Night Fall on December 7th 1941

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 7^th, 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.]

The Evening of December 7th

As the day wore on, other men wandered by.  There were many rumors, most of which later proved to be false.  Japanese cane cutters in the fields out by Ewa had cut huge arrows in the cane fields pointing at Pearl Harbor to guide the attackers.  A Japanese milk truck driver had been caught by the Marines on the base at Kaneohe with a radio beacon hidden in a milk can.  Japanese troop ships had been sighted off Kauai and invasion could be expected.  Japanese troops dressed in dungarees had landed up the coast by the Mormon Temple and were working in our direction.  The ARAZONA had blown up and was lost with all hands (the only rumor that day that was true!).

None of us gave a thought to the fact that we had not had breakfast until a truck pulled up and mess cooks gave us each a ham and cheese sandwich, an orange, and a warm bottle of Coca Cola.  We wolfed them down hungrily.

A little later another truck backed up to the bomb crater and we were ordered to load our guns and ammo onto the truck.  Expecting invasion, we were to set up a “strongpoint” for a last stand on Hawaiiloa Hill.  We were the front line.  Other men were digging pits all over the hillside behind us.

We were beyond the station nursery.  Nearby there was a gardener’s shed that proved a godsend.  It was padlocked but we forced the lock.  Inside there were shovels, a mattock, and—best of all—a heavy workbench with a vise at one end.  It would be ideal for mounting the 50 caliber.

All we knew about machine gun nests was what we had seen in old World War movies.  We dug a semi-circular pit into the red earth at the base of the hill and dragged the workbench to it with the vise on the inner end.  In the shed we found some empty five-gallon tins and a bunch of empty fertilizer sacks.  They made great sandbags.  We shoveled them full of the red dirt and built a chest-high parapet covering the end of the workbench.  Dick was to man the machine gun (by then he considered it his own and fussed over it as if it were a baby) and Glover and I would take positions with the rifles on each side of the workbench.  We laid bandoleers of rifle ammunition and the Springlfields ready on the parapet.  Dick had a new case of ammunition and some loaded spare magazines for the machine gun.

As we finished, an hour or so before sunset, the squadron executive officer came by and approved our work.  He reached into the back seat of his car and produced a bottle of Old Crow bourbon whiskey.

“Men,” he said “we do not have any first aid kits to distribute.  This is the best I can do—courtesy of the officers’ club.  Let me warn you, though.  It is strictly for emergency medical purposes.  I’ll have the crow of any man caught drunk and he will go to sea on a destroyer!”

Dick took the bottle and placed it under the workbench with our spare ammunition.  Meanwhile the exec was surveying the hillside which teemed with men digging gun pits.  A look of dismay came over his face.  “Damn,” he said, “those white uniforms are going to make great targets in the dark!   Need to do something about that.”

He drove off in the car.  Thirty minutes later a truck pulled up nearby and two sailors unloaded garbage cans full of strong black coffee.  We were instructed to pull off our whites, dip them in the coffee, put them on wet, and roll in the red dirt.  It made camouflage that blended nicely with the dirt of the hillside.

Another truck came by before dark and distributed a blanket to each man.  It had also been distributing some World War vintage doughboy steel helmets but was down to one left.  It was tossed to Dick.  He looked at it and tossed it to Glover.  Gloved snorted, “I don’t want that piss pot!” and tossed it to me.  I looked at the ominous sky, thought about the bullets that had been flying around that morning and might be that night, and put it on.

The cooks had not forgotten us.  At dusk a truck pulled up under the big tree that was our command headquarters and unloaded two more garbage cans full of beef stew.  There was another of fresh coffee.  Our supper consisted of a paper cup of stew each which we had to eat with our fingers.

After our evening chow, such as it was, we settled down to watch in our gun pit.  There was much talk about invasion.  We agreed that two shiploads of soldiers could easily take over Oahu with all the confusion and lack of preparedness.  Glover’s comment was, “Shee-it, boys, if it come at us tonight, tomorrow we will either be dead or we will be pulling rickshaws over the Pali!”

We also agreed that, if the Japanese were coming, they would not come up the narrow peninsula from the land side.  They would more likely come ashore right on our ramp.  Outposts had been established down near the hangars to give warning.  Otherwise, the base had essentially been abandoned and we were dug in for what might be a last stand.

Taking Stock

Conrad Frieze in foreground with binoculars.  Richard Frieze shading his eyes on the right in bomb crater at Kaneohe NAS on December 7th 1941.

The CPO did not come back right away.  When we had finished our cigarettes, we looked at the big bomb crater out beyond the airplane and decided that it would be the best place for the machine gun.  The problem was how to rig it on something so it could be swiveled and fired.

