Everday Heroes

In my memory, the next ten days were an exhausting blur of long patrol flights sometimes all day and sometimes all night.  I had been re=assigned as second mechanic and gunner on Gibson’s crew.  When we were not flying we spend long hours maintaining the airplane.  Whenever I was off duty I simply fell onto that cot in the corner of the hangar and went promptly to sleep.  On Christmas Eve we had one of the hunter/killer night patrols.  The next day Gibson roused me around noon.

“Hey, knucklehead,” he said.  “you are sleeping Christmas Day away!  They are serving Christmas dinner at the field kitchen.”

I took my mess kit, ate a Christmas dinner of turkey, dressing, and all the trimmings—which I barely taste, then hit the sack again because we were scheduled for patrol the next morning.  We continued to find nothing out there except empty sky and ocean.

Replacements started coming in—new men and some PBY squadrons from stateside to supplement the few airplanes we were flying around the clock.  VP-22 got new personnel and on December 30^th my temporary duty on Ford Island ended and I reported back to VP-11 at Kaneohe.

During my absence, most of the wreckage at Kaneohe had been cleaned up.  The shattered and burned PBY-5s on the ramp had been cut up and sent back stateside as scrap.  The bombed and burned hangar had been cleared and re-construction had begun.  Meanwhile, we operated out of a small hangar located between the bombed No. 1 and the still incomplete No. 2 hangars.

PBY squadron VP-71 had arrived at Kaneohe.  We were to furnish airplane maintenance and relief flight crews while jVP-11 waited for its own airplanes.  The destroyed “country club of the Pacific” was slowly becoming operational again.  I was once more assigned as second mechanic on my old 11-P-11 flight crew with Davenport and with Clark and Willis as pilots.

Richard, Glover, and I spent New Year’s Eve in the station beer garden quietly sipping Acme beer while they brought me up to date.  The senior pilots, most of whom had been ensigns, had been promoted to lieutenants.  Most of the Aps, including our friend Bobby Hines and Max Ricketts, had been given temporary commissions and were not lieutenants junior grade.  The only enlisted pilot not given a commission was a screwball NAP first class named Miller.  His record was not good and he had a reputation for raising hell and getting in trouble with the Shore Patrol on liberty.  Instead of a temporary commission they made him a CPO.  Glover chuckled when related the reason that was given why Miller was not commissioned with the rest.  The selection board simply informed Miller that an officer was a gentleman by act of Congress and they could find no evidence that he was a gentleman!  He was assigned as third pilot on Lt. Clark’s flight crew.

News about our shipmates who had been casualties was depressing.  Our VP-11 dead included AOM3c Buckley, AMM1c Formoe, Ensign Foss, AMM3c Manning, seaman Robinson (an newly arrived recruit), Ensign Smartt who had been the JOOD relieving Foss, and S1c Luther Weaver, Dick’s parachute loft buddy.

VP-11, VP-12, and VP-14 at Kaneohe had lost a total of eighteen dead plus Isaac Lee, a civilian contractor’s employee.  Kaneohe wounded had number sixty-six. 

Our leading chief, “Duke” Byron who had been hit in the belly had been taken to the hospital at Kaneohe on the 7^th and a Japanese surgeon had saved his life by removing four or five feet of intestine.  Duke was on the way stateside on a hospital ship and would live.  Our leading yeoman, Ken Nash, had lost an arm.  Joe Crowder, a radioman, had lost an eye.  Most of the many other wounds were relatively minor and the wounded had been or would be returned to duty.

Dick and Glover also related the system that had been set up to recognize acts of heroism on December 7^th.  Few officers had been present in the ramp and hangar area and there was no record of individual acts.  The base commander had requested that names of those who had performed in an outstanding fashion be submitted so that commendations could be written up.

“Kee-rist,” Glover had said, “who the hell wants a medal for just doing what we are trained to do?!  There wasn’t any heroes down there—just a scared bunch of knotheads that were mad and trying to fight back!  Hell, they are recommending John Finn of VP-14 for a Congressional Medal of Honor because he stood out on the open ramp with a fifty-caliber and kept shooting after he got a bullet in his arm!  Hell, we all saw old Joe Brooks out there holding a thirty-caliber on his shoulders while someone fired it—the hot barrel burned the skin off his hands.

