Aftermath of the First Wave

PBY wreckage at Kaneohe NAS on December 7th 1941

Silence settled over Kaneohe as the sound of the departing Zeros faded into the distance.  Dick leaned tiredly on the machine gun, his eyes still on the sky.  I sat slumped in the hatchway, my bloody hands still gripping that last belt of ammunition.  Acrid burned gunpowder fumes swirled about us and the empty hot brass cartridges filled the bilge to my ankles.  Almost in slow motion, I folded the belt into an empty magazine and placed it in the rack.  Our dungaree shirts were soaked with sweat and a mixture of sweat and angry tears streaked my cheeks.  Incongruously, in the sudden total silence, except for the guttering of flames in the burning airplanes and hangar, I heard a bird start to sing in a small tree across the road.

Many chaotic thoughts flashed through my mind as the rush of adrenalin subsided.  I recall ironically thinking that this was not the way war should be.  During my young years in the Ozark hills, I had thought of war being a glorious experience—charging into battel with flags flying and destroying the enemy.  This was not that way.  This war was a mélange of incalculable noise, dirt, fire, blood, and dead shipmates laid in a row on the concrete ramp.  I stared dully at the hands resting on my dugareed legs.  They were bloody.  One of them was still oozing dark red blood.  I wrapped my handkerchief around it and heaved a tired sigh.

Dick stirred and spoke over his should, “You all right?”

“Yeah, I’m all right—you?”  He nodded and I went on, “Down to our last two magazines—we gonna need some more ammo if they come back.”

“What’s the matter with your hands?  They’re bloody.”

“Nuthin’ much—cut ‘em a little on the ammo cans.  Be all right.”

There was movement outside as people started coming out of ditches and moving around to assess the damage.  One of the squadron CPOs hailed us from outside the airplane, “Hey, how many dead and wounded in there?”

Dick’s voice was hoarse and he had to clear his throat, “Nobody dead or wounded, chief,--just me and my brother up here.  Need some more ammo.”

“For Christ’s sake,” the CPO said angrily, “get the hell out of there and find a protected place for that gun!  They’ve shot that airplane to pieces around you—lucky you ain’t both dead!  That aluminum skin is about as much protection as tissue paper!  What the hell did you get in there for?!”

Dick answered him, “Dang it, we needed a gun mount!  Can’t fire a fifty from the hip, you know.  What’s the score, chief?”

“Don’t know yet, but I reckon it’s the Japs one—us nuthin”.  Guess they pounded Pearl pretty good.  Heard a rumor that they got some battleships and the OKLAHOMA turned over.  Lots of people killed.  The bastards may be back any time—we don’t know.”

The CPO shook his head and his gaze travelled over the shot-up airplane again.  I heard him mutter as he turned away, “Dumb sons a bitches—got more guts than good sense!”

(In retrospect, the chief was absolutely correct.  All we had thought of was that the airplane had no gasoline and would not burn around us.  What the Japanes saw after all the rest of the airplanes were burning—only three Kaneohe PBYs survived and they were out on patrol that morning—was one airplane not on fire and tracers were coming from it.  That is why they kept strafing us repeadedly and it no doubt frustrated them.  We were truly a couple of dumb country boys and I have always thought that Somebody Up There had a hand on our shoulders that morning.)

“Well,” Dick finally said, “we might as well stretch our legs and get some fresh air.”  I followed him down the short ladder to stand in the shade of the wing.

The wing shadow was not solid.  I looked up and saw that the fabric trailing edge of the broad wing had been shot to ribbons.  The whole airplane except that narrow area where we had been was literally a sieve.  The big beaching gear wheels on that side were flat so that the airplane listed drunkenly.  I later stood directly in front of the gun mount and stretched out my arms.  Dick counded thirty-six bullet holes within the span of my arms.

It was inconceivable that neither of us was wounded.  The nearest we came was that Dick spotted two holes in the slack of my shirt.  The tug I had felt when I bent over to pick up the magazine had been a bullet passing thought my shirt.  Had I been sitting upright the bullet would have gone through my chest from side to side.

[I have to pause here as the above sinks in.  Weather you think it was dumb luck or divine intervention that saved my father that day, it is powerful to think of all that would have never happened, including me, and how my grandmother would have suffered if he would have been sitting up.  Of course, as news of the attack reached the states, she would suffer, not knowing if her two oldest were dead or alive.]

Reaction set in now that it was over for a while.  We started to light cigarettes from a crumpled green pack of Lucky’s in my shirt pocket.  It took both hands to steady a match and get it to the tip.  I do not know how I looked, but Dick’s face was grim and his blue eyes were bleak.  Our world had suddenly and traumatically been turned upside down.  We would never again be the same as before.  (I was to realize later that something in my young mind died that morning. Never again would I have sudden surges of joy and carefree ebullience.  I may have even lost he capacity to truly love.  In the future I would accept events good and bad almost phlegmatically instead of with beating heart and soaring spirits for the good and quick anger for the bad.  It is trite and banal to say that we had aged in a short hour from boys to me, but I guess that is true.)

