_Col Claude A. “Sheriff” Larkin, Commanding Officer, Marine Aircraft
Group 21, photographed circa early 1942._]
After seeing that the corpsman’s bleeding was stopped and the painful
wound was cleaned and dressed, Private First Class Mann sprinted to
his own tent. Grabbing his rifle, he then returned to the battered
ambulance and, shot-out tires flopping, drove toward Ewa’s garage.
There, Master Technical Sergeant Lawrence R. Darner directed his men
to replace the damaged tires with those from a mobile water purifier.
Meanwhile, Smith resumed his duties as a member of the dressing station
crew.
Also watching the smoke beginning to billow skyward was Sergeant
Duane W. Shaw, USMCR, the driver of the station fire truck. Normally,
during off-duty hours, the truck sat parked a quarter-mile from the
landing area. Shaw, figuring that it was his job to put out the fires,
climbed into the fire engine and set off. Unfortunately, like Private
First Class Mann’s ambulance, Sergeant Shaw’s bright red engine moving
across the embattled camp soon attracted strafing Zeroes. Unfazed
by the enemy fire that perforated his vehicle in several places, he
drove doggedly toward the flight line until another Zero shot out his
tires. Only then pausing to make a hasty estimate of the situation, he
reasoned that with the fire truck at least temporarily out of service
he would have to do something else. Jumping down from the cab, he soon
got himself a rifle and some ammunition. Then, he set out for the
flight line. If he could not put out fires, he could at least do some
firing of his own at the men who caused them.
With the parking area cloaked in black smoke, Japanese fighter pilots
shifted their efforts to the planes either out for repairs in the rear
areas or to the utility planes parked north of the intersection of
the main runways. Inside ten minutes’ time, machine gun fire likewise
transformed many of those planes into flaming wreckage.
Firing only small arms and rifles in the opening stages, the Marines
fought back against _Kaga_’s fighters as best they could, with
almost reckless heroism. Lieutenant Shiga remembered one particular
Leatherneck who, oblivious to the machine gun fire striking the ground
around him and kicking up dirt, stood transfixed, emptying his sidearm
at Shiga’s Zero as it roared past. Years later, Shiga would describe
that lone, defiant, and unknown Marine as the bravest American he had
ever met.
A tragic drama, however, soon unfolded amidst the Japanese attack. One
Marine, Sergeant William E. Lutschan, Jr., USMCR, a truckdriver, had
been “under suspicion” of espionage and he was ordered placed under
arrest. In the exchange of gunfire that followed his resisting being
taken into custody, though, he was shot dead. With that one exception,
the Marines at Ewa Field had fought back to a man.
[Illustration: