these warnings were ignored.
At 0830, Lieutenant Tadashi Kaneko, having used up his Zero’s cannon fire, strafed Bellows’s tents with his machine guns. Aerial gunner Private 1st Class Raymond McBriarty saw the strike and saw the Japanese markings on the plane, which started a heated argument among the men. But since no officers gave any orders and no one even pulled the air-raid siren, McBriarty and the others went to church. Then a B-17 from California crash-landed on the runway, plowing into a knoll, followed by nine Japanese planes strafing the base. The air-raid alarm finally sounded and the men scrambled from their tents, looking for shelter. McBriarty and his fellow churchgoers ran from the chapel to their posts.
A group made it to the armament building to load up on Springfield bolts and Browning automatics. They couldn’t find the ammo belts for the machine guns, but they did find a gun on a scout plane, as well as two .30-caliber antiaircraft guns on the runway. The army’s Pearl Harbor report would judge trying to fight Zeros and Vals with Springfield rifles “ineffective.”
Raymond McBriarty and William Burt mounted a gun to the rear cockpit of the squadron commander’s O-47 plane. When the strafing Zeros targeted them, they fell to the ground, but when there was a lull, they pulled themselves into the cockpit and fired back 450 rounds. They were awarded Silver Stars.
Due to a series of commands and coincidences, only four officers were at Bellows that morning, and the P-40s that could have been used for counterstrikes were nearly empty on fuel and had most of their guns disassembled for cleaning. But three fighter pilots of the Forty-Fourth and the squadron’s ground crew did all they could to refuel and rearm three planes to fight back. At first, when the three wanted to immediately get their P-40 Warhawks into the air, armament officer Lieutenant Phillips ordered that all six .50-caliber guns needed to be loaded before anyone could fly. When nine Zeros flew in and began strafing, the three decided to overturn this decision.
As Second Lieutenant Hans Christensen started to get into the cockpit of his plane, he was hit in the back by a bullet. The wound killed him.
Second Lieutenant George Whiteman ran up to a Warhawk and told the ground crew to get off the wing and stop loading the ammo, so he could fly. He taxied out so fast that the workers couldn’t get the cowlings back over the wing guns, and on liftoff, he was spotted by two Zeros. Whiteman tried evading, but didn’t yet have enough speed, and his Warhawk was hit in the engine. It burst into flames.
First Lieutenant Samuel Bishop began to lift off behind Whiteman, and when he saw Whiteman shot down and burning, he became enraged. He tried to shoot down Whitman’s attackers, but couldn’t outmaneuver the Zeros, which shot him down into the ocean, half a mile off the beach.
“I was in a very excited state of mind when I saw the fighter headed straight onto me,” Zero pilot Lieutenant Iyozou Fujita remembered. “I thought I would crash into him. But at the last minute the enemy pulled up to avoid the collision. And then it happened. He had exposed the belly of his plane right in front of me. And I started shooting. And he went down.”
With a bullet in his leg, Bishop got out of his plane, inflated his Mae West, and swam home.
• • •
Tech Sergeant Henry Anglin was taking pictures of his three-year-old toddler, Hank, at the US Marines’ Mooring Mast Field at Ewa, when he heard the “mingled noise of airplanes and machine guns.” They went outside, joined by others, all assuming it was an American pilot . . . so much so that, when machine-gun bullets made puffs of dirt in the road, someone said, “Look, live ammunition. Somebody’ll go to prison for this.”
Diving as low as twenty feet, Akagi’s Lieutenant Commander Shigeru Itaya and Kaga’s Lieutenant Yoshio Shiga led eighteen Zeros against the base, striking at 0755 with their mix of incendiary, explosive, and armor-piercing rounds . . . first demolishing aircraft, and then killing men.
In all the ruckus, little Hank Anglin had run off. Now the puffs were clearly real. Henry found his son and threw himself over his body to protect him. They crawled together for thirty-five yards, surrounded by strafing fire, back to the photo tent. Henry told his son to hide under a wood bench and got his camera to take pictures. But when he went back outside, he was shot in the arm, and then when he went back in the tent to his boy, Hank pointed out a bullet on the floor next to him and said, “Don’t touch that, Daddy. It’s hot.”
A group of Americans including Corporal Earl Hinz were in camp a half mile from the base when they heard the “Assembly for Colors” call to arms. Hinz had joined the Marine Reserves from Minneapolis and was called to active duty on December 16, 1940, when he was shipped from San Diego to Hawaii aboard Enterprise as part of Marine Air Group (MAG) 21, which cleared cane to build Ewa, a base still under construction on December 7. The Mooring Mast name came from an American navy of the 1930s that was busily assembling dirigibles and needed a global network of masts to anchor their great floating airships. Now, Ewa’s hundred-foot mast was topped by a flight control tower.
MAG 21’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Claude A. “Sheriff” Larkin, was at home in Honolulu when the attack started. He jumped into his 1930 Plymouth and was pedal to the metal when a Zero strafed him. Larkin pulled over and hid in a ditch until the fighter left; then he got back in the car and made it to Ewa by 0805. While helping defend his base, he was machine-gunned and seriously injured, but refused to leave his post.
Earl Hinz started up the fire truck and drove the crew chief to the operations building next to Ewa’s runway, where forty-eight planes were parked. Just as their minds grasped that nearly all of their planes were on fire and beyond what they could save, a Zero shot at them, hitting the rear tires. They stopped and jumped out, hiding under the truck.
Having finished strafing Wheeler, Lieutenant Akira Sakamoto’s dive-bombers now joined in the a
ttack. The base ambulance took fifty-two bullets as it tried to help the dying and the injured. After eight strafing runs, nine of Ewa’s eleven F4F fighters and eighteen of her thirty-two SBD-1 scout/bombers were destroyed.
• • •
Lieutenant Commander Howard “Brigham” Young had been 215 miles west of Oahu when he launched his Douglas Dauntless SBD-3 from the deck of the USS Enterprise at dawn. In an hour, a mix of SBD-2s, and -3s from Scouting and Bombing Squadrons Six led by Lieutenant Commander Hallsted Hopping would be surveilling in pairs to the southwest of the Hawaiian archipelago. Instead of returning to the carrier’s deck that morning, Halsey had told them to land at the Naval Air Station on Ford Island, refuel, run an afternoon search, and then come home to Enterprise for dinner.
Though eventually their pilots would call them “Slow but Deadly,” Douglas’s SBDs, with a two-man crew that worked in pairs, could scout or dive-bomb, and were the American navy’s most significant plane in the opening years of the war. The SBD’s radioman/gunner sat in the rear cockpit, where he could swivel his seat 360 degrees to fire his machine gun; the newest SBD-3 was far more capable in a dogfight, with the gunner having twin .30-caliber guns and the pilot, two .50-caliber machine guns in the nose.
Eighteen planes, following Halsey’s orders, would now try to land, like those B-17 Flying Fortresses, in the thick of the battle on December 7. Lieutenant Commander Hopping: “When a short distance from Barbers Point, heavy smoke was visible. At this time a report was heard over the radio: ‘Do not attack me. This is six baker three an American plane,’ and the same voice continued on telling his gunner to break out the boat as he was landing in the water.