While we waited for further instructions about what to do with the machine gun, I walked out away from the airplane in the direction from which the Zeros had come.  The brass and belt links from their wing guns just fell free.  I picked up three 7.7 casings and belt links.  Later, in the bilges of Number Four, I found two spent Japanese 7.7 bullets, one a bent, soft-cored brass one and the other the steel core of an armor-piercing bullet.  I still have them.

The Fighting Frieze Brothers

The unfinished Hangar 2 at Kaneohe on December 7th 1941

With the one airplane away from the flames, Dick and I turned toward the hangar which was apparently undamaged at that point.  Men in both dungarees and white liberty uniforms were milling around and attempting to salvage airplanes and guns.  A group was endeavoring to pull an airplane in the water, one wing burning, to the beach.  We started toward them when Dick halted.  His eyes were on the sky to the north where the attackers had disappeared over the entrance to Kaneohe Bay.

“Y’know,” he said thoughtfully, “there was just fighters in that bunch strafing us.  I’ll bet you money there will be some bombers in here.  We got to find us a gun!”

We raced to the hangar.  It was not yet on fire but something had set off the sprinkler system and water was pouring down inside the big building (water that would quickly deplete the station reservoir).  We ran splashing to the ordnance room.  The door was open and the place had been stripped of guns.  Airplane 11-P-4 that we had been working on the night before had been pushed out the north door along with a VP-12 airplane and they sat nose to tail out on the ramp away from the fires.

“Wait a minute,” I said, “I’m sure I saw a fifty in the waist hatch of number seven back there.  Let’s get that!”

We ran back through the hangar.  Outside, 11-P-7 had one wing starting to burn but there were guns in the airplane.  We scrambled u[ the entry ladder to the gun blister.

“We’ll need c=some place to rig it,” Dick said.  “I know, there’s still no gasoline in Number Four—we’ll put it there and have a clear shot to the north where they came from.”

As we got the gun free of its mount, Glover appeared from somewhere.  Dick hailed him to give us a hand and we handed the heavy gun down to him.  Scrambling down the ladder, Dick shouted back at me, “Get a case of ammo and some magazines—should be a case under the aft bunk.  Hand it down then we’ll take the gun around.

The adrenalin was flowing.  Although a case of fifty-caliber ammunition weighs in the neighborhood of one hundred pounds and I weighed all of 140, I handed it out of the hatch with apparent ease, then turned and yanked four or five empty magazine cases from the rack on the bulkhead.  When I came down the ladder with them, Dick and Glover were disappearing around the corner of the hangar with the big machine gun between them.  The case of ammunition was sitting on the ground.

Under normal circumstances there was no way that I could shoulder that heavy case but these were not normal circumstances.  I swung the brown wooden case onto a shoulder, seized the straps of the magazines with my free hand, and went at a shuffling trot around hangar.

Dick and Glover got the big machine gun mounted on the trunnion in the port waist hatch facing north toward the entrance to the bay.  I handed up the case of ammunition then scrambled into the waist compartment with the empty magazines.  Glover said, “You don’t need me here—I’ll go and find another gun.”  He went down the ladder and disappearance into the hangar.

“Hurry up,” Dick snapped, “and get some ammo into those cans.  We don’t know when they might be back but I’ll bet it won’t be long!”

I opened the case, picked up a magazine, then curse.  “Dammit—that’s a port gun and these are starboard cans!  They are backwards—I’ll have go back.”

“Don’t take time for that, dummy—turn the feed spindles around!  They may be here any minute!”

I had no tools but I yanked the cover hinges out with my bare fingers, somehow got the spindle cotter pins out, and reversed them.  Dick did one of the but he mostly kept a wary eye on the northeast approach to the base.  In the process, I accumulated cuts on my hands so that I was leaving bloody smears here and there that would later give raise to scuttlebutt that one of the Frieze boys had gotten wounded in Number Four.

Just as I got the first magazine loaded and handed it up to Dick, we heard a shout in the distance, “Here the bastards come again!”

Dick slammed the magazine onto the gun, threaded in the belt, and pulled the charging handle.  “Keep your head down and keep them coming,” he said grimly.

I was sitting in the hatch leading forward.  By turning my head, I could see under Dick’s left arm.  We had a perfect field of fire away from the hangar and over the roof of the incomplete Hangar No. 2.  I folded an ammunition belt into the next magazine and slammed it into the ready rack on the bulkhead at his elbow just as the big machine gun started thudding.  A Zero was sweeping in over the other hangar headed straight for us, his wings winking points of fire and orange tracer reaching out as a twin line of bullets walked across the ramp toward us.  I could see Dick’s tracers fanning the air behind the speeding airplane as it pulled up over us and the hangar.  Several other streams of tracers from the ground were also passing behind the speeding airplane.

Adrenalin was pouring through us.  I slammed another magazine in the rack and yelled over the din, “Lead the sonamabitch!  Lead him like he was a duck!”

The Zeros kept coming and Dick’s machine gun kept up an almost steady thudding.  The canvas bag beneath the gun quickly filled with the empty brass casings spilling out.  I ripped the bag loose and let the hot casing spill onto the bilges under out feet.  The odor of burned gunpowder filled the compartment and the noise of the diving airplanes and hammering machine guns was continuous.  We had no anti-aircraft guns on the base and had only the machine guns we had salvaged from the burning planes, Springfield rifles, and Colt automatic pistols but this time we were fighting mad and we were fighting back with all we had.  When a magazine went empty Dick yanked it off, threw it behind him into my lap, slammed another in place, and recharged the gun in one continuous motion.

The day dissolved into a series of quick impressions.  At one point between Zeros I glanced out across the ramp and saw Joe Brooks holding the barrel of a thirty caliber macine gun on his shoulder like a human gun mount while a man knelt behind him and fired at the attackers.  Out by the road an officer knelt in the shallow ditch and fired a 45-caliber automatic.  Others were firing rifles.

A lull in the strafing attacks came and then the bombers came in from the sea.  They were small Kakajima 97s with fixed landing gear.  They came over at about fifteen hundred feet in a long line.  The smoke of the burning airplanes was blowing away from us so we could see them clearly.  When they dropped a bomb we could see the black shape tumble from the belly.  Each one looked like it was falling straight for us.

One bomb hit on the open ramp just a few yards short of our position.  A hug geyser of shattered concrete and sand was thrown up and the concussion nearly deafened us and rocked the airplane.  Another bomb hit the airplane parked immediately behind Number Four.  That concussion picked me up and slammed me face down into the hot shell casing in the bilges.  That was the only time Dick left his gun.  He wheeled around and grabbed my arm.  “You hurt?!”  I shook my head and he went back to the gun.

A bomb hit in the parking lot across the street.  I saw Whiskey Willis’ Chev coupe go fifty feet into the air, execute a slow roll, and land upside down.  Another scored a direct hit on the hangar behind us.  The new corrugated siding bulged at the explosion then went flying off in huge pieces.  The office spaces in the hangar were now burning.

When the bomber had gone the Zeros came back.  They went after every airplane that was not yet on fire, including Number Four.  At one point a Zero banked around low over us apparently assessing the damage or perhaps wondering why this one airplane from which tracers kept coming was not on fire.  For a long second, Dick and I gaped up at him.  The canopy was open and we could see the pilot clearly—his goggled face circled by the fur of a flying helmet.  He appeared to be grinning.’

Number Four was probably the only airplane on the ramp that was not on fire.  Three or four Zeros set up a racetrack pattern and kept coming after us.  Fortunately, they were good.  Their wing guns were set to converge at three hundred yards for air combat and they were flying so low on their strafing runs that the lines of tracers and bullets chipping the ramp kept straddling us.

At one point I had dropped an ammo can and leaned down to get it.  As I did, I felt a tug at the back of my ahirt as if there was someone forward in the airplane trying to get my attention.  I looked over my shoulder, but there was no one there.

Dick’s gun kept up its heavy thudding.  I slammed another full magazine into the rack and looked up just as one came at us.  The sight of the nose of a Zero with its wing guns spitting tracers became engraved indelibly on my memory.  This time Dick was leading the speeding airplane.  I saw his tracers hit the nose and walk the full length of the green fuselage.  A thin stream of white vapor poured out of the airplane and Dick yelled exultantly, “I HIT THAT SOME OF A BITCH!  I HIT HIM!”

I saw movement to my right and looked out the other blister toward the hangar.  Trucks were coming to that corner of the hangar and taking away wounded that were carried out of the burning building.  Six or seven dead had been laid out in a row beneath the port wing of the airplane.  Crimson blood was everywhere.  One body had no legs.  Another, that of a big burly sailor in dungarees, lay on its back with one arm raised toward that sky as if in death shaking a bloody fist at the sneak attackers.  The eyes were open, their glazed gaze directed at the treacherous sky.  I quickly turned away.

After what seemed like hours but was probably twenty or thirty minutes, the sound of diving airplanes and the hammering of machine guns and rifles dwindled.  The bombers had gone and the Zeros were swinging away out of range over the bay to get back in formation.  My ammo case was empty.  I sat with the last belt draped across my knees and watched them go.

The airplane Dick had hit was still streaming white fuel vapor.  When the others were in formation, the cripple turned and came back at us in a suicide run.  He came straight in at full throttle, his wing guns spitting win lines of tracers.  All guns on the ramp, including Dick’s, came alive and the Japanese flew into literally a vortex of our tracers.  The canopy shattered and the Zero pilot must have been dead because the airplane dived into the side of Hawaiiloa Hill at full throttle, guns still firing, and exploded sending a ball of greasy black and orange smoke rolling into the sky.  The gunfire ceased in the sudden silence I could hear cheers all over the ramp area.

Waking from a Dream on a Sunday Morning

Chapter 25

“Day of Infamy”

Sunday, December 7^th, 1941

In my dream I was lying on my back in my grandma’s back yard in Bona, Missouri.  I was near the row of hollyhocks and sweet peas along the kitchen garden fence and there were a couple of big yellow and black bumblebees buzzing around the flowers.  Every once in a while, one of them would swoop close, annoying me when I was trying to sleep.

Suddenly I woke and became aware that I was not in the Ozarks but in the barracks, lit by the morning sun, at Kaneohe Bay.  The bumblebees were airplanes diving and snarling overhead and past the barracks windows.  The man in the bunk next to mine was sitting up in bed craning his neck.

I rolled over, still annoyed.  “What in the hell is going on out there?  Sunday morning is a helluva time to be out flying!”

My shipmate shook his head, “Dunno—got a glimpse of one of them and it was a khaki colored fighter plane.  Must be the Army out on maneuvers again with a mock attack.”

I rolled back over.  “Well, I wish they would take their noisy damn maneuvers somewhere else and let a fellow sleep!”

Just then someone in the day room looking northeast toward the hangars called out, “Hey, they sure are making their maneuvers real—someone has set fire to a barrel of oil or something down by the hangar!  Lots of smoke coming up.”

Now wide awake, I got out of my bunk clad in just my skivvies, and walked to the day room.  A huge column of black smoke was boiling up from the ramp area and drifting west toward Kailua.  Others came and crowded around the windows.

“Looks like a helluva big barrel of oil to me,” I commented.

There was suddenly an inexplicable silence and an air of apprehension in the room.  Just then a snarling airplane came diving down across the officers’ country on the hill and banked low over the Ad building where the color guard was just forming for morning colors.  It was a single-seat fighter with a radial engine and streamlined plexiglass cockpit enclosure.  It had a tapering tail and wing and was painted olive green on top and grey on the bottom.  Both the wing and fuselage bore large solid red circles and there was a band of color around the aft fuselage.

Someone called out, “Hey, ain’t that a Jap insignia?”

An aggrieved voice answered with a snort as if unwilling to believe they were Japanese, “Naw, them is those old Army P-40s with radial engines—think they call them P-36s.  They are the Reds for maneuvers.  Pretty soon the Blues will be here to chase them away.”

The fighter that banked past pulled up into a wingover then dived back toward the hangar area.  We watched in horror as tracers reached out from it toward our parked airplanes.

“Army, hell,” someone shouted, “THEM’S JAPS!  WE GOT US A WAR!”

WAR—the word sent a shiver up my spine.  I froze where I was for a minute and watched on of our new PBYs burst into flame and add to the smoke now pouring up in greater quantity.  The whole group turned and surged toward our lockers for our clothes.

As I hurriedly pulled on dungarees, shirt, and shoes I had another   Somnumbing thought—my brother Richard would be down there at the hangar just finishing third shift.  It was still five minutes short of colors at 0800.  We had been hit ten minutes before.

The barracks was a scene of confusion as excited voices called out and men scrambled to get some clothes on.  I grabbed a white hat, slammed my locker door, and raced toward the head and the back door.  Someone got a hold of an arm and shouted, “Don’t go out there, dummy,--they are shooting up the place!”

I yanked my arm free, “Gotta go find my brother—he’s down at the hangar!”

As I slammed through the double doors someone was still shouting, “Frieze!  Frieze!  Come back here, you knot head!”

I leaped down the three steps from the breezeway between barracks buildings just as another fighter dived on the area with its machine guns spitting tracers uncomfortably close.  I hit the coarse grass and red dirt, but the pilot’s attention was on a car speeding down the street toward the hangars.  I did not see if he hit it—I as trying to burrow into the ground.

The enemy plane pulled up and headed out over the bay as I leaped up and ran full tilt down the street.  The noise was abating as the several airplanes that we soon learned were the new Japanese Zeros, all pulled away and headed out toward Chris Holmes Island to form up to leave.

I pounded down the street past the mess hall and around the corner past the fire house.  When I came into view of the parking ramp, it was a shambles.  Under the pall of black smoke, I could see PBYs already down on the ground burning fiercely.  Near the first one, I skidded to a halt and watched as the aluminum skin burned like tissue paper.  In the intense heat, a solid aluminum propeller blade curled over as if it were made of wax.  The heat on my face was like a blast furnace.

A combination of sweat and tears poured down my face as I raised my fists to the sky and shouted insanely, “You bastards—you miserable stinking bastards!”

The noise of the airplanes was receding as I continued on toward the hangar beyond the smoke.  There I began to meet men straggling away from the hangar toward the sick bay and barracks.  Some of them walked as if in a trance.  One man was supporting another whose dangling arm dripped bright red blood on the pavement.  I scanned each face for a sight of my brother.  Among them was one of our ordnancemen.  He was shirtless—I recall that he had several tattoos on his arms and chest—and was carrying a 03.06 Springfield rifle.  His eyes were fixed straight ahead and his face expressionless.

I caught his arm and called him by name, “Have you seen my brother?  Have you seen my brother Dick Frieze?!”

The man was obviously in shock.  He looked at me with vacant eyes, pulled his arm free, and walked on without a word in return.  I proceeded toward the hangar though the smoke scanning the people moving about for a sign of my brother when a voice haled me.  It was a CPO with a group of men trying to push one of the airplanes not yet on fire away from one that was buring furiously.  “You there!  Bear a hand!”

I joined the group, putting my shoulder to the wing strut.  We had gotten the big airplane a few yards away from the fire when a hand fell on my shoulder and, with a feeling of relief, I heard a familiar voice.

“Hey, Bub, where were you when the shit hit the fan—sacked out?”

It was Dick.  Some of the tension went out of me when I found he was not hurt.

Hawaii Goes on War Alert

On November 26^th 1941 Hawaii suddenly went on a war alert.  Scuttlebutt had it that the Secretary of War had sent out a “war warning” message.  Working hours were extended to 1600 (4 PM).  We put ramp sentries on our neatly lined up airplanes to guard against sabotage.  We were also ordered to fly evening patrols with the airplanes fully armed for the first time.  We had ammunition for our machine guns and under the wings that were two five-hundred-pound contact bombs and two 375-pound depth charges, all armed.  We simply raised an eyebrow when Lt. Clark informed us that our orders were to report, attack, and sink anything in the Hawaiian Defense Area flying a Japanese flag.

(In retrospect, those evening patrols would not have been effective even if the Japanese fleet had been approaching from the direction we searched.  Our flight path in each sector—and we did not have enough airplanes to cover the whole 360 degrees—was 350 miles out, thirty miles across and return.  A simple time and distance calculation shows that, had one PBY been flying directly at Admiral Nagumo’s fleet on a patrol limited to 350 miles out, the PBY would have returned back fifty miles short of the point where Nagumo would have had to be in order to race in and launch his airplanes 250 miles out at dawn.)

We on 11-P-11 flew two of the evening patrols during the last week of November.  We saw nothing but broaching whales and thousands of square miles of empty ocean.

Also during that last week in November, VP-11 was supplied with kits of parts to install self-sealing fuel cells in the port gasoline tanks of the airplanes.  They were neoprene rubber cells with a core material that would seal any bullet holes the wing might collect in battle.  We were also furnished kits of armor plate for installation on the fifty caliber machine guns, the back of the pilots’ seats and behind the tail gun position in the tunnel compartment.  Special crews were formed and I wound up on the second shift evening crew.  Dick was less fortunate—he was assigned to the third shift crew that would work midnight to 0800.  Tropical working hours were no more.  We were to work seven days a week until all the airplanes had been modified.  We were girding for the war that everyone felt was inevitable.

Another event of that fateful week was that on Thursday, December 4^th, Ensign Foss notified me that my examination packet for the Annapolis prep school had arrived.  It was to be an eight-hour examination under his supervision.  He said we would schedule it for Monday, December 8^th.  In the meantime, he had said nothing to anyone and would keep the packet locked in his wooden desk in the squadron offices.  My heart sand and I was almost jumping for joy.  Glover was the leading petty officer of my second shift crew and he kept shaking his head at the way I bucked rivets for the armor plates on 11-P-4 until midnight—whistling cheerfully and smiling or grinning the whole time.

“Damn, young Frieze,” Glover finally said.  “You look like a cat with canary feathers in its teeth!  What the hell has got into you?”

I just shook my head and grinned wider, “Nothin’, Glover, just feeling good, that’s all.”

He shrugged, shook his head again, and pulled the trigger on the riveting gun.

Earlier that week I had received a letter from Elaine in which she told me that two of my VHS classmates would be in Honolulu with the Willamette University football team to play the University of Hawaii team on Saturday, December 6^th.  I wangled special liberty on Friday the 5^th and went into town in the evening.  The WU team was staying at the Moana Hotel in Waikiki.

It was the usual peaceful Hawaii evening.  The coconut palms lining the boulevard waved in a soft evening breeze.  The sidewalk lei stands near the Royal Hawaiian filled the air with the delicate odor of pikake and ginger blossoms.  In the fading sunset there was the usual air of tranquility and no hint of the danger that was heading toward us from the vast reaches of the North Pacific.

The football players were not allowed out of the hotel after supper so I visited the two of them from VHS in their room, a corner room overlooking the beach and the ocean.  They had not been close friends of mine (I no longer recall their names), but we visited for a while.  They duly admired my crisp white uniform and I asked about mutual friends at home.  During the conversation one of them wanted to know why there were so many servicemen on the streets of Honolulu.

I recall my answer clearly, and the two of them were to quote it in Vancouver when they finally got back stateside.  It was really just a bit of bravado, “Hey, we’re sitting on a powder keg out here, boys, and one of these days someone is liable to light the fuse!”

