_LCdr Shigeru Itaya, commander of_ Akagi’_s first-wave fighters, which
carried out the initial strafing attacks at Ewa Field._]
Thinking that Army pilots were showing off, Sergeant Anglin stepped
outside the photographic section tent and, along with some other
enlisted men, watched planes bearing Japanese markings strafing the
edge of the field. Then, the planes began roaring down toward the field
itself and the bullets from their cowl and wing-mounted guns began
kicking up puffs of dirt. “Look, live ammunition,” somebody said or
thought, “Somebody’ll go to prison for this.”
Shiga’s pilots, like Itaya’s, concentrated on the tactical aircraft
lined up neatly on Ewa’s northwest apron with short bursts of 7.7-
and 20-millimeter machine gun fire. Shiga’s pilots, unlike Itaya’s,
however, reversed course over the treetops and repeated their
blistering attacks from the opposite direction. Within minutes, most of
MAG-21’s planes sat ablaze and exploding, black smoke corkscrewing into
the sky. The enemy spared none of the planes: the gray SBD-1s and -2s
of VMSB-232 and the seven spare SB2U-3s left behind by VMSB-231 when
they embarked in _Lexington_ just two days before. VMF-211’s remaining
F4F-3s, left behind when the squadron deployed to Wake well over a week
before, likewise began exploding in flame and smoke.
At his home on Ewa Beach, three miles southeast of the air station,
Captain Richard C. Mangrum, VMSB-232’s flight officer, sat reading
the Sunday comics. Often residents of that area had heard gunnery
exercises, but on a Sunday morning? The chatter of gunfire and the
dull thump of explosions, however, drew Mangrum’s attention away from
the cartoons. As he looked out his front door, planes with red ball
markings on the wings and fuselage roared by at very low altitude,
bound for Pearl Harbor. Up the valley in the direction of Wheeler
Field, smoke was boiling skyward, as it was from Ewa. As he set out for
Ewa on an old country road, wives and children of Marines who lived in
the Ewa Beach neighborhood began gathering at the Mangrum’s house.
[Illustration: