 |
| Burning PBY at Kaneohe NAS December 7th 1941 |
After
dark, we cursed the fact that the fire in the wreckage of the hangar was still
burning. It made a perfect beacon for possible
night air attacks. The sky had become cloudy
but it was possible to dimly see the ramp area in the weak light of the
flickering flames.
At
one p
“At
one point Dick moved to the machine gun, swung it toward the hangar area, and pulled
the charging handle. Glover said sharply,
“What the hell are you doing, Dick?!”
“There’s
something down there by the hangar! See,
look at those black shapes—men crouching down!”
“You
silly shit,” Glover growled, “them ain’t men—they’s a bunch of old oil drums, that’s
all!”
“If
they are oil drums,” Dick retorted, “how come they keep moving toward us, huh?”
The
argument was interrupted by a rifle shot, then a sudden burst of 30-caliber machine
gun fire from up on the hill behind us.
Glover and I snatched up our rifles and charged them. We could hear a voice yelling “Cease fire!” then
there was silence but people were moving around.
After
a few minutes Glover said, “I’ll just slip up that way and see what the hell is
going on.” He slipped over the parapet
and Dick hissed. “Sing out when you come back or we may get trigger-happy!”
Glover
slid back into the gun pit in then minutes. He reported, chuckling, that a seaman on watch
had got to fiddling with his rifle and shot himself in the foot. A nearby machine gun had opened up and cut the
other leg from under him. He had been
taken away to the infirmary.
All
was quiet in the darkness for some time and we began to relax, believing that
if invasion came it would be at dawn.
There had been no further reports of enemy troops on the island and the “invaders”
up near the Mormon Temple had proven to be a group of workmen. We decided to try to get some sleep. Dick offered to take the first watch and said
he would rouse one of us in a couple of hours.
Glover huddled down on the dirt floor of the pit, wrapped in a blanket
and leaning against the back of the pit.
I
ventured out of the pit and, toward the gardener’s shed, found some boards and
a sheet of corrugated roofing. I put
them at the base of our sandbagged wall and rolled into my blanket on the boards
with the corrugated tin propped over me.
I
lay there sleepless, my rifle at my side.
It seemed that the day had been a week long. Everything had suddenly changed. The scenes burned indelibly into my memory
passed in review. The hangar offices had
burned out, including Ensign Foss’ wooden desk with my examination package, and
the nice young ensign had been the first man to die at Kaneohe—probably the
first man to die in the Pacific war since the Zeros had hit us nearly ten
minutes before they first bombs feel at Pearl Harbor.
There
was a reason for that, I mused. The
Japanese would have known that Kaneohe was a PBY base (they had found a
detailed map of the base in the pocket of the pilot we had shot down) and that
the PBY was the one airplane with the range to take off and find the attacking
aircraft carriers. That must be why they
worked us over until all our airplanes had been destroyed on the ground.
My
soliloquy was interrupted. There was the
sound of an airplane engine approaching Kaneohe and the air raid siren went
off. I knocked aside the corrugated tin
and shot into the gun pit. Dick was
swinging the machine gun toward the sound.
The airplane was apparently coming in for a landing on the fighter strip
at the north end of the base.
Earlier
that afternoon, fearing that the strip might be used for enemy landing, the
base first lieutenant had scattered vehicles and oil drums at random down the
length of the strip to make it unusable.
The precaution was in vain. The
airplane proved to be a Navy carrier plane.
I never heard what he was doing there in the middle of the night; however,
being low on fuel he turned on his landing lights and landed successfully by weaving
his way through the obstacles.
When
things finally settled down sometime after midnight, it was raining. The red dirt in the bottom of the gun pit was
turning to sticky mud. I offered to take
over the watch, but Dick said, “Naw, I’m not sleepy—you and Glover get some
shuteye.”
Not
wanting to go back under the tin outside, I found that there was some room in
the dry under the workbench gun mount on top of the spare ammunition. I curled up under there and, overcome by
exhaustion both physical and emotional, feel asleep while December 7th,
1941 passed into history.
[That night, thousands of miles away, my grandmother lay in the dark at her cousin's house in Bona, Missouri, listening to the radio reports about Pearl Harbor and wondering if her two oldest boys were still alive. As a mother I can identify with her heartache.]
