Above the Thunder (7 page)

The old Hawaiian Division had just been broken up to make the new 24th and 25th Infantry Divisions, and my battery had become Headquarters Battery of the 89th Field Artillery Battalion, 25th Division Artillery. On Thursday, we went into the field to reconnoiter new positions in the Kailua-Kaneohe sector on the eastern side of the island, our old position at Pearl City to be ours no more. We returned to Schofield at noon on Saturday, which, in the staggered payday system then in effect, happened to be our day for the eagle.

After being paid and getting dressed in our slacks and sports shirts, Bill Gibson and I walked over to Wahiwa and saw a Japanese-language movie in which a father, from a distance, shot his daughter with a rifle to prevent her leaping from a high cliff. Then we attended a carnival on the post, where we saw an interesting demonstration of hypnotism—you know, all the hell-raising things that tough, rowdy soldiers do on payday night. And just about the time the bugler of the guard was playing “Taps,” we arrived outside our barracks and said goodnight. Gibson was going to play golf next morning, he said, and I was going to make my flight schedule.

Then we'd get together and think of something to do Sunday afternoon.

According to accounts I've read, he was Lt. Akira Sakamoto. I can envision him pulling his flying goggles down over his eyes, hastily rechecking the “ready” switches for guns and bombs, and rolling his Aichi-99 into a howling plunge toward Wheeler Field. Behind him twenty-five more dive-bombers from the Imperial Japanese Navy's aircraft carrier Zuikaku began peeling off to follow him down in line astern. Higher up, the Zeros of their fighter escort, encountering no American opposition, prepared to join in the attack.

It was Sunday morning, 7 December 1941. My watch told me it was 0740 hours, but most people think it was nearly 0800 by the military clock. At that moment, few Americans, if any, knew that several hundred Japanese warplanes were streaming over the Island of Oahu, intent on destroying the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet where it lay at anchor in Pearl Harbor. Surprise was essential for success, and the attackers had achieved total surprise, seeming to drop out of nowhere—but actually coming in from a large carrier force some two hundred miles north of Oahu. Another essential was early destruction of the planes and facilities of the United States Army Air Force on Oahu, which had as its primary
mission defense of the naval base at Pearl Harbor. Wheeler was the Army's principal fighter base in Hawaii, and Sakimoto's task was to nip reaction in the bud.

As his bomber slanted downward, Sakimoto could see rows of Curtiss P-40s and P-36 fighter planes tied down, wingtip to wingtip, on Wheeler. There was no hostile activity in evidence. He could see some strollers, an automobile here and there, a few people on the golf course, and soldiers moving between barracks and mess halls. It was evident that neither Wheeler nor adjoining Schofield Barracks had been alerted. Sakamoto's heart must have raced in exultation and excitement as he concentrated on aligning his sights on what had sud denly become, by orders from Tokyo, enemy aircraft there below.

As the howl of Lieutenant Sakamoto's diving plane rose in pitch and volume, it finally intruded on my consciousness and that of a few other men in the latrine of our barracks. With my razor poised in midair, I gazed silently at First Sergeant Regan of Service Battery. We stood there staring at each other, wondering if the pilot would be able to pull out. The howl suddenly ended in a thunderous, building-shaking crash.

Pvt. Burnis Williamson yelled, “He's crashed in the quadrangle!”

It sounded as if he had, but when we rushed out to the third-floor porch and looked into the grassy square surrounded by concrete barracks like our own, we saw nothing unusual. And now we became aware of continuing howling and crashing and shuddering, so we ran to the east windows of our room.

We could see smoke already boiling up from Wheeler, nearly a mile away. Planes were trailing each other in from over the mountains of the Waianae Range, dropping their bombs on the airfield, then pulling up and banking around toward our left to sweep across Schofield with their machine guns chattering.

Since we had no mandatory formations on Sunday, most of our men were still in bed; my personal schedule had gotten me up early. I was expecting to make my first solo flight that day at John Rodgers Airport, which was where Honolulu International is now. I wanted to get breakfast before the mess hall closed at 0800, and then I'd ride the bus to the airport. But many of our men, tired from a long Saturday night after payday, lay like logs in their bunks. Only “Pappy” Downs rose up on an elbow and growled, “What the hell is going on, anyway?”

This 1950s aerial view of a part of Schofield Barracks is much as it must have appeared to the attacking Japanese pilots. The quadrangle is the enclosed area between the buildings and is similar to the one referred to in the text (Photograph courtesy of Tom Baker).

Pappy was one of my colleagues in the Radio Section. His real name was Maurice, but he was in his late twenties, which made him seem old to most of us boys, so we called him Pappy. I replied to him, “Somebody's bombing the hell out of Wheeler Field!”

Beside me at the window, Sergeant Regan smiled. “No,” he said, “they're not really bombing. It's just a mock air raid. Funny they didn't let us know about it, though. They usually do.”

“Sergeant,” I said, “if it's just a mock air raid, where is all that smoke coming from?”

“Smoke bombs,” he explained. “They always use them.”

“Sergeant, I don't believe smoke bombs would shake this building from that far away.”

He snorted derisively (as they always say in books). “What's the matter, Kerns? You scared?”

I wasn't exactly scared, just very concerned and becoming excited, but I said to him, “You're damned right I am, Sergeant!”

I pointed to one of the planes as it pulled up and banked sharply, silhouetted against a gray cloud.

“You see the elliptical shape of those wings? I don't know whose planes those are, but I know we don't have any planes in the islands that look like that.”

Regan still was not convinced, but the matter was quickly settled when bullets began breaking windows of the NCO (noncommissioned officer) rooms on one side of the barracks—one of them being Regan's own room—and one of the planes broke into view directly overhead, no more than seventy-five feet away, its guns now spewing bullets into the buildings beyond ours. On its gray and dull yellow wings and fuselage we could clearly see its markings: the big red Rising Sun.

“Hot damn! Japanese! It's the damned Japs! Oh, those little yellow bastards will be sorry for this!” Sergeant Regan may have been the originator of that term we so fondly and universally used in reference to our Pacific enemy during that war. Seeing how things are all these years later, I hope they don't hold it against us.

The men now rolled out with alacrity, crowding to the windows and porch to see for themselves what was happening. From the porch, I watched a man caught in the middle of the quadrangle moving from side to side along a small, low structure there as strafing planes came from different directions. He finally got a break and ran for better cover. A man in cook's whites took a look around the corner of a kitchen across the quadrangle just in time to catch a bullet. He dropped and lay still.
¹
A machine gun stitched a stream of lead in front of Pvt. William Cancro, and, as the man from “Joisy” later reported, he “toined” and ran another way. However, seeing a man fall with several bullets in his body, Cancro “toined” again to help Privates First Class Clarence Compton and Charles Dahl carry the man into our dayroom and place him on a pool table. PFC Warren Harriman, narrowly missed by a flurry of bullets, ran through a screen door to the first floor of the barracks and pounded up
two flights of stairs, arriving breathless and bleeding from a small cut on his cheek to announce to us: “They're shooting real bullets! They're killing people downstairs!”

He was so right. Men caught in the open sought cover from the machine guns while an exodus of the curious from mess halls sometimes prevented others from getting back in. Pvt. Walter R. French was killed; PFC Claude E. Phipps took two bullets in the body but made it to cover in a barracks corridor before he collapsed; Pvt. Leo R. Eppes was outside his mess hall when a bullet from a Zero nailed him in the leg; Cpl. John E. Robinson was hit in the hand, and Pvt. Stephen A. Kitt went down wounded. First Lieutenent Charles G. Cassell, a former Army Air Corps bomber pilot who had recently joined our battery and was still quartered at Hickam Field, ran outside to bring a neighbor's little girl to cover when the attack started there. He was shot through the face.
²

In the midst of the furor, PFC Van Swaney, of Calf Creek in McCulloch County, Texas, bugler of the guard for the 25th Division Artillery that day, marched to the bugler's post near the guardhouse and played “Alert Call”—twice, in the prescribed military manner. He never hurried or missed a note. I think that if a monument is ever erected to the Pineapple Soldiers of Pearl Harbor Day it should be a statue of Van Swaney in campaign hat, wool olive-drab (OD) shirt with khaki tie tucked in, khaki trousers and canvas leggings, his bugle to his lips, calling the nation to war. Like the others, Van did just what he was supposed to do: his assigned duty. If there was failure that day, it was not in the lower echelons.

Officers and NCOs not living in barracks were alerted in various ways, usually by hearing the bombs, and made their way as quickly as possible to their units. Capt. John Ferris was probably typical of our battery commanders. He arrived at his orderly room no more than ten minutes after the attack began. Breathless from running, he used the squawk box to announce that the attacking planes were Japanese: “This is no drill. This is no drill. This is a real air raid. I want everyone on the ground floor. Stay inside, stay in the corridors. All men to the ground floor. This is no drill.”

We had been so fascinated with watching the planes that few of us had started to dress, and now the men began heading downstairs, grabbing a garment or two, many of them wearing only the shorts and undershirt that are a soldier's pajamas as well as his underwear. I yelled to the general assembly that we should at least take helmets and gas masks, but few paid any attention to me. I was just a PFC. So I soon found myself alone in the room where about forty men had been before. An occasional bullet zinged off the concrete floor as I hastily donned my field gear. I had recently read of the German airborne assault on Crete, and I had no desire to be caught out in some guava thicket in my underwear fighting enemy paratroopers. Finally, I laced up my leggings and headed for the stairs. And I fell flat on my face. I got up, took one more step, and fell again. Then I sat on the top step, took off my leggings, and put them on the proper legs so the strings of one would not catch on the hooks of the other and hobble me.