by Craig Nelson
As Zeros were trying to take down Landon from the rear, American soldiers manning antiaircraft guns on the ground—either in a panic, or mistaking the B-17 for an enemy plane—were firing at him from the fore. That Landon got her down with no one killed or injured was a remarkable achievement and a shot of pure damn luck.
The next Fortress pilot coming in was Captain Raymond Swenson. As he first tried setting her down, a Zero’s attacks made him overshoot, and when he came around to try again, a Zero’s bullets struck some magnesium flares, which erupted, injuring one of Swenson’s crewmen, Lieutenant William Schick, in the leg. Within seconds, the back half the B-17 was on fire, and while everyone was moving forward to escape, another Zero, strafing the airfield, hit Schick in the face. Swenson finally landed and was met by emergency crews as well as bikers from the Honolulu Motor Club, who, hearing of the attacks, had ridden down to help. The injured Schick was taken to Hickam Hospital. Acting commander Captain Frank Lane: “I suppose the reason my attention was called to him was that he was dressed in a winter uniform, which we never wore in the islands, and had the insignia of a medical officer on his lapels. He had a wound in his face, and when I went to take care of him, he pointed to the casualties on litters on the floor and said, ‘Take care of them.’ I told him I’d get him on the next ambulance, [but] the next day I heard that he died.”
The six B-17s of the Eighty-Eighth Reconnaissance Squadron heard what was happening to their fellow pilots at Hickam and were ready. Three landed there and two others, headed by Captain Richard Carmichael and Lieutenant Harold Chaffin, detoured to Oahu’s north shore. Sergeant Robert Barnard: “By then the sky was thick with puffs of antiaircraft fire. ‘The Japs have hit Pearl Harbor!’ was the word that came over the intercom. At this instant I looked through the radio hatch and saw six Mitsubishis go over us. The antiaircraft fire from the ground seemed to have no particular target, just aircraft. As we neared Hickam Field, we heard another pilot ask for landing instructions and he got an immediate reply. ‘Land east to west, runway two, wind five mph—look out, there’s a Jap on your tail!’ We circled Hickam three times and saw the great battleships burning, smoke and flames everywhere. Antiaircraft fire kept us from landing. Our pilot, Lieutenant Harold ‘Newt’ Chaffin, from Arkansas, told the copilot and engineer he did not like the looks of it down there. He repeated it three times. ‘Okay, let’s get the hell out of here then,’ said the engineer. ‘Where to?’ asked the pilot. ‘You know we only have fifteen or twenty minutes of fuel left, if we’re lucky.’ ” The engineer recommended Haleiwa Auxiliary Field, which had a shorter runway than ones built for a B-17, but their load was pretty light, and they were running out of gas. Captain Carmichael followed Chaffin over the mountains. Both bombers landed unharmed.
“An unfamiliar-sounding aircraft engine startled us, and we heard a lot of yells to head for the ditch,” Barnard said. “A Japanese fighter plane came down the length of the field with guns blazing as it strafed the old P-36 trainer planes parked on the edge of the strip. The aircrews and the men at the field had only sidearms and rifles to shoot with, but they did fire at the Japs with gusto. One Japanese Val-type dive-bomber came in and strafed us. As he passed us, he did a chandelle, stood on his tail for an instant and then headed out to sea. In just a few seconds a P-40 came by and went after the Val. Shortly after we heard the crackle of fifty-caliber machine-gun fire, a huge ball of smoke plummeted into the sea. One less Val.”
First Lieutenant Robert Richards was so overtaken by Japanese gunfire on his Fortress that he had to give up on coming in and flew back out to sea. Chased by Zeros, he finally saw the short strip at Bellows Field, which he thought he could handle by riding his four-engine giant into the wind. But at that moment, crew chief Earl Sutton was moving a P-40 on the runway, forcing Richards to pull up and come around. Bellows’s Sergeant Covelesky: “Our asphalt landing strip at Bellows was hardly long enough to accommodate our P-40s, much less a B-17; and when he made an approach from the ocean downwind, we knew we were in for a breathtaking crash landing. Even though his wheels were down, he flared out and touched down halfway on the strip, knowing he wouldn’t be able to stop, retracted the wheels, and slid off the runway over a ditch and into a cane field bordering the strip.” Rescued by firemen and ambulance workers, the Fortress crew refused to leave the plane until making sure their Norden bombsight was pulled from the wreckage. If the Japanese invaded, it was one piece of American know-how that no one wanted falling into enemy hands.
First Lieutenant Frank Bostrom was so repeatedly attacked that he couldn’t set down at any airfield and was forced to bring his B-17 in on the Kahuku Golf Course. It was a smart choice; the plane was damaged but fixable, and everyone aboard was alive and uninjured.
• • •
The Japanese continued to bomb and strafe the American airfields, spreading havoc and death. Hickam’s William Melnyk was talking on a stairway landing with a group of servicemen when the force of a bomb striking Hangar 7 threw them all to the ground. A sergeant began screaming orders to get out. Since it looked as though the enemy was targeting buildings, everyone thought it would be safer to be outside, so a group gathered on the parade grounds along with men fleeing the barracks, many in their Skivvies. They heard pah pah pah pah pah and then saw a bomber dive in to strafe them with its cowling guns. Everyone began running in all directions; some fell to their deaths. One remembered thinking at that moment: He’d come to Hawaii with the idea that he was more or less getting a vacation paid for by the US government. Now he’d be lucky to get out alive. Another group, including Leon Webster, found cover under a building by the post exchange and became enraged when one crewman used the chaos to loot a case of beer and cartons of cigarettes out of the PX. But, loaded down with booty, he couldn’t run and was taken down.
Fires now erupted everywhere. When a plane took a hit, it exploded, the flames both leaping to anything nearby they could ignite, and erupting from high-octane avgas tanks onto tarmacs to flow as lavalike streams of flame. William Melnyk went from building to building, followed by the whistle of falling bombs, the shock of explosions, and the terror of whizzing bullets. A man came in and said, “I need help; the lieutenant has been hit!” First Lieutenant Malcolm Brumwell had been seriously wounded by shrapnel. William Melnyk: “We carried him to the supply room and laid him on the counter. He was bleeding across the chest and moaned from the pain. At this time, there were about five people in the supply room, and one called the hospital for an ambulance. In a short time it came to the front of the building and we were told to bring the lieutenant out. The driver and another fellow slid him in and they turned toward me. The driver, thinking I was wounded also because of all the blood on my shirt, said, ‘Take it easy now and get into the ambulance.’ I said, ‘There is nothing wrong with me.’ He replied, ‘I know, I know,’ and began to force me inside where the lieutenant was lying. I went into the vehicle, crawled over the driver’s seat, and went out through the door. As I walked away from the ambulance, the driver, thinking I was in shock, began chasing me, yelling for me to come back. He soon gave up, returning to the ambulance, and drove the injured man to the hospital. We later learned that he died from the injuries he received in the chest. I turned and saw a man from our squadron named Bernard Mulcahy. He looked at me and said, ‘You know, Bill, we lived more in the past two hours than we did in our last nineteen years.’
“There was talk around about another raid and an invasion. We walked into the mess hall and it was a shambles. Someone mentioned that we would have to move into the mountains and fight off the Japanese. I noticed someone brought out a five-gallon pail of maraschino cherries in syrup, and several five-pound packages of American cheese. Thinking we would have to go to the mountains to fight, we both took a piece of the cheese, and I placed two handfuls of the syrupy cherries in my pocket.”
Private Edward Hall, a truck driver who volunteered for KP duty first thing Sunday morning to earn some extra spending money, had hea
rd the explosions and was hiding under a sink. He came back outside to find an enemy plane coming right at him, guns blazing. Hall froze, but suddenly the plane pulled up. The pilot had to avoid some power lines, and Hall’s life was saved.
Dodging more bullets, Hall and a group of men took cover under a supply building’s roof overhangs. When Hall walked out to see what was going on, someone grabbed his shirt and pulled him back. “Get outta there! You’ll get killed!” He had indeed been spotted, and immediately strafer fire tore out chunks of the building they were hiding in.
“At this time our lieutenant called us together and assembled us on the edge of the parade ground and made the great statement ‘Men, we are at war,’ as if we did not already know it,” Nineteenth Transport Squadron’s George Gabik said. “He then posted a couple of men on east and west sides of the parade ground [as lookouts]. He no sooner said that than they were upon us. We lost several men because of this. The rest of us scattered and hid under or behind a building. Everything was now fine until the bombing started. I did not know what to do or where to go as we had no foxholes to jump into. So I just stayed where I was, and as the bombs came closer and hit, I dove for the ground. One hit across the road in front of me where a bunch of cars were parked, and they took most of the shrapnel. The piece that got me hit behind me and about thirty feet away in the dirt, and being on the ground I guess saved my life. The piece traveled along the ground and hit my left leg above the knee and below the hip and rolled me over. The first thing I thought of was this old movie All Quiet on the Western Front, where this one soldier was carrying another who had got hit in the leg and was being taken to the hospital. At the hospital he lost the leg. That was the only thought I had at this time, had I lost my leg, so I reached down and found the leg still there and what a great feeling it was.”
There was courage, and there was fear and panic. A second lieutenant emotionally collapsed and was found hiding and sobbing, while another officer “went all to pieces after the attack and had to be sent back to the States on a stretcher.” Fifth Bomb Group ground crewman Harold Fishencord said he could never forget the horrible screams of a man, trapped in the nose of a B-18 that had caught fire, as he burned to his death. Private 1st Class Gabriel Christie noticed fellow PFC James Lewis lying on his back in a warehouse. Christie was impressed that Lewis was so calm and courageous when Christie was scared and didn’t know what to do. He later learned that Lewis had taken a lot of shrapnel in the back and was dead.
Carl Brown, a civilian, was standing near the airstrip when it looked as though one of the few surviving planes was about to be attacked. Brown heard someone yell, “For God’s sake, save that plane!” Though he wasn’t a pilot or even a mechanic, Brown started the plane and taxied her in a zigzag manner to avoid both Japanese strafers and American antiaircraft counterfire. After he drove her out of harm’s way, an angry recruit screamed at the civilian, “Get the hell out of here! Don’t you know this is a combat area?”
First Sergeant Carlos McCuiston: “After the last explosion, I jumped up and turned to run, hoping to find better shelter before the next bombs fell. As it turned out, that was the last of the bombing. As I turned, I saw two airmen lying facedown just a few feet from me. One had both legs severed at the buttocks. His blood had soaked the ground where he lay. The second had a massive head wound. Some object had passed through his head from the left temple area to just above the right ear. His brains were lying on the ground. Both were dead.”
The army’s Twenty-Ninth Car Company asked for volunteers to assist with the wounded. Someone took a bedsheet and painted a big red cross on it and laid it over the top of a truck. The Japanese bombed and strafed it anyway.
Second Lieutenant Monica Conter was one of Hickam’s six nurses at a hospital that had only been open for three weeks and didn’t yet have mattresses for all the beds: “There were just all kinds of wounds and blood and dust from the building that exploded on them. Some had machine-gun and bomb-fragment wounds. They were just butchered. We were trying to relieve their pain and their shock. We just went around giving that morphine in those ten cc syringes, filling them up from the flask, just going from one to the other. We did try to tag them. Then they would just load them in trucks and ambulances and off they would go. They were in terrible condition and may have died. Some were brought in dead, and we put them out at the rear of the hospital and covered them up.
“We heard this plane. It was losing altitude, and . . . we both just stopped suddenly and stared at each other. . . . There was a bang! I saw the rising sun on the planes. The bombs were getting closer and closer. . . . One five-hundred-pound bomb fell on the hospital lawn. . . . The whole hospital shook! In a split second someone yelled. ‘Down everybody!’ And we fell wherever we were, crouching, waiting for the next minute—the next bomb to kill us all!”