“You know that radioman, Perry?  Scuttlebutt is that he turned in his own name—probably get a Navy Cross out of it.  Claimed he was out there firing a Springfield rifle and was sure he hit that one we shot down.  Only time I got a glimpse of Perry, he had a rifle all right, but he also was under a bomb truck!  Hell, everybody on the ramp were pumping bullets into the sucker when he came back.  Nobody shot him down—everyone did!”

“Well,” I said, “I know for a fact that it was Dick cut open his belly tank.  I saw his tracers hit and I saw the fuel start streaming out.  Why didn’t you turn in Dick’s name?  That alclad skin wasn’t Any protection—we might as well have been out in the open.”

Richard had been sitting quietly sipping his beer but he jumped on my statement, “BULL—ain’t no one turning in my name for no damn medal!!  Like Glover said, you don’t get a medal for just doing what we are trained to do!  I don’t know how we got out of it without getting hit—we were a dumb couple of country boys to set that gun up in an airplane that wouldn’t catch fire so they just kept on strafing us.  Let the Finns and the Perrys have their tinware—we ain’t no heroes and we don’t want no phony medals.

The three of us got liberty the next day, took the big baby blue LaSalle, drove in to Honolulu, and got more than a little bit drunk.

[Uncle Dick’s children and I have always known our fathers were heroes regardless of what they said about December 7^th.  Yes, they did what they were trained to do, but Uncle Dick was an expert marksman and his younger brother kept feeding him ammunition that horrific day.  No one will ever be able to tell us different.  Richard S. Frieze shot down that Zero.]

The Recovery of Pearl Harbor

Sunken remains of ARIZONA

Between December 10^th and December 20^th, I was in the air with one crew or another for nearly a hundred hours.  We continued to find nothing but empty ocean in all directions from the island.  The weather was, as usual, perfect but the blue sky and sharply-defined horizon were ominous.  Our rage at the Japanese was unabated and we longed for a chance to strike back.  The Japanese, however, had sailed back to their homeland islands.

I got my one day of liberty while I was at Ford Island on Sunday, December 21^st.  It was not very satisfying.  First of all I discovered that I had packed neither my black silk neckerchief nor my good liberty shoes.  I borrowed a neckerchief from Gibson then did the best I could with black Shinola liquid shoe polish on my scuffed work shoes.  At least my one suit of whites and my white hat were crisp and clean right out of the laundry.  It got me by—the JOOD (Junior Officer of the Day) inspecting uniforms on Landing A let me board the liberty boat.

Pearl Harbor was recovering rapidly from the sneak attack.  The waters of the bay were almost clean except for slicks of oil still forming from the blasted and sunken hulk of the ARIZONA and the capsized OKLAHOMA.  Across the East Loch, the wrecked destroyers, CASSIN and DOWNES, had been removed from the dry-dock and the PENNSYLVANIA looked nearly ready for sea.  Cutting torches still flared on the superstructure of the ARIZONA which would be shipped back to the states for use as material.  The slanted bottom of “the Okie” was deserted—the remainder imprisoned were long since dead and would remain entombed until the ship was righted later.  The crew of ARIZONA would stay where they were.  The ship had already been declared a memorial and would remain forever in commission in the United States Navy with her crew aboard (It still is in commission.) [Cannot help but cry about this.]

The whole atmosphere of Hawaii had undergone a radical change after the attack.  The scene was the same—palm trees waving in the soft breezes, cloud-studded blue sky, white surf rolling onto the beaches—but the blue ocean, the sky, and the horizon were ominous.  The Japanese could be out there anywhere, anytime.

There was no Nimitz freeway from Pearl Harbor to Honolulu in those days.  Only a two-lane dusty country road through the kiave trees that was perpetually being worked on by road crews.  The liberty bus slowed as we passed one of those work crews.  They were mostly Japanese laborers.  Their almost-eyed round brown faces stared up at us as we passed.  For a moment I felt a wild urge to smash in those faces.  (It would be years before I lost that animosity for anything Japanese.) [But he did and made friends in Japan, but that was much later.]

Beyond the oriental road crew there was a typical little white-trimmed green Hawaiian house nestled in some scraggly banana trees.  In the red dirt dooryard there were three or four Japanese-Hawaiian small children at play.  They looked up at the sailors on the bus with wide innocent cheerful grins and waved gaily.  I did not wave back at the children, but my bitter thoughts were suddenly replaced by a feeling of shame for having had them.  I closed my eyes and leaned against the window frame.  It’s not those people that caused it, I told myself—it is the fault of those sonsabitches Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini! I had heard the rumors that on the west coast of the United States Japanese were being rounded up and sent to “relocation camps” away from the coast.  Presumably, the same thing was happening to Japanese-Hawaiians here on Oahu.

