Count me as one. I was two, my brother one, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941.
My brother and I were born in Honolulu, Our paternal grandfather, a Scots immigrant, was a principal in a successful business called the Honolulu Iron Works, with branches in Hilo and the Philppines. My father was a graduate of the Punahou School, same high school alma mater as President Obama three generations later. Pop, pre-War, spent much of his youth surfing and his evenings in white dinner jackets.
And then the world rushed in, along with reality.
By the end of the war Pop was loading submarines at Hunter’s Point in San Francisco. He’d cashed in his Honolulu chips because, like most Islanders, he assumed the Japanese would follow-up their successful aerial blitz of America’s Pacific defenses with a ground invasion so he loaded my mother and his two heirs on a evacuating troop ship headed for San Francisco while he wrapped up his affairs in his native Hawaii.
The morning of the infamous day, my brother and I had been up before dawn demanding, as family lore has it, ice cream cones. We were in the car as the sun rose and with it came wave after wave of low-flying planes swooping in over us and central Honolulu. We drove obliviously on as the invaders devastated the unawares American fleet where it was conveniently assembled in Pearl Harbor, their crews slumbering, many eternally.
“The planes were flying so low I could see the pilots,” my father remembered. “I thought it was some kind of maneuvers. There was smoke coming from Pearl Harbor, but most people simply assumed there had been an explosion and a fire. There were lots of people out in the streets watching the planes coming in.”
My father said quite a few of those spectators were recreationally strafed as the Japanese flew back out to sea. He didn’t know what was happening until we got home. It hadn’t occurred to him that the planes were hostile. That thought hadn’t occurred to much of anyone in Honolulu until they were either shot at or a stray bomb fell on their neighborhood. The Japanese, as always on-task, mostly confined themselves to military targets and, of course, forty years later, held the paper on our mortgages, including, for a spell, the Mendocino County Courthouse.
Some 20 minutes after the attack had begun, my father stopped to buy us our coveted ice cream cones, which were served up by an unperturbed clerk, and we drove on home. “Nobody had any idea that the Japanese would do such a thing,” my father said whenever he talked about December 7th. “They were too far away and America had no quarrel with them.” That he knew of, anyway.
Arriving home, my father famously complained to my mother that “These military maneuvers are getting a little too goddam realistic.” My mother, who’d always regarded her husband as something of a Magoo-like figure, informed her mate that the Japanese were attacking both Pearl Harbor and, it seemed, Honolulu, where errant bombs aimed at Hickham Field had already destroyed homes and businesses of non-combatants. She’d turned on the radio when she’d heard explosions. One of the first things she learned was that a bomb had obliterated the area where we’d made our ice cream purchase minutes earlier.
Years later, a hippie told me that I’d eluded the random wrath of the Japanese because I had “good karma.” I think it was more a case of God’s high regard for idiots and children.
My father was exempt from military service because he had a wife and children, but he was pressed into service as a member of a sort of impromptu Honolulu home guard called the Business Man’s Training Corps, or BMTC. Honolulu in 1941 was about the size of today’s Santa Rosa. My mother had much ribald enjoyment at the abbreviation, and was even more delighted at the sight of my father togged out as a World War One Doughboy, the only uniforms available.
The BMTC wouldn’t have been much of a match for the Japanese Imperial Army which, fortunately, never appeared on Waikiki. The Japanese had surprised themselves by the unopposed success of their attack on Pearl Harbor and had not prepared to land an occupying ground force.
December 7th was a major trauma for America. For our family, too. Pop made plans to head for the Mainland as soon as he could, but he wanted to accomplish both without being derided as a slacker for fleeing. It took him another year to make it stateside. He continued to spend his days surfing and sitting around in the dark at night behind blackout curtains.
My mother was a registered nurse who’d worked at Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu, my birthplace and also the birthplace of President Obama.
While surfer dude lingered in Honolulu, we'd been packed on to a troop ship headed for the Golden Gate. My mother remembers daily submarine alerts all the way across the Pacific during which everyone, including the women and children on board, trundled over the side by rope nets into lifeboats. Mom recalls that the two of us infants loved being handed off like a couple of footballs up and down the side of the ship, but the daily alarms and exertions terrified her and everyone else on board.
But we made it unscathed, and were soon ensconced in, of all places, the Fairmont Hotel, the evacuation center for people fleeing Hawaii.
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