Above the Thunder (8 page)

Pvt. Leo Eppes, seen here clowning for the camera in front of Schofield Barracks, took a bullet in the leg from a strafing Japanese plane during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Beside Eppes is Pvt. Allison Murphy (Photograph courtesy of Henry Hazelwood).

On the first floor at last, I ran down the porch and turned toward our supply room, gun in mind. I stepped over Claude Phipps as he lay bleeding on the floor and continued on my way. I helped PFC Leo Magnan and another man break in the supply room door, and there we got tools and further broke through the iron bars of the arms room, wondering where Sgt. Kenneth McCart was with the keys. (We later learned he was at the motor pool with Cpl. Adolph Otto Mann, shooting out-of-focus 8 mm movies of the Japanese planes.)

Although assigned a 1903 Springfield rifle, I grabbed a Browning automatic, commonly called a BAR, and hastily loaded three twenty-round magazines of ammo. Then I ran out to the quadrangle and waited for a target. Very soon one of the strafing dive-bombers came low across our building, firing into the building across the quadrangle. I brought up my BAR and let go a burst at him, but within about three seconds he had disappeared beyond that building, his rear gunner throwing lead back at our barracks as he went. I waited a few minutes for another, but none came near. And then I remembered that Captain Ferris had ordered us to stay inside, so I went into the dayroom, from which men were being dispatched in small groups to proceed to the motor pool, gun park, and section rooms to start loading out for the field.

So far as I know, I was the only man in my battalion to fire at the Japanese planes that day, with one exception. Our battalion commander, six-foot four-inch Lt. Col. (later brigadier general) William P. Bledsoe, a veteran of World War I, reportedly was seen out in the open, stomping and cursing as he fired his pistol at the planes.

The dayroom was still crowded with men, and the wounded man on the pool table lay moaning softly, his white undershirt soaked with blood. Amid the babble, I recognized the high-pitched voice of Pvt. Carl Bunn asking, “How in the hell do you get this thing to fire automatic?” Immediately afterward he accidentally fired a burst from his BAR into the dayroom ceiling, bringing down plaster over everything, including the wounded man. Bunn was a droll young radio operator with innumerable friends, a special fondness for oranges and beer, and a passionate devotion to Columbus Grove, Ohio. But he was never to see his beloved hometown again. In little more than three years, he would die beside his radio in a fight at Binalonan on Luzon. Burnis Williamson's Springfield left a bullet hole above the screen door that was still visible when he visited forty years later.

As Japanese airplanes sprayed Schofield Barracks with bullets, Capt. John Ferris (right) announced over the squawk box, “This is no drill, this is no drill!” Fer ris is seen here two years later, in 1943, when he was Colonel Ferris, battalion commander of the 89th Field Artillery, on the Solomon Islands. At left is Capt. W. D. “Doug” Baker, who was later killed in action on Luzon, and Col. William W. Dick, G-3 of the 25th Infantry Division (U.S. Army photo).

Some of the boys were already on the move. A bullet slammed into the backseat of Pvt. Elmer Darling's command car, just missing his shoulder. Maj. James Carroll, the battalion exec, en route to the ammo supply point, kept yelling, “Faster! Faster!” His driver, PFC Robert D. Schumaker, floored the accelerator but was frustrated by the engine governor that
limited the vehicle to 35 mph. When Capt. Gavin L. Muirhead saw PFC Carl Koon frantically typing vehicle dispatches, he yelled, “We don't need dispatches now! This is war!”

In less than an hour our battery—Headquarters Battery (HQ Btry)—was dispersed over a large field in Area M, between Schofield and Kolekole Pass, waiting for its turn on the roads to move to our island defense position. Some of us had grabbed little paper cartons of milk before leaving the barracks area, but few of us had eaten that morning. Now our mess sergeant, S.Sgt. Lorenzo Silvestre, formerly of the Philippine Scouts, assisted by cooks Charles Dlusky, George Kimball, and Michael Drapczak, came around handing out apples and sandwiches made from roast beef that had been prepared for Sunday dinner.

Radio operator William A. “Billy” Mulherin, who had spent the night at the YMCA in Honolulu, made his way to Schofield as quickly as possible, and now joined us in the dispersal area. He had passed along the edge of Pearl Harbor, and in his Georgia drawl, he gave us our first word of the disaster that had struck the Navy there.

Also arriving, smiling happily and not at all angry with the Jap anese, were two young soldiers named Robert Trayer and James O'Donnell who, a few months earlier, had stowed away on the Matson Liner Lurline and got almost to San Diego before they were caught. Like all but the most serious offenders, they had just been released from Schofield Stockade—the one made notorious by James Jones's novel
From Here to Eternity.

Meanwhile, fire continued to billow from Wheeler Field's planes and hangars, casting a gloom of dark smoke that mixed with the broken clouds. Under those clouds, circling bravely in a loneliness that was both dramatic and pathetic, was a P-40 in camouflage paint with an unpainted silvery P-36 flying on its wing. They were the only American planes I saw aloft that morning, but there were a few others, piloted by devoted young lieutenants who used their private cars to reach their planes and take to the air, ill armed, against odds of twenty to one or worse, while their own air base was under attack, their own quarters blazing. They destroyed a number of Japanese planes. For example, only weeks out of flight school, Lieutenants Kenneth Taylor and George Welch took down two and four, respectively. There were a few others. As I have said, if there was a failure that day, it was not in the lower echelons of the command.

Two good men: Privates Carl Bunn and Bill Wil liamson. Bunn survived the attack on Pearl Harbor only to die three years later beside his radio on the Philippine island of Luzon.

There was, however, at least one exception: the lieutenant who dismissed a radar report of large numbers of unidentified aircraft approaching from the north and took no action. He had been informed of a flight of twelve B-17 bombers arriving from the States for refueling, and he assumed those were what he had seen on the radar.

But the truth is that things looked rather bleak at that juncture. They didn't brighten much when Captain Ferris told us that, according to higher headquarters, the Japanese had landed parachute troops and set up roadblocks to delay or prevent our deployment. They were
described as dressed in blue coveralls with the Rising Sun insignia on the left breast pocket. All this was in error, of course, but we thought then that it was true; therefore, Captain Ferris wanted an automatic weapon on each of the battery vehicles. Noting my BAR and the 140 rounds of ammo I now carried, he gave me the responsibility for one of the radio section's weapons carriers. If we ran into a roadblock, he said, we would open fire with all weapons and run through at top speed, stopping for nothing.

It was the first time I had ever been given charge of anything other than a sentry post or a range guard tower. Getting the weapons carrier ready for defense, I called on other radio section men to help: Ralph Park of Akron; Willie Waldsmith, the jockey from Massachusetts; Billy Mulherin, the Georgia boy; Salvatore Crupi of Brooklyn. Those men would have laughed at me yesterday if I'd tried to give them orders, but today they responded with goodwill and helped roll the canvas up to the front bow so I could stand behind the cab, steadying myself and the BAR against the wooden bows as we traveled. When I assigned them directions to watch and to fire, they gave strict attention and took their positions in the truck. Like the other radiomen—Burnis Williamson, William Cancro, Carl Bunn, Pappy Downs, James McAndrews, and George Williams, our section chief—they were all Regular Army men, proud of their country, its flag, and the uniform they wore. In this time of crisis they wanted only to be given orders. Thanks to my BAR and Captain Ferris, I was temporarily privileged to give them.

It was a critical time in my life, in a way. Although I loved soldiering, I had always had a conviction that if anyone ever fired at me he would hit me, and that would be the end of it all. Now, visualizing all the possible ambush points along the familiar route to our field positions, I felt that I had practically no chance at all to survive the trip. It was disturbing, thinking that within a couple of hours at most, I would be dead. Was there any way to avoid it? I could think of no way at all that would not disgrace me before the other soldiers, my friends back home, and all my family. I remembered how my folks had always admired and respected those who had honorably served the nation in war, how proud they were of one of Kentucky's counties—Breathitt, I think—where not one
man had to be drafted for the First World War. In their minds there was nothing more honorable than to die in service under our flag.

So I had to go forward, so to speak. I resolved to do so gracefully, and I resigned myself to dying that morning. I actually thought of how proud the family would be when they got the word, and with what respect they would mention my name in years to come. So, being thus mentally resigned, I felt no fear that might have inter fered with performing my duty, and I was prepared literally to defend that truck to the death. Of course, I got not a scratch that day, and, strange to say, I never thereafter had any doubt—for longer than a few seconds at a time—that I would survive the war.

While we were getting the truck ready, the second Japanese attack came in. It didn't hit us, but a formation of eighteen bombers passed directly overhead, not far above the now scattering clouds, droning toward Pearl Harbor. I looked around for our two fighters but could not spot them. Then, far above the neat enemy formations, I noticed a flash, a small movement far up in the sky above it, and down came two planes, a dark one in the lead, a silver one following. Like hawks dropping toward their prey, the two fighters came almost straight down through the midst of the enemy. They began firing, and the bomber gunners responded in kind, the crisscrossing tracers looking pale in the morning light. After a brief delay the thin, ripping sounds of the guns drifted down to us.

The two fighters continued their dive together until they had passed through and below the Japanese formation, and then the silver plane pulled up and turned away to disappear behind a cloud. The dark plane shallowed its dive a little but kept coming down, and smoke began stream ing out behind it. I thought then that the dark plane was the P-40 I had seen shortly before, so I kept urging the pilot to pull out, pull out, but it appeared that he did not try to do so. I guess he was already dead or unconscious. The plane exploded in a burst of flame and black smoke in a pineapple field a short distance from us, and for the first time that day, I got that empty, weak-kneed feeling that comes with being just a wee bit shaken up. The enemy bombers continued on their way, apparently unperturbed.

Since then, I have read several accounts of American fighter losses during that affair, and it seems that none occurred in that particular locale just south of Schofield; thus, I must have witnessed the silver P-36 shooting down a Japanese fighter, meanwhile passing through the bomber formation and being fired on by them.

Immediately after the plane came down, we got the order to move out. We went along the southeast edge of Schofield, passed the smoking wreck age at Wheeler, and went out the Wheeler gate onto the Kamehameha Highway toward Honolulu. Rolling down the long, gentle slope through fields of pineapple toward the cane fields at lower levels, we looked down on Pearl Harbor as on a game being played in a stadium.

From the vicinity of Ford Island in the middle of the harbor and from Hickam Field on the far side of it, black smoke boiled upward, adding to the volume of a huge cloud that spread and drifted slowly southwestward. Around that smoke Japanese planes swirled and dived and zoomed like night bugs around a light, and the air was alive with dark puffs of antiaircraft artillery shell bursts. Within the smoke pall, the bursts flashed dull red. As we drew nearer, we could see the battleships burning and many small boats moving about the smoky harbor that, although we didn't know the numbers then, was the fresh grave of some two thousand officers and sailors, many of whose bodies would never be recovered. I stood in the back of our truck, holding my BAR and marveling at the scene of death and destruction. Any personal fears I might previously have felt were completely forgotten.