When I got off the bus in Honolulu, I crossed Beretania to The Black Cat for a drink.  It was the first liberty weekend for any service personnel since the attack.  The bar was jammed with the white, khaki, and green uniforms of sailors, soldiers, and marines.  I gave up and wandered on down South Hotel Street toward the Honolulu Café.  With early curfew and blackout in effect the many cathouses were doing a daytime land office business.  There were waiting lines of servicemen down the stairs and onto the sidewalk at the Honolulu Rooms and the New Senator Hotel.

It was not for me.  I retraced my steps, went uptown, and caught the Number Seven bus to Waikiki.  Wartime and martial law had changed Waikiki as well.  The lei stands and souvenir shops were open; however, there were more service uniforms on the street than civilian tourists.  The famed beach at Waikiki was deserted and was lined with coils of barbed wire against possible invasion.  The military, having been literally caught sleeping, had over-reacted almost to the point of paranoia.

The Waikiki Tavern was comfortably crowded but I found a stool at the end of the bar and ordered a drink.  I saw no one that I recognized from Kaneohe so I simply sat and ordered one drink after another while I chatted with the bartender and whoever happened to take the stool next to me.  When I realized that the tip of my nose was getting numb—I had learned that was a signal that I had enough—I walked unsteadily down to The Wagon Wheel Restaurant, ate a ham steak with fried bananas (the specialty of the house), caught the city bus back down town, then the Navy bus back to Pearl Harbor.

Hunter-Killer Patrol

The next few days I recall only in a blur of continual flying.  We extended our patrols to the practical limit of a PBY—750 miles out, fifty miles across, and 750 miles home.  The fifteen hundred mile patrols took more than twelve hours at our cruise speed of 110 knots—twelve hours of monotony at seven hundred fifty feet ceaselessly scanning thousands of square miles of empty ocean.  We took off at 0500 and landed in the late afternoon.

When we had a patrol to the east, we kept hoping to see a huge relief convoy headed for Hawaii, but with the U.S. war machine just gearing up, it never came.  We continued to make do with what we had—airplanes on which even the patches had patches.

After a week of that, we came in one afternoon and the leading chief said I was to report to the Operations Office.  There the assistant operations officer stated that I had been promoted to temporary plane captain on 22-P-3 because the regular plane captain was in sick bay.  The airplane was being readied for a night patrol and I was to report right away.  I assumed that Gibson would be notified that he needed a new second mech.

After a quick bite to eat from a field kitchen behind the hangar, I went to 22-P-3.  The pilot briefed me on a new tactic that we were to try.  A submarine had been sighted on the surface charging batteries a night or two before in the vicinity of Maui.  We were to fly as “hunter-killer” mission.

Each PBY-5 had two flare tubes in the tunnel hatch from which parachute flares that cast a wide circle of light could be ejected.  Our airplane had about twenty extra flares loaded into the bunk compartment.  The tactic was for two airplanes to go out—one to fly in front as the hunter and periodically drop flares, the other to come along behind and look for surfaced submarines in the light of the flares.  As usual, we were armed with both contact bombs and depth charges.

I chuckled ruefully when the pilot finished and said, “Sir, do you know how big that damned ocean is out there?  Tale about a needle in a haystack.”

“I know,” he said, “but we can’t think of anything else.  We believe that they may be using the protected waters of Lahaina Roads to charge their batteries and we just might find one on the surface.”

We took off at sunset, followed by another PBY also loaded with extra flares so we could take turns being the hunter and the killer, and arrived off Lahaina after full dark.  It was monotonous—drop two flares, reload the tubes, drop two more, and on and on.  It almost worked.  About two 0’clock, just before we ran out of flares, in the far edge of the circle of white light from the burning magnesium, we saw what at first looked like a line of breakers.  It could not be breakers, however, because we were two or three miles off shore and there were no rocks in that vicinity showing on the chart.

It was the wake of a conning tower as a submarine went under the water.  We made a diving turn but by the time we got to the spot there was only a swirl left.  Not knowing which way the sub captain would turn under the dark water, the pilot elected not to waste depth charges.  We made a radio report, but there was no sonar-equipped ship in the vicinity.

By three o’clock in the morning, both airplanes had run out of flares.  Wishing to land in the daylight, we climbed to three thousand feet and simply cruised around on autopilot until the sun came up.  Not having slept for 36 hours or more, the entire crew was exhausted.  In spite of opening the side window for air, my head kept falling forward as I sat in the tower.  Suddenly I realized I had been sound asleep.  The panel clock said three-forty-five and my last entry in the engine log was at three o’clock.  I had slept a half hour or more.

There had not been a sound on the interphone.  I logged the instrument reading then slid quietly down the ladder from the tower.  In the radio compartment both the radioman at his set and the navigator at his chart table were sound asleep.  Forward I could see the heads of both the pilot and the copilot resting on the back of their seats and not moving.  Aft there were two men in bunks.  I did not go aft to see if the waist gunners were asleep but climbed back to the tower.

Apparently the airplane had been droning along on autopilot for more than a half hour with all exhausted hands asleep.  I figured that I should discreetly wake those on duty so I hit the interphone with a call from tower to pilot.  When he groggily answered, I gave him an unnecessary fuel report that we were down to one hundred fifty gallons in each wing tank.  He thanked me and an hour later, just as sunrise, we landed back at Pearl.

When I reported the Operations Officer, an older lieutenant commander, was indignant.  He looked me over distastefully.  I was a bit disheveled.  My dungarees were dirty, I was unshaven, and when I pulled off my grimy white hat my hair was uncombed.  I was bleary-eyed from having nothing but a thirty-minute nap during the past day and a half.

“Sailor,” the commander said, “where the hell have you been today—goofing off?!  You were scheduled to fly on 22-P-6 and you could not be found!  They had to scrounge another second mech.”

I stammered something like, “I—uh—well—sire, I was flying.  They put me on 22-P-3 as relief plane captain for that hunter-killer patrol last night.  We just now landed.”

The officer’s stony face softened and his eyebrows went up.  “you mean you were flying all night?!”

“Yessir—Lieutenant Dobson sent me out on the crew.  I figured they had replaced me on Gibson’s crew.”

“Well—I’ll be damned!”  The Operations Officer rose and strode out to look at the schedule board on the hangar bulkhead outside the office.  He turned to me and said ruefully, “It was a mistake, Frieze.  Someone fouled up—everything has been a mess since the attack.  Why didn’t you tell Dobson that you had just come in from a long patrol last night?”

I remember my answer distinctly, “I—uh—well, sir, I reckon I just figured that is the way you have to run a war.  Never been in one before.”

He chuckled then looked at me compassionately.  “No, that is not the way we have to run it, son.  We all have to get our rest.  How long has it been since your slept?”

“Well, I got a little nap in the airplane this morning (I felt I’d better not mention that everyone else did at the same time) and I got a few hours night before last.”

“You are now off duty—I’ll do some crew shuffling.  Get yourself some chow and some sleep and check the schedule board this evening.  I won’t schedule you before tomorrow morning.”

I got a mess kit of scrambled eggs and bacon from the field kitchen.  Even the strong black Navy coffee could not keep me awake.  I fell on my cot in the corner of the hangar and, in spite of the noisy activity all around, slept for ten hours.

First War Patrol

Chapter 26

December 1941

The thirty of us from Kaneohe were taken by truck to the Pearl Harbor Naval Base where the motor launch would take us to Landing A on Ford Island.  The boat, normall spick and span in grey paint and shined brass works, was filthy with oil and blood from picking up bodies and debris in the oil covered, wreckage strewn waters.

We stared in silent awe as the boat crossed to the island.  The tall tripod mast of the ARIZONA leaned at an angle above the sunken hull of the battleship.  The dull red bottom of the capsized OKLAHOMA was sprinkled with the blue-white flares of cutting torches in the on-going attempt to cut through to men still strapped inside the battered ships, only some of which I could identify—WEST VIRGINIA, CALIFORNIA, TENNESSEE, MARYLAND.

In the big dry-dock in East Loch, the wreckage of the destroyers CASSIN and DOWNES leaned against each other, trapping the battleship PENNYSLVANIA, flagship of the Pacific Fleet, in the damaged dry-dock.  Over beyond Ford Island was the battered bulk of the NEVEDA which had been the only battleship to get under way during the attack.  Under intense dive bombing, NEVADA had been beached on Hospital Point rather than be sunk blocking the narrow entrance to the harbor.  The waters of the bay were covered with a thick scum of oil and pieces of wreckage.  Motor whaleboats were everywhere picking up the flotsam and still occasionally pulling aboard an old covered body.

Not a word was spoken in our group until the boat desposited us at Landing A.  As we debarked onto the wide concrete landing we walked past a row of tarpaulin covered bodies that had been pulled from the bay.  From behind me I heard someone mutter bitterly, “God damn the sons-a-bitches!”

No time was wasted.  We were escorted to our living quarters that were a roped-off corner of the least badly damaged PBY hangar on the island.  Rows of folding cots had been set up.  Since the Ford Island barracks were overflowing with survivors, the corner of that hangar was where we would sleep while maintenance work on airplanes was done.  The windows of the hanglar had been painted black so that work could continue twenty-four hours a day.

As soon as we had deposited our ditty bags (I had brought only a spare suit of dungarees and one white uniform) on a chosen cot, we lined up at a desk near the VP-22 operations office for assignment.  I was assigned to 22-P-6 and was informed that the airplane was on the ramp and was scheduled for evening patrol.

22-P-6 had not come through the attack unscathed.  The fuselage, wing, and tail suraces were peppered with bullet holes.  Those below the waterline had been patched properly by the metalsmiths but those on the upper surfaces simply had fabric patches doped over the holes.

The plane captain on 22-P-6 was a harried second class AMM named Gibson.  His face was grim and there were dark circles under his eyes.  He greeted me warmly because both the original plane captain, a first class, and the third mech had been wounded in the attack and were in the hospital.  He had been promoted to plane captain, I would be second mech, and our third mech was a seaman striker for AMM.

When I commented that Gibson looked bushed, he sighed and said, “Don’t rightly remember when I had some sack time—we worked all day yesterday and last night to get this old bird flyable.”

The pilots came aboard while Gibson and I were finishing our pre-flight checks of the equipment.  All guns were loaded and we were carrying two five hundred pound bombs and two depth charges on the wing racks.  When he found that I had more than fifty hours of flight time, Gibson put me in the mechanics tower for takeoff and the first watch.  He would try to get some sleep when we were airborne.

When I scrambled into the tower, I saw that there were two bullet holes in the instrument panel.  I called them to Gibson’s attention.  “I know,” he said tiredly.  “I checked all the lines behind the panel and they look okay.  Slapped some tape on the holes outside.  Just get “em started!”  He fired up the putt-putt and the instrument panel came alive.

When we taxied out on the oily water of Pearl Harbor, motor whaleboats were still busily clearing debris from the takeoff sea lane on the east side of Ford Island past Battleship Row.  When we were in position, a green flag was waved from the nearest boat and we started our takeoff run.  Just as the airplane came up onto the step I heard a loud thud from somewhere below.  In response to the annunciator light on the panel, I moved the mixture controls from Full Rich to Automatic Rich for climb and maneuver then slid down out of the tower.

In the galley compartment directly below the tower Gibson was standing staring mournfully at a hole in the bottom of the airplane.  We had hit a piece of debris that curled the aluminum skin inward leaving a hole about six inches wide and over a foot long between hull frames.  Through the hole we could see the Naval Hospital passing below as the airplane banked out to sea.

While we were contemplating the damage, the PPC turned the airplane over to the co-pilot and came aft.  He whistled and groaned, “What a hell of a way to start a war—shot up airplane and we knock a hole in the bottom!!”  Will it sink us when we land, Gib?” Gibson sighed and shook his head dolefully.  “Dunno, sir.  Maybe—maybe not if you can land close to the ramp and they get us out of the water in a hurry.  I’ll bend that tin back, dope a bunch of fabric patches on it, and pile on some mattresses for collision mats.”  He sighed again and reached for his tool box as I climbed back into the tower.

That first war patrol was an anti-submarine sweep down between Molokai and Maui where there had been reports of a submarine in the vicinity of Lahaina Roads, the old Navy anchorage off Maui that was used before Pearl Harbor became operational a few years before.  We had also been alerted that all fishing boats and sampans had been ordered to stay in port.  We were to check out any vessel we encountered.  It was rumored that such boats were being used to re-supply enemy submarines.

Gibson finished his makeshift patch of the bottom, caught an hour of sleep in the forward bunk, then came to relieve me in the tower.  I went aft to take position on one of the waist machine guns.  Just as I started aft, the pilots spotted a large fishing boat underway ahead.  Jus as I stepped into the waist compartment and reached for the interphone headphones, the pilot made a low pass past the fishing boat.  Without orders to pen fire, the third mech opened up with the port 50-cal machine gun and raked the vessel from stem to stern.

There had been two men visible on the boat—one on deck and one standing in the cabin hatch.  As fountains of water and splinters from the boat sprayed into the air, the man on the deck went over the side.  The other man ducked back into the cabin.  I grabbed the gunner by the arm and yanked him away from the gun.  The pilot was yelling, “Cease Fire!  CEASE FIRE!” on the interphone.

We circled and came back, our co-pilot calling on the radio for a ship to come out and investigate the fishing boat.  The boat did not seem to be badly damaged.  It had laid to and the man from the cabin pulled his deck hand from the water.  They both stood up and did not appear to be injured.  When we were informed there was a ship on the way we continued our patrol—after the pilot had some very harsh words with the trigger-happy seaman striker.

It was after dark when we approached Pearl Harbor to land.  Gibson and I had placed three bunk mattresses over the makeshift patch, piled on two cases of fifty caliber ammunition for weight and I agreed to sit on top of those when we touched down to try to hold the mattresses in place against the force of the water when the airplane settled down.

I do not recall that pilot’s name but he made a great feather light power landing headed straight for the launching ramp on Ford Island.  Alerted by radio, the beach crew was ready with the big side mounts already in the water.  As the airplane slowed and settled, water poured in all around the mattresses.  Our timing was good—I heard the tail hook clank into place, the tractor on the beach wheeled us around, and the side mounts banged into their sockets.  Our first war patrol was safely over.

First War Patrol

Chapter 26

December 1941

The thirty of us from Kaneohe were taken by truck to the Pearl Harbor Naval Base where the motor launch would take us to Landing A on Ford Island.  The boat, normall spick and span in grey paint and shined brass works, was filthy with oil and blood from picking up bodies and debris in the oil covered, wreckage strewn waters.

We stared in silent awe as the boat crossed to the island.  The tall tripod mast of the ARIZONA leaned at an angle above the sunken hull of the battleship.  The dull red bottom of the capsized OKLAHOMA was sprinkled with the blue-white flares of cutting torches in the on-going attempt to cut through to men still strapped inside the battered ships, only some of which I could identify—WEST VIRGINIA, CALIFORNIA, TENNESSEE, MARYLAND.

In the big dry-dock in East Loch, the wreckage of the destroyers CASSIN and DOWNES leaned against each other, trapping the battleship PENNYSLVANIA, flagship of the Pacific Fleet, in the damaged dry-dock.  Over beyond Ford Island was the battered bulk of the NEVEDA which had been the only battleship to get under way during the attack.  Under intense dive bombing, NEVADA had been beached on Hospital Point rather than be sunk blocking the narrow entrance to the harbor.  The waters of the bay were covered with a thick scum of oil and pieces of wreckage.  Motor whaleboats were everywhere picking up the flotsam and still occasionally pulling aboard an old covered body.

Not a word was spoken in our group until the boat desposited us at Landing A.  As we debarked onto the wide concrete landing we walked past a row of tarpaulin covered bodies that had been pulled from the bay.  From behind me I heard someone mutter bitterly, “God damn the sons-a-bitches!”

No time was wasted.  We were escorted to our living quarters that were a roped-off corner of the least badly damaged PBY hangar on the island.  Rows of folding cots had been set up.  Since the Ford Island barracks were overflowing with survivors, the corner of that hangar was where we would sleep while maintenance work on airplanes was done.  The windows of the hanglar had been painted black so that work could continue twenty-four hours a day.

As soon as we had deposited our ditty bags (I had brought only a spare suit of dungarees and one white uniform) on a chosen cot, we lined up at a desk near the VP-22 operations office for assignment.  I was assigned to 22-P-6 and was informed that the airplane was on the ramp and was scheduled for evening patrol.

22-P-6 had not come through the attack unscathed.  The fuselage, wing, and tail suraces were peppered with bullet holes.  Those below the waterline had been patched properly by the metalsmiths but those on the upper surfaces simply had fabric patches doped over the holes.

The plane captain on 22-P-6 was a harried second class AMM named Gibson.  His face was grim and there were dark circles under his eyes.  He greeted me warmly because both the original plane captain, a first class, and the third mech had been wounded in the attack and were in the hospital.  He had been promoted to plane captain, I would be second mech, and our third mech was a seaman striker for AMM.

When I commented that Gibson looked bushed, he sighed and said, “Don’t rightly remember when I had some sack time—we worked all day yesterday and last night to get this old bird flyable.”

The pilots came aboard while Gibson and I were finishing our pre-flight checks of the equipment.  All guns were loaded and we were carrying two five hundred pound bombs and two depth charges on the wing racks.  When he found that I had more than fifty hours of flight time, Gibson put me in the mechanics tower for takeoff and the first watch.  He would try to get some sleep when we were airborne.

When I scrambled into the tower, I saw that there were two bullet holes in the instrument panel.  I called them to Gibson’s attention.  “I know,” he said tiredly.  “I checked all the lines behind the panel and they look okay.  Slapped some tape on the holes outside.  Just get “em started!”  He fired up the putt-putt and the instrument panel came alive.

When we taxied out on the oily water of Pearl Harbor, motor whaleboats were still busily clearing debris from the takeoff sea lane on the east side of Ford Island past Battleship Row.  When we were in position, a green flag was waved from the nearest boat and we started our takeoff run.  Just as the airplane came up onto the step I heard a loud thud from somewhere below.  In response to the annunciator light on the panel, I moved the mixture controls from Full Rich to Automatic Rich for climb and maneuver then slid down out of the tower.

In the galley compartment directly below the tower Gibson was standing staring mournfully at a hole in the bottom of the airplane.  We had hit a piece of debris that curled the aluminum skin inward leaving a hole about six inches wide and over a foot long between hull frames.  Through the hole we could see the Naval Hospital passing below as the airplane banked out to sea.

While we were contemplating the damage, the PPC turned the airplane over to the co-pilot and came aft.  He whistled and groaned, “What a hell of a way to start a war—shot up airplane and we knock a hole in the bottom!!”  Will it sink us when we land, Gib?” Gibson sighed and shook his head dolefully.  “Dunno, sir.  Maybe—maybe not if you can land close to the ramp and they get us out of the water in a hurry.  I’ll bend that tin back, dope a bunch of fabric patches on it, and pile on some mattresses for collision mats.”  He sighed again and reached for his tool box as I climbed back into the tower.

That first war patrol was an anti-submarine sweep down between Molokai and Maui where there had been reports of a submarine in the vicinity of Lahaina Roads, the old Navy anchorage off Maui that was used before Pearl Harbor became operational a few years before.  We had also been alerted that all fishing boats and sampans had been ordered to stay in port.  We were to check out any vessel we encountered.  It was rumored that such boats were being used to re-supply enemy submarines.

Gibson finished his makeshift patch of the bottom, caught an hour of sleep in the forward bunk, then came to relieve me in the tower.  I went aft to take position on one of the waist machine guns.  Just as I started aft, the pilots spotted a large fishing boat underway ahead.  Jus as I stepped into the waist compartment and reached for the interphone headphones, the pilot made a low pass past the fishing boat.  Without orders to pen fire, the third mech opened up with the port 50-cal machine gun and raked the vessel from stem to stern.

There had been two men visible on the boat—one on deck and one standing in the cabin hatch.  As fountains of water and splinters from the boat sprayed into the air, the man on the deck went over the side.  The other man ducked back into the cabin.  I grabbed the gunner by the arm and yanked him away from the gun.  The pilot was yelling, “Cease Fire!  CEASE FIRE!” on the interphone.

We circled and came back, our co-pilot calling on the radio for a ship to come out and investigate the fishing boat.  The boat did not seem to be badly damaged.  It had laid to and the man from the cabin pulled his deck hand from the water.  They both stood up and did not appear to be injured.  When we were informed there was a ship on the way we continued our patrol—after the pilot had some very harsh words with the trigger-happy seaman striker.

It was after dark when we approached Pearl Harbor to land.  Gibson and I had placed three bunk mattresses over the makeshift patch, piled on two cases of fifty caliber ammunition for weight and I agreed to sit on top of those when we touched down to try to hold the mattresses in place against the force of the water when the airplane settled down.

I do not recall that pilot’s name but he made a great feather light power landing headed straight for the launching ramp on Ford Island.  Alerted by radio, the beach crew was ready with the big side mounts already in the water.  As the airplane slowed and settled, water poured in all around the mattresses.  Our timing was good—I heard the tail hook clank into place, the tractor on the beach wheeled us around, and the side mounts banged into their sockets.  Our first war patrol was safely over.