Quick thinking

Frederick Stanley Ross

“The attack came at 7:55 a.m. … I was in my cot in the barracks, reading the Sunday paper,” Ross said. “Upon hearing machine gun fire, I jumped out of bed, pulled on trousers and shoes, and ran outside.” Then, seeing Japanese planes strafing the airfield, he ran back inside, grabbed his rifle and ran to the guard shack at the main gate for ammunition.

Everything was locked up, so “some of the fellows grabbed a private car and drove across the runway under fire to the ammo dump and got four cases of .30-caliber ammo,” Ross said.

“By this time we were under fire by strafing planes at the guard shack. When the ammo arrived, we each grabbed two bandoleers and ran to the flight line. We fired at strafing planes,” he said. After the first attack wave ended, Ross and others pushed 10 undamaged planes back into the underbrush.

“Out of 120 planes, these were the only planes saved,” he said.

During the second wave, Ross and others were taken by truck to various roadway intersections to direct military traffic and stop pedestrians.

Soldiers at their core

Woody Knutson

Knutson and six other Marines piled into a station wagon and left the air base at Ewa Field at about 7:40 a.m. for a pistol match in Honolulu. “As we approached Pearl City, we saw heavy black smoke coming from the harbor.” Getting closer, they saw the Japanese planes and immediately headed back to the air base.

“We left the wagon by a church at the edge of town and started running for our base through the back ways to avoid the (Japanese) who were strafing our field,” Knutson said. “One of them did spot us and let a burst of machine gun fire go at us.”

He continued, “When we got back to the base, we scurried for our rifles and whatever weapons we could find.” Knutson said. “One of our Marines did score a hit because we saw smoke trailing one of their planes.”

When the raid was over, most of the base’s planes were in ashes on the runway aprons, where they had been “neatly lined up” for the previous day’s inspection.

Also, Knutson said, Marines “started digging trenches in hard coral in case the (Japanese) decide to make a landing. Luckily that didn’t happen as we were ill-prepared for it.”

Stepping in

Bert R. Mendenhall

“After being awakened by aircraft machine gun fire, I dressed and went immediately to the telephone tent where I was assigned. The two men on duty were hiding under an Army cot, so I manned the switchboard.

Later, Mendenhall said, “after receiving some ammunition that was being distributed from a truck, I went to the PX (post exchange) where I took several shots at a plane circling overhead. The plane was smoking from previous hits, and appeared to go down somewhere between our base and Barbers Point.”

At Ewa Field, Mendenhall said, “Very few cars, if any, in the the parking lot missed being hit” by strafing planes.