They just laughed (and I joined them).  We had no inkling that two days later we would be in a shooting war and they would be walking beach patrol as volunteers to assist the Coast Guard and Army while they waited for transportation home.  A Japanese attack on Hawaii could not have been more inconceivable to us or, indeed, to anyone.  We were sure that if the Japanese pulled anything it would be somewhere in the Far East.

Since the football players were confined to the hotel for the night, I wished them luck in the game the next day (I do not recall who won that Saturday), said goodbye and wandered off to the Waikiki Tavern for a couple of drinks before I caught the “Red Peril” back over the Pali to Kaneohe.

On Saturday afternoon, since I had the duty that weekend, I again worked on the second shift ground crew on airplane 11-P-4 in the hangar.  The armor plate installation ahd been completed.  We drained all the gasoline out of the big wing fuel tanks and ventilated them in preparation for installation of self-sealing cells in the port tank.

It was not an easy job.  The big black rubber fuel cells had to be collapsed and worked into the integral fuel tanks through small manholes barely large enough for a man to get through worked into position, then joined together with rubber crossfeed tubes.

We had all but one of the cells in place when we were relieved at midnight by the third shift crew who would work until eight on Sunday morning.  My brother Richard and his pal Joe Brooks were on the relieving crew.  I recall that Joe was kidding Dick about a crap game in the head from which they had just come.  Dick had always been a much better poker player than a crap shooter and he never knew when to drag some money after two or three good passes.  He had once more gotten on a roll and ran up a pot of two or three hundred dollars.  Instead of dragging a stake, he shot it all, rolled box cars, and came away broke.

I went to the barracks, showered, and rolled into my bunk blissfully aware that the next day was Sunday and I could sleep in late.  I would miss morning chow in the mess hall, but I went happily to sleep anticipating getting up at leisure and wandering over to ships service for some bacon and eggs.

A Postcard from the Edge of Peace

I waited eagerly for Chief Byron to post the new permanent flight crew assignments the next morning and let out a whoop of joy.  I was once more assigned to 11-P-11 with “Dopey” Clark’s crew.  Not only that, Foret had made CPO and Ernie Davenport was the plane captain.  I had been moved up to second mech and a new man, Paul Herrin, was our third mech.  Clark, our PPC, had been promoted to lieutenant junior grade and Ens. “Whiskey” Willis was still the co-pilot.  I forget his name, but we had an experienced ARM1c for first radio man.  It was a good crew.

Davenport had been on a ferry crew and he lost no time getting us familiar with the changes in the PBYs.  The engines had late model Stromberg pressure injection carburetors that had automatic temperature controls.  No longer would we have to sit in the tower endlessly and manually keeping the temperatures right.  In the galley compartment beneath the mechanic’s tower seat there was a new type of auxiliary power unit (we called it a “putt-putt”) that was designed to run on aviation fuel instead of white gasoline from its own little fuel tank.  The putt-putt was plumbed directly into the main fuel tanks (a fact that would become important to us at a later date.).

Back in the roomy waist gun blisters, the big black fifty-caliber machine guns were mounted on pivots so that it was not necessary to swing them up into position.  To fire, the gunner simply opened the side of the blister and swung the gun out, all the while well shielded from the slipstream.  Forward in the nose, behind the bomb sight window, the PBY-5s were equipped with the latest (and still secret) Norden bombsights. Being classified, it was necessary for the bombardier to carry the bombsight to the airplane in a black bag just before flight and return it to the ordnance vault immediately after the flight. [Since my father writing his memoires the Norden bombsight has been replaced by a radar based bomb sight.]

By the middle of November all of us were fully aware of the deteriorating of U.S.-Japanese relations.  We knew from scuttlebutt that the entry of the U.S. into the war in Europe was more and more imminent and we were fully aware of the “Axis” that had been formed by Germany, Italy, and Japan.  Tojo and his minions became our very potential enemy in the Pacific and a serious and grim air crept into our training flights.

We had read the accounts and seen the newsreels of the debacle at a coastal town in Europe called Dunkirk.  We knew that President Roosevelt had armed our merchant ships participating in convoys to England.  We knew that Navy destroyers had been sunk guarding those convoys.  We knew, too, that Roosevelt was still faced with a very divided United States with the pacifists and German bundists still making themselves heard.  We had had absolutely no idea and no hint that we might be in immediate danger in Hawaii, however, and went about our training with a blithe attitude, still observing those relaxed tropical working hours and long weekends.

Awaiting the New PBY-5s

"We were an operating squadron again."

During that almost idyllic but rather boring peaceful time, I maintained a desultory correspondence not only occasionally with the family back home, but also with Patty Cross, Elaine, and Shirley Mills.  The latter did not last.  Somehow I was just not much interested and her letters were not the breezy, chatty notes that I got form Elaine and Patty.  Shirley’s letters tended to have a rather possessive flavor to them.  I decided that I could do with less letter writing so, finally, I wrote her that we were not meant for each other—a sort of “Dear Jane” letter.  In return she sent me a new portrait of herself inscribed, “To Conrad, a boy who will always have a spot in my heart”.  I thought that would be that.

I kept up my correspondence off and on with both Elaine and Patty, keeping them up to date and asking about people and things at home.  Elaine was the most faithful to answer.  She wrote as delightfully as she talked, often skipping blithely from subject to subject and always was interesting and entertaining.

Around the first of November (I did not record the exact date in my diary) every one of us were on the ramp the day the new PBY-5s came sweeping around Bird Island and over the bay.  They were a magnificent sight when they made one pass in formation over the base before they peeled off to land.  They were powered by the latest supercharged Pratt & Whitney R-1830-92 engines that produced 1,450 horsepower each.  That gave them better takeoff capability, a cruise speed of 110 knots, and improved climb capability.

There were external changes that were obvious.  They flat sliding waist gunners hatches had been replaced by Plexiglas gun “blisters” that also gave good visibility for anti-submarine patrols.  The shaped of the rudder had been changed to a straight trailing edge.  Instead of the silver fuselages and rudders with squadron stripes, the new airplanes were painted a camouflage blue on the topsides and light grey on the bottom in an effort to make the airplanes harder to see by potential enemy either from above or below.  All in all, the PBY-5s had much more businesslike appearance than the old PBY-1s and the deep-throated roar of those big fourteen cylinder radial engines literally sent delighted shivers along my spine.

Our rather sullen non-cooperation with Lt. Delaney, born of boredom and inactivity, was suddenly forgotten.  We enthusiastically reinforced the beach crew with volunteers (me included), splashed the big 600-pound side mounts into the water, and in record time brought those beautiful aircraft ashore.  We were an operating squadron again.

The Fighting Frieze Brothers

During that summer [1941], my opportunistic brother, Dick, teamed up with one of our mechs named Bill Greer.  Greer fancied himself as an Edward G. Robinson type and he did, indeed resemble that actor playing a gangster role.  He was short and stocky, swarthy complexion, black hair, and a thin black mustache.  There was always a cigar butt in the corner of his mouth around which there was an almost perpetual sardonic smile.  He was a much better “card mechanic” than he was an airplane mechanic and brother Dick was an apt pupil.  (It was not long before I would no longer play poker with either of them.)

Actually, both Greer and Dick played it straight in most games with squadron shipmates except for a little practice now and then to keep their fingers supple.  They confined their card sharking to games at Army or Marine bases.  They would go into a game separately and, with one of them on each side of the table and apparently strangers to each other, they would take turns “third basing” for each other and invariably come away with a nice profit—enough that they solved the problem of liberty transportation.  Greer, in gangster tradition, turned up with a big black Cadillac sedan.  Dick went for a flashier “date buggy” and showed up one day with a big baby blue 1937 LaSalle convertible sedan equipped with chrome spotlights, fender mounted spare tires, and a powerful straight-eight that was a real gas guzzler.

Our life at Kaneohe Bay was truly idyllic through the summer of 1941.   We all agreed that it had to be the best duty in the entire Navy.  We spent most of our working hours on the ramp scrubbing and polishing those old airplanes and using liberal quantities of yellow zinc chromate to fight the inevitable salt air corrosion on the aluminum structure.  Every three or four days we would go on a three or four-hour training flight—the pilots practicing navigation and giving us strafing and bombing practice.

The PBY had no internal bomb bays.  Our armament of bombs, depth charges, or torpedoes were carried on external racks up under the broad wings.  We could carry either twelve one hundred pound bombs, four five hundred pound bombs or depth charges, or two 21-inch torpedoes.  We were provided little lead practice bombs to drop wither on smoke markers or on target sleds towed by ships.  Infrequently, we went on high altitude bombing practice over the bombing range on the island of Kahoolawe off the west side of Maui.  Those were long flights because, at the PBY-1 cruising speed of 100 knots and a climb speed of ninety coupled with a laboring rate of climb, it took a while to get to our maximum altitude of 12,000 feet.

In September, we got some welcome news.  We were to fly the creaking old PBY-1s stateside and pick up thirteen brand new improved model PBY-5s at the factory in San Diego.  We were ecstatic—a trans-Pacific mass flight and we would get brand new airplanes!  Many of us on assigned flight crews did not get to make the flights, however.  Leading Chief Duke Byron re-shuffled flight crew assignments so that the ferry crews were made up of the older men who had been in the islands long enough to qualify for annual leave.  Dick, Greer, Glover, Joe Brooks, and I would be among those left behind to more or less twiddle our thumbs until the ferry crews got back with the new planes in early November.

When the airplanes had departed on their stateside flight and we had received word that all planes made it without incident, we settled into an even more leisurely routine at Kaneohe.  Duty sections were small and liberty very plentiful.  Our VP-11 acting commanding officer, Lt. Delaney, was soon faced with a problem—how to keep the 150-odd men without airplanes busy.  He tired several special activities such as a boxing tournament that went over like a lead balloon.  When he tried organizing softball teams he struck out entirely.  Most of us did not particularly like Delaney and simply would not play ball for him.  He finally gave up and simply gave all the special liberty that was requested.

I did stumble onto one special activity in which I offered to participate.  The wife of our executive officer decided to form a VP-11 drama group and the play she selected for an opener was “Seven Keys to Baldpate”—the senior class play in which I had the leading role of Magee in 1939.  I could still remember most of the lines without looking at the lay book.  At the tryouts, without reading from the script, I was selected to play Magee once more.  It was not to be, however.  The group was formed shortly before the arrival of our new airplanes and rehearsals were scheduled to begin in earnest the second week of December so the play could be presented in conjunction with the holidays.  The Japanese were to put a stop to that.

During those halcyon days of October and November in 1941, Richard and I had a reputation in the squadron for frequent verbal scrapping as sibling will inevitably do.  We went on liberty together often in the blue LaSalle, usually accompanied by Glover, but we occasionally had a few arguments.  Sometime during that period I forget exactly when, we became “those fighting Frieze brothers” purely by accident.

Since civilian clothes were not allowed on the base, we had each rented lockers at a “locker club” in Honolulu and had purchased some basic civilian clothes to wear on liberty instead of our uniforms.  I had a pair of slacks, some sports shirts, and a lightweight jacket.

On one liberty both Glove and a shipmate Art Grace had gone into town with us.  During the course of the evening Grace managed to get himself thoroughly drunk—and when he was drunk he was mean.  The rest of us had a few drinks as well.  Sometime in the shank of the evening we went back to the locker club to change back into uniform to go back to Kaneohe.

I do not recall what started the argument between Grace and Dick, but Grace got mad and stomped out of the locker club declaring that no way would he ride back to Kaneohe in the blue car.  We just let him go although we knew that the last Windward Transit had left and that he did not have money for a cab.  “Hell,” Glover said, “let the bastard walk or hitch hike—might sober him up a little!”  We went to the Black Cat and had a couple more drinks.

Somewhere up in Nuuanu Valley on our way to the Pali we caught up with Art Grace trudging along the shoulder of the road.  Apparently he had been unable to thumb a ride.  I insisted that, after all, he was a VP-11 shipmate and that we should stop and pick him up.  Dick pulled over.

Grace had not sobered up appreciably.  He proceeded to cuss us out soundly and finally got so mad that he pulled a very small penknife out and opened the blade, declaring as he did that he would uct one of us.  I had enough to drink that I grabbed his arm, got the little knife away from him and threw it off into the brush getting a cut on a finger in the process.  Art was so drunk he really did not offer much resistance at that point. 

Later I recalled only that Glover said, “Shee-it, we ought to Sunday punch the bastard and throw him into the car!”

In my alcohol fog I thought I was just the man to Sunday punch Art and swung a hard right at him.  It was unfortunate that Dick was standing directly behind Grace, half supporting the frunk.  Just as I swung, Art’s head slumped forward (he was apparently passing out) and my fist missed him and caught Dick on the cheekbone.  I was wearing a heavy Navy ring on that hand and it laid open a pretty good gash on his cheek.  We shoved Art into the back seat and went on to Kaneohe.

At muster the next morning Dick showed up with a bandaid on his cheek and a beautiful purple shiner.  Of course the story inevitably got twisted and scuttlebutt was simply that I had done it to him—which was true, but I had not meant to hit him.  It was an accident.  When I would explain that, eyebrows would raise and someone would snort, “Oh sure!”

Art Grace, it turned out, was an ornery s.o.b. and his story was that Dick ahd held him while I tried to clobber him and that he could whip us both only one at a time.  Since he did not have a mark on him, he was ignored and it was assumed merely that Dick and I had a fight and I belted him.  Our reputation as “the fighting Frieze brothers” was really quite undeserved.

Except for the inevitable occasional squabbling of siblings, Richard and I got alone more as good friends than brothers.  He was reluctant to lend me the big blue LaSalle to go off in liberty with others but we used it frequently, often with glover or other friends.

I sometimes double-dated with Dick when he took his little Japanese friend from the saimen stand out for an evening or for a picnic.  She had a friend named Vivian, a beautiful, slim little half Chinese girl who sometimes came along as mu date.  We never developed more than a casual relationship but she liked me well enough that on one occasion she presented me with a good luck charm.  It was a small teak statue of the Laughing Buddha.  Supposedly, rubbing the Buddha’s fat belly would bring good luck.

One of our favorite spots for a night beer party was Haunama Bay which would later become famous for a steamy beach scene in Jack Jones’ “From Here to Eternity”.  It is a developed Hawaii state park now with asphalt paths, lights, and restrooms; however, in those days it was a very isolated cover reached only by a steep, winding path down the cliff from the Kam Highway.  With that car, we could always recruit a few girls.  I never asked Glover where he found some of the dates he would have.  They were usually haole and seemed quite familiar with the South Hotel Street area.