_Lt Yoshio Shiga, commander of_ Kaga’_s nine Zeroes which strafed Ewa
soon after Itaya, was assigned the task of reducing the “Barbers Point
Airdrome.”_]
Elsewhere in the Ewa Beach community, Mrs. Charles S. Barker, Jr.,
wife of Master Technical Sergeant Barker, the chief clerk in MAG-21’s
operations office, heard the noise and asked: “What’s all the shooting?”
Barker, clad only in beach shorts, looked out his front door, saw and
heard a plane fly by at low altitude, and then saw splashes along the
shoreline from strafing planes marked with red _hinomaru_. Running
out to turn off the water hose in his front yard, and seeing a small
explosion nearby (probably an antiaircraft shell from the direction of
Pearl), Barker had seen enough. He left his wife and baby with his
neighbors, and set out for Ewa.
The strafers who singled out cars moving along the roads that led
to Ewa proved no respecter of persons. MAG-21’s commanding officer,
Lieutenant Colonel Claude A. “Sheriff” Larkin, en route from Honolulu,
was about a mile from Ewa in his 1930 Plymouth when a Zero shot at
him. He momentarily abandoned the car for the relative sanctuary of a
nearby ditch, not even bothering to turn off the engine, and then, as
the strafer roared out of sight, sprinted back to the vehicle, jumped
back in, and sped on. He reached his destination at 0805--just in time
to be machine gunned again by one of Admiral Nagumo’s fighters. Soon
thereafter, Larkin’s good fortune at remaining unwounded amidst the
attack ran out, as he suffered several penetrating wounds, the most
painful of which included one on the top of the middle finger of his
left hand and another on the front of his lower left leg just above the
top of his shoe. Refusing immediate medical attention, though, Larkin
continued to direct the defense of Ewa Field.
[Illustration: