Several of the many memoirs in the Marine Corps Oral History Collection
are by Marines who were serving at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941,
and personally witnessed the Japanese attack. Two such memoirs--one
by Lieutenant General Alan Shapley and a second by Brigadier General
Samuel R. Shaw--vividly describe the events of that day as they
remembered it. General Shapley, a major in December 1941, had been
relieved as commander of _Arizona_’s Marine detachment on the 6th. He
recalled:
I was just finishing my breakfast, and I was just about ready
to go to my room and get in my baseball uniform to play the
_Enterprise_ for the baseball championship of the United States
Fleet, and I heard this terrible bang and crash. I thought it
was a motor sailer that they dropped on the fantail, and I ran
up there to see what it was all about. When I got up on deck
there, the sailors were aligned on the railing there, looking
towards Pearl Harbor, and I heard two or three of them say,
‘This is the best damned drill the Army Air Corps has ever put
on.’ Then we saw a destroyer being blown up in the dry dock
across the way.
The first thing I knew was when the fantail, which was wood,
was being splintered when we were being strafed by machine
guns. And then there was a little bit of confusion, and I can
remember this because they passed the word on ship that all
unengaged personnel get below the third deck. You see, in a
battleship the third deck is the armored deck, and so realizing
what was going on, this attack and being strafed, the unengaged
personnel were ordered below the third deck.
That started some people going down the ladders. Then right
after that, the _Pennsylvania_, which was the flagship of the
whole fleet, put up these signals, “Go to general quarters.”
So that meant that the people were going the other way too. Lt
[Carleton E.] Simensen did quite a job of turning some of the
sailors around, and we went up in the director. [On the way up
the mainmast tripod, Lt Simensen was killed.] He caught a burst
through the heart and almost knocked me off the tripod because
I was behind him on the ladder, and I boosted him up in the
searchlight platform and went in to my director. And of course
when I got up there, there were only seven or eight men there,
and I thought we were all going to get cooked to death because
I couldn’t see anything but fire below after a while. I stayed
there and watched this whole attack, because I had a grandstand
seat for that, and then it got pretty hot. Anyway, the wind was
blowing from the stern to the stem and I sent the men down and
got those men off. Then I apparently got knocked off or blown
off.
I was pretty close to shore.... There was a dredging pipeline
that ran between the ship and Ford Island. And I guess that I
was only about 25 yards from the pipeline and 10 yards from
Ford Island, and managed to get ashore. I wasn’t so much
covered with oil. I didn’t have any clothes on. [The burning
fuel oil] burnt all my clothes off. I walked up to the airfield
which wasn’t very bright of me, because this was still being
attacked at first. I wanted to get a machine gun in the
administration building but I couldn’t do that. Then I was
given a boat cloak from one of my men. It was quite a sight to
see 400 or 500 men walking around all burnt, just like charred
steak. You could just see their eyes and their mouths. It was
terrible. Later I went over to the island and went to the
Marine barracks and got some clothes.
At the Marine Barracks, Captain Samuel R. Shaw, who commanded one of
the two barracks companies, vividly remembered that Sunday morning as
well:
The boat guards were in place, and the music was out there,
and the old and new officer of the day. And we had a music,
and a hell of a fine sergeant bugler who had been in Shanghai.
He would stand beside the officers of the day, and there came
the airplanes, and he looked up and he said, “Captain, those
are Japanese war planes.” And one of the two of them said, “My
God, they are, sound the call to arms.” So the bugler started
sounding the call to arms before the first bomb hit.
Of course they had already started taking out the machine
guns. They didn’t wait for the key in the OD’s office, they
just broke the door down and hauled out the machine guns, put
them in position. Everybody that wasn’t involved in that drill
grabbed their rifles and ran out in the parade ground, and
starting firing at the airplanes. They must have had several
hundred men out there with rifles. And every [Japanese]
plane that was recovered there, or pieces of it, had lots of
.30-caliber holes--somebody was hitting them, machine guns or
rifles.
Then I remembered--here we had all these guys on the post who
had not been relieved, and they had been posted at 4 o’clock,
and come 9 o’clock, 9:30 they not only had not been relieved
but had no chow and no water. So I got hold of the mess
sergeant and told him to organize, to go around to the posts.
They had a depot. At the beginning it was a supply depot. I
told him to send a party over there and draw a lot of canteens
and make sandwiches, and we’d send water and sandwiches around
to the guys on posts until we found out some way to relieve all
these guys, and get people back. Then he told me that it was
fine except that he didn’t have nearly enough messmen, they
were all out in the parade ground shooting. I think the second
phase of planes came in at that time and we had a hell of an
uproar.
_Sources_
The authors consulted primary materials in the Marine Corps Historical
Center Reference Section (November/December 1941 muster rolls) and
Personal Papers Section (Claude A. Larkins, Roger M. Emmons, and
Wayne Jordan collections), as well as in the Naval Historical Center
Operational Archives Branch (action reports and/or microfilmed deck
logs for the 15 ships with embarked Marine Detachments, and those units
included in the Commandant, 14th Naval District, report), in the office
of the Coast Guard Historian, and in the Gordon W. Prange Papers.
The _Pearl Harbor Attack: Hearings Before the Joint Committee on the
Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack_ (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1946) contains useful accounts (Lieutenant Commander
Fuqua, Lieutenant Colonel Whaling, and Lieutenant Colonel Larkin), as
does Paul Stillwell, ed., _Air Raid: Pearl Harbor! Recollections of a
Day of Infamy_ (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1981).
General works concerning Pearl Harbor that were consulted include
Gordon W. Prange, et al., _December 7, 1941: The Day The Japanese
Attacked Pearl Harbor_ (New York: McGraw Hill, 1987), Walter Lord, _Day
of Infamy_ (Henry Holt & Co., 1957), and Japanese War History Office,
_Senshi Sosho_ [War History Series], Vol. 10, _Hawaii Sakusen_ (Tokyo:
Asagumo Shimbunsa, 1970).
Articles from the _Naval Institute Proceedings_ include: Cornelius C.
Smith Jr., “... A Hell of a Christmas,” (Dec68), Thomas C. Hone, “The
Destruction of the Battle Line at Pearl Harbor,” (Dec77) and Paul H.
Backus, “Why Them And Not Me?” (Sep81). From _Marine Corps Gazette_:
Clifford B. Drake, “A Day at Pearl Harbor,” (Nov65). From _Shipmate_:
Samuel R. Shaw, “Marine Barracks, Navy Yard, Pearl Harbor,” (Dec73).
From _Naval History_: Albert A. Grasselli, “The Ewa Marines” (Spring
1991). From _Leatherneck_: Philip N. Pierce, “Twenty Years Ago ...”
(Dec61)
_About the Authors_
[Illustration]
Robert J. Cressman is currently a civilian historian in the Naval
Historical Center’s Ships’ Histories Branch. A graduate of the
University of Maryland with a bachelor of arts in history in 1972, he
obtained his master of arts in history under the late Dr. Gordon W.
Prange at the University of Maryland in 1978. Mr. Cressman, a former
reference historian in the Marine Corps Historical Center’s Reference
Section (1979–1981), is author of _That Gallant Ship: USS Yorktown
(CV-5)_, and editor and principal contributor of _A Glorious Page in
Our History: The Battle of Midway, 4–6 June 1942_. He and the co-author
of this monograph, J. Michael Wenger, also co-authored _Steady Nerves
and Stout Hearts: The USS Enterprise (CV-6) Air Group and Pearl Harbor,
7 December 1941_.
[Illustration]
J. Michael Wenger, currently an analyst for the Square D Company in
Knightdale, North Carolina, graduated from Atlantic Christian College
in 1972, and obtained a master of arts from Duke University in 1973.
Mr. Wenger has taught in the Raleigh, North Carolina, school system and
writes as a free-lance military historian. He is the co-author of _The
Way It Was: Pearl Harbor--The Original Photographs_. His publication
credits include the Raleigh _News and Observer_ and _Naval Aviation
News_.
About the Cover: In the aftermath of the attack, _Pennsylvania_ (BB-38)
lies astern of the wrecked destroyers _Cassin_ (DD-372) and _Downes_
(DD-375).
[Illustration]
This pamphlet history, one in a series devoted to U.S. Marines
in the World War II era, is published for the education and
training of Marines by the History and Museums Division,
Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, Washington, D.C., as a part
of the U.S. Department of Defense observance of the 50th
anniversary of victory in that war.
Editorial costs of preparing this pamphlet have been defrayed
in part by a bequest from the estate of Emilie H. Watts, in
memory of her late husband, Thomas M. Watts, who served as a
Marine and was the recipient of a Purple Heart.