In the ordnance room, Dick found a bench adapter that would hold the trunnion of the gun.  Meanwhile, I found a small wooden work punt dragged up on the beach near the launching ramp.  I dragged it to the crater and we place it on its side in the bottom and filled in around it with sand.  There were some concrete rounds with reinforcing steel rods protruding from nearby.  We put one at each end of the little boat.

I scrounged a parachute out of Number Four.  We spilled it and cut off the shroud lines for lashings.  I also found that the 30-caliber bow machine gun was in place in Number Four.  I brought it and some ammunition cans to the crater.  Others appeared to help us and before long we had a primitive anti-aircraft position and the only armed punt in the U.S. Navy and with a main and secondary battery of one gun each.  Someone brought a new case of ammunition for Dick’s 50-caliber.  The fires were still burning.  We stood and scanned the sky, still blue and studded with white clouds above the rolling black smoke but now that tropic sky was ominous.  It was still barely ten o’clock in the morning.

The VP-11 executive officer came by after a while and inspected our position approvingly.  He handed me a pair of binoculars and said, “Well, sailors, you are now an anti-aircraft battery.  We don’t know what is going to happen next, but they may be back.  Stay alert.  Anything you see up there may be a Jap because there does not appear to be many flyable airplanes left on Oahu.  They really did a number on us.”

We questioned him about details.  He confirmed that the OKLAHOMA had capsized and some other battleships had been sunk.  Pearl Harbor was a shambles with many men killed and wounded.  All military installations have been hit.  Hickam Field was the same shambles that we were.  The Army airplanes down the coast at Bellows Field had been wiped out.  At Kaneohe all our airplanes on the ground had been destroyed.  Our own casualties were high.  Out of about 350 men aboard the station that morning, we had nearly twenty killed and upwards of a hundred badly wounded.  [Allen Cunningham, my father’s shipmate in VP-11 was among those wounded on December 7^th.  He was sent stateside and outlived my father by several years, marrying my step-mother a couple of years after my father’s death in 2002.]

During the attack we had shot down only the airplane that crashed on the base and one other that went into the water over toward Kailua.  When the enemy planes left, two or three had been trailing smoke as they flew out to sea.  He did not know how many Japanese had been shot down at Pearl Harbor, but understood that they got maybe twenty or thirty.

A little latker Glover appeared and slid down into the bomb crater to join us.  His face was twisted with anger and sorrow.  The front of his dungarees was smeared with dried blood, but he appeared unhurt.  Dicked asked him if he knew who we had lost.

“Some of them,” he growled.  “They got Luther Weaver—one bullet or piece of shrapnel in the chest and he just fell over.  Manning’s dead—Buckley and Formoe, too.  Lost a couple of officers, too.  Young ensign Foss was duty officer last night—the Jap that made the first run got him in the back with a 20-millimeter cannon.  Ensign Smartt was his relief—he got it in the second attack.

“They got old Curley Brown in VP-12, too.  He was on watch on an airplane moored to a buoy.  They set it on fire and machine-gunned him when he was swimming for the beach!  Dirty bastards!  There may be others I ain’t heard about.”

“Lot of guys wounded?”

“Too dang many—sick bay is overflowing and they are still trucking over to the hospital at Kaneohe.  Old Duke Byron took a bullet or piece of shrapnel in the guts.  We were in a stairwell in the hangar when that bomb hit.  Fell in a pile and there was blood all over—thought for a minute I was dead!  It was Duke, though, bleeding all over me.  We carried him out to a truck and he was still alive.”

As we adjusted to the reality of what had happened some of the stories were bitterly funny.  Glover said, “You should have seen old ‘Rigor Mortis’—he was out on the ramp firing a pistol fro behind a tractor and took a bullet in the leg.  He fell down and started yelling ‘I’m hit!  Somebody help me!’

“Two of us took a cot to use for a stretcher and ran out there.  We got him on it and started back but another strafe came at us.  We dropped Ballou and tried to dig us a hole in the concreted as the bullets went by.  When we looked up old Benny was disappearing around the corner of the hangar at a dead run—bloody leg and all!

“Hurrle got one right in the fanny—in one side and out the other.  Told him he is going to have a helluva time showing his war wound scars!  Asked him if he was running from them, but he said he was in a ditch—he remembered to keep his dead down, but forgot the other end!”

The sound of an airplane engine interrupted Glover.  I snatched up the binoculars and searched the clouds to the east.  Dick swung the machine gun into position.  We relaxed when I identified it as an Army P-40—the only airplane we say in the sky for the rest of the day.

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.