When Nurse Conter hit the floor during a strike and used a garbage-can lid to cover herself, someone tried to take it away from her, but she held on to it. Lieutenant Philip Sprawls: “She, nor any of them, had had any rest for over thirty hours. They laid victims on the porch floor for first aid. Many died, even while she was extracting the hypo needle! The blood actually ran on the floor. She showed me where it came up over the soles on her shoes. Marie [a nurse at Tripler] said many came in holding his arm or leg!—completely severed, but hating to leave it! Others came with an arm or leg off; both legs and an arm; and some with all limbs gone! All these fellows were still conscious and cussing the Japs!” George Gabik: “I got to Tripler [Hospital] about eleven a.m. and still had my .45 with me and would not give it up. I looked up and saw a Japanese doctor getting ready to work on me. I don’t recall, but they said I tried to find my .45 so I could shoot him, and everyone was saying, ‘No, no, he is one of us.’ ”
Carlos McCuiston: “Lieutenant Turner and I visited the morgue to try and identify the squadron dead. The dead were in plain wooden boxes, naked; many with no obvious wounds. This would support the belief that some were killed by concussion. As I walked among the dead, the thought occurred to me that perhaps in view of the expected invasion, they were better off than those of us who survived the initial attack.”
The Honolulu fire department’s Kalihi station was told to respond to a hangar fire at Hickam. There was no mention of the attack that had begun. They arrived to find one of the base’s fire trucks bombed out in the station. In the other, twenty feet away, the driver, having been strafed, was now hanging over the steering wheel, dead. Three of the city’s firemen would die in the attack on Hickam, while five more would be wounded.
At Makalapa senior officers’ housing, Mrs. Mayfield took her maid, Fumiyo, with her next door when she went to join Mrs. Earle in sheltering together. They decided to turn the living room’s bamboo couches upside down and pile the cushions on top. In the middle of this, Fumiyo asked, “Mrs. Mayfield, is it—is it the Japanese who are attacking us?” Mrs. Mayfield had to answer yes. At Hickam’s NCO housing, Mrs. Walter Blakey knew the safest defense against bullets was a bathtub, while over at Ford, Mrs. Claire Fonderhide, married to a submarine officer, sat in her living room with a .45 automatic and waited.
• • •
Wheeler Field, at the center of Oahu, was home to the Air Force’s Fourteenth Pursuit Wing—ninety-nine P-40s, thirty-nine P-36s, and an assortment of older craft. Just before 0800, armorer Private Wilfred Burke was in the tent area’s quadrangle, talking with a bunch of airmen. Burke was up and out at that time on a Sunday because he had promised to go to church service with his boss, Sergeant Forest Wills. At 0802 a squadron of planes shot past, heading to Pearl Harbor.
Wheeler’s aircraft were that Sunday morning guarded by one PFC Fusco, armed with a 1903 Springfield rifle. Fusco, however, immediately recognized the red balls on the wings and ran to the nearest hangar for a machine gun. The armory’s door was locked; he had to break it down. The ammunition was locked up in a hangar, and that hangar was now on fire. Since General Short had set his department on sa
botage alert, it would take four hours to get any of Wheeler’s planes ready to fight.
“I was thirteen years old and living in army housing close to Wheeler Field—home of the P-40,” Helen Griffith Livermont remembered. “My sister and I were in bed when it all started and discussed how terrible it was to stage a sham battle on a Sunday morning. The noise from the bombs grew louder, so we got up and joined our parents in the kitchen. My mother was in a frantic state. She was a German war bride of World War I and knew the sound of bombs. She headed out the door for the safety of the concrete housing across from us—ours was made of wood. My sister followed her, and I thought I had better get out, too. We lost track of our mother, but my sister and I ran between houses, dodging bullets for what seemed like an hour.”
Just waking up in Wheeler’s barracks, Gus Ahola was trying to decide if he should wash his car or go play golf. He heard an odd-whining plane engine, getting louder and louder, which meant trouble. He hoped the pilot could recover, but then the whole building shook with an explosion, and Gus knew the man must be dead. He looked out the window, hoping to see a parachute, but instead saw a pillar of smoke from the runway. Ahola assumed it was the “damned navy” practicing with their Betty Crocker bombs made from flour sacks. Then Ahola saw the rising-sun meatballs glinting on the wings. “Navy, hell!” he yelled out. “Those are the goddamn Nips!”
Base commander Colonel Flood was in front of his quarters nearby when he saw a bomb hit and assumed the explosion was an accident, but it was in fact a strike on the base’s engineering shops at Hangar 1. Those nearby thought the building had lifted into the air, so powerful was the explosion. Bigger detonations followed, as the flammable storage dump, filled with drums of lacquer, turpentine, and aviation-grade fuel, thundered, followed by the ammunition depot, where all the aircraft machine-gun belts cracked like the Fourth of July.
