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Pearl Harbor: Army Air Corps pilot describes chaos and fear after attack

Editor’s note: This is a detailed account of the day of the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, written by Lawrence M. Kirsch, a one-time Southern California reporter and at that time an Army Air Corps pilot stationed at Honolulu. He offers a look at what that chaotic day looked like and his reaction to it. This document, never before published, was made available by Kirsch’s sister-in-law, Barbara Kirsch of Yucaipa.  

WAR – FIRST DAY | By Lawrence M. Kirsch

Those can’t be our planes – that hum, high above the field, growing into an angry buzz – because it’s early Sunday morning. The Army just doesn’t fly on Sundays! I roll over sleepily and eye the alarm clock on the dresser beside the bed. It’s about ten minutes to eight.

But the mean whine of the engines which has awakened me had become the heavy racket of power-diving aircraft. Then at the crescendo of one of the dives, there is a muffled, heavy kaPLUNK! The damn show-off Navy is up on maneuvers I think, drowsily. I hop out of the bed to the window to watch the doings.

At the far end of the field, coal black smoke is pouring up in a huge column, but my mind is too fogged with sleep to think straight. It appears to be some game. Before we can identify the planes the cha-cha-cha stutter of machine guns staccatos the morning quiet. “That’s real machine gunning,” I say to myself.

Army pilot Lawrence M. Kirsch (Photo from a 1944 Pasadena newspaper)

“The sky is full of planes, diving and zooming over the hangar line a couple of blocks to the south. I pick out one in particular. It has long unretractable landing gear and strange-looking wingtips. It pulls out of its dive sharply – more suddenly than any of our planes could do. A missile drops from its belly, fifty feet above a hangar-top. BLAM! A jarring thud. As it chandelles away, my stomach turns leaden. A huge red eye, a rising sun, glares at me from the bottom of a wing.

“It’s the Japs,” I say automatically. My voice trembles strangely. It’s like watching a newsreel. It doesn’t seem possible. It can’t be true. Something’s crazy.

Across the street came two friends and their bathrobed wives, running with panic from their apartment, which is closer to the field. We see one plane veer, nose down, and its machine guns begin to spit, loud and close. One of the two girls falls flat.

I wait to see no more. “The sonsabitches,” I mumble, feeling the blood pound up my neck. I run upstairs to slap on a flying suit and shoes. Must get to the planes, is all I can think.

As I get into the car the two pilots join me. And here comes one more, still dressing. They pile in. The car starts and we swing toward the street. But here comes a plane, unmistakably at us. It looks as if it will dive straight through the windshield. The doors burst open and we scatter like a bunch of rabbits. One of the pilots tells me later that bullets actually kicked dirt in his eyes as he lay prone.

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The plane streaks by. Three of us jump back in and drive like mad down the street toward the hangar line. We’re all ducking low on the seat as plane after plane whizzes over us shooting at the hangar line, and, for all we know, at us. Other cars are racing with us. There’s a big open space to cross before we get to the officer’s club. Someone yells, “Get across this spot fast!” I can only think, as I flatten the accelerator, “What a way to die – shot in the back like a running burglar.”

The hangars are black and red with smoke and flame. Bombs and machine guns are deafeningly doing their work, the bullets darting about like a bunch of angry bees. A few of our planes in front of one hangar are untouched as yet and we park the car and decide to try to get to them. But the gunnery is too intense, especially as the Japs are starting to concentrate their incendiary shells on the parked planes. It would be suicide to try to reach the line.

I run up to a non-com’s house on the main street and squat against the wall facing the field. I stick my neck around the corner to see if it would be safer on the other side, but planes are diving from all angles now in a methodical pattern. I might as well face the hangars and watch the show, even though the huge air-base barracks across the street may offer a tempting target to a bomber.

Some cars are whizzing down the main avenue in front of me and tracer bullets seem to bracket them in red streaks, bouncing toward me as they hit the pavement. The noise is terrific – deafening. What a nightmare!

In this photo provided by the Department of Defense, U.S. aircraft destroyed as a result of the Japanese bombing on Pearl Harbor is shown, Dec. 7, 1941. Heap of demolished hanger in background Army amphibian in foreground. (AP Photo/DOD)

A corporal with blood-stained face squats on his heels near me. “Not much we can do, is there,” I grin at him, or try to grin. He turns his head and stares at me mutely, blank, as if I were a post.

Across the street stands a field guard, calmly watching the proceedings as he leans against a small tree.  Does he think the whole thing is some kind of maneuver or is he daffy? Bullets finally zip around him. Two more soldiers, prone beside a lumber pile near him, yell and beckon him to cover, but he ignores them.

I think: Which way will I fall; how will they find my body sprawled if one of those slugs hits me in the head?  The POW-POW-POW of the planes’ automatic cannons is hard on the nerves.

Suddenly the racket ceases, I crane a cautious neck around the corner and survey the sky. They must be through. I run across the street downhill toward the hangars. At the lumber pile, one of two soldiers has not risen. His pants are scarlet above the knee. I yell at the guard by the tree to run for a stretcher and he trots off like an automaton.

Men are emerging from underneath buildings. They are grimy with dirt and look as if they can’t believe they’re untouched. I bump into two majors. “Get all the good planes out into the field,” one yells.

Running down the last fifty yards onto the ramp is like ascending into some noisy black and red pit. Row after row of parked P-40s standing like patient blind men, are ablaze from the incendiary bullets. I feel that they have been awaiting a terrible and unknown doom. Only an occasional one, here and there, had failed to ignite, even though riddled with shells. The hangar line is devoid of any life – it is a lurid stage, set for a horrible scene.

Our hangar is worst hit, I notice, as I keep trotting down the ramp. The noise from the crackling flames and falling walls is almost as bad as the gunning had been. Smoke and ashes billow about. The burning planes pop, spit and shower sparks as if in protest to their unexpected destruction. The whole mess stuns one’s mind.

Something is moving in the blackened space between hangar and planes. It is an arm – rising and falling – a feeble attempt to summon help. The man is hardly distinguishable from the shambles from this distance. But as I approach I see his uniform is mostly blown off and in shreds. His face is black and greenish. I can barely make out his eyes. “My leg is broken,” he yells, trying to raise himself on an elbow. I cup my hands to my mouth: “Lie still. I’ll get a stretcher right away.”  Broken leg – God! It is split open nearly from his hip almost to ankle. The white bone is clearly visible. Strangely enough, it does not seem to bleed.

A Japanese plane, braving American anti-aircraft fire, proceeds toward “battleship row,” Pearl Harbor, after other bombers had hit USS. Arizona, from which smoke billows, Dec. 7, 1941. (AP Photo)

The first plane I try to start grinds furiously and refuses. Gas drains from the holes in the tanks and I sit on windshield glass which has fallen on the seat.

Men are running about on the ramp now. We push one good plane away from the confusion. Another one, with a flat tire, gets a lift from a tug. I see the General striding by, grimly. Seawards, toward Pearl Harbor, the sky is split by the same kind of coal black smoke. And from time to time, we pause and gaze in that direction, note the puffs of anti-aircraft fire, and think, “They’re really getting it now!

Most of the moveable planes are out of the way now. Remaining, like charred blue tombstones, are the unburned engines, pitifully pointed skywards as they rest on their bent propellers. Their fuselages trail out in blackened smudges behind them. They look like fishheads on an ocean wharf.

They were the planes we had learned to fly, to stunt, and to shoot. Planes we had come to identify with the field, with our daily course of living – with ourselves. We had cussed them, mistreated them – but somehow there was a bond between us. They were defenseless friends, butchered without warning.

Our own fiercely burning hangar draws our attention. Ammunition stored there keeps banging away, exploded by the heat. Part of the iron walls had fallen over an outer portion of the cases of 50- and 30-caliber shells, stacked there recently in preparation for a move to another island to the west. We push and tug the iron away, form a line and pass the heavy boxes of ammunition, arm to arm, from the insides of the hangar to safety on the ramp. Why nobody is struck by one of the many exploding bullets further inside is a mystery. Faces about me are blackened and drawn. One private, very eager, is big and loud and believes he is running the whole rescue business. The Captain is standing next to him and gets orders from the private to move the cases along faster. I’m forced to grin.

Firemen are hosing a burned gas truck to one side of us and I wangle the hose away from them. We retrace it through several tents so that it will reach our hangar. Finally we get it near enough so that the stream will reach and I open the nozzle. Aha! One of my lifetime ambitions is fulfilled – I am working a fire hose!

Suddenly, a great yell rises. The seas of working men along the hangars, like a wheat field in a gust of wind, flows away from the ramp in one lashing wave. “Here they come again” is the cry. We hear the approaching plane engines and we drop the hoses and run with the rest.

At the top of the hill we pause and survey the sky. It evidently is a pair of planes returning from Pearl Harbor. They are shot down several minutes later by two of our planes who have flown up from an outlying field.

One plane crashes a half-mile from the field, and in later hours about fifty-three persons claim to have made the shot which got it. The lieutenant with a shotgun; a private with a pistol; a civilian with a .22 rifle; a ground machine gunner – all are sure they are the killers!

About this time, in comes a B-17, half-crippled and scared to death by the chasing he has been getting as he arrived from a long formation flight from San Francisco. He lands directly into the hangar line, a feat not only difficult to do but against all air regulations. The General himself strides up to bawl him out, but the pilot just steps down and throws his arms around the General’s shoulders. “General,” he smiles with a quiver in his voice. “I am so damn glad to be down on solid earth alive, I don’t care if I landed on the hangar roofs!”

A small boat rescues a USS West Virginia crew member from the water after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941 during World War II. Two men can be seen on the superstructure, upper center. The mast of the USS Tennessee is beyond the burning West Virginia. (AP Photo)

We swap stories as we catch our breaths. One pilot, who had driven up from his home on Pearl Harbor, has seen at least two big ships sunk by torpedo and bombs. One guard at Hickam Field, they say, stood immovable at port-arms for a half-hour after the attack. Officers kept telling him to lay his gun aside and help. Finally they had to pry the gun from his hands.

I like the story about the one GI who was missed after the raid and everyone thought he had taken off for the hills. But someone finally remember seeing him running across a street just a bomb hit the corner of the nearby barracks. He must have been nearly a direct hit. That bomb blew a running man’s head one way and his body another. Anyhow, not a particle of this first GI was ever identified. Although, come to think of it, they said that one man, while rummaging in the debris, picked up a battered shoe. Inside the shoe was somebody’s foot.

As we return to the hangars the second time some of the men are working bedecked in bloody bandages. But they wear grins, too. Tin helmets, gas masks and hip pistols have put in an appearance.

I help pile ammunition into a truck and spend some time dispersing it out to the planes which have been stuck in the bunkers around the field. Mechanics have their hands full taking parts from badly damaged planes to renovate less damaged ones. Armament men are just as busy loading the guns. Squadrons are getting organized in their respective dispersal positions.

Alarming reports are coming in from the Honolulu radio station: Jap troop ships flying the American flag; a major first engagement southwest of the island; parachutists landing at Barbers Point. We don’t relish the thought of being prisoners for some years to come!

Around one p.m. I get in on a patrol flight of four patched-up planes. There is not an instrument working in one of them. Below us, southwest of the island, about fifteen or twenty navy ships are zigzagging around in their methodical patterns. We can’t see if they have any opposition, but there is anti-aircraft fire in a line of black puffs high above the ships.

I twist and turn my neck searching the sky. Then my heart jumps. There are four black specks out to sea and above us. On the radio I start calling our leader but he cannot seem to make them out. “They’re coming this way!” I shout, and start imagining Jap slugs tearing into my vitals. I can make out six planes now, approaching in formation.

“Take the lead and point them out,” calls the leader. I swing ahead, point my ship and waggle my wings. “Okay,” answers the leader, and climbs to meet them. The “bogies” make a slow arc and start to descend, straight at us. It will be a heads-on meeting. I feel rather glad I am the last man in the flight. But it turns out to be another friendly P-40 patrol, and the leaders rock their wings relievedly. My hand is very sweaty on the stick.

Just after we get back, they call for two pilots to transfer to Bellows Field, our gunnery camp on the northeast side of the island. I am one who happens to be handy, to grab a parachute, check out at headquarters and race down the highway in a command car driven by a bandaged wild man. At every intersection stands an M.P. waving army traffic along. By army orders, civilian cars are abandoned along the road.

Skirting Pearl Harbor – invulnerable Pearl Harbor – we look out on the still-burning Arizona and the other sunken shops. One’s huge, bare bottom is turned skywards. Another pair is sunk to their rails and tilted at crazy angles. It is a pitiful sight. Honolulu is devoid of any traffic and we make Bellows Field in record time.

Here no bombing was done. Evidently the enemy planes sent to attack the nearby Navy auxiliary station of Kaneohe saw, just by chance, the pursuit planes stationed at Bellows. This squadron had been told to load its guns and go on the alert – but they had no word of the actual attack until the Navy station began to get it.

One pilot ran out to his plane. He was sprayed with lead and fell under the wing. Another barely made it off the ground and was murdered from behind. A third flew a few miles down the coast, taking off despite the fact that he had witnessed the other two deaths. He managed to bail out of his riddled plane and swim safely to shore.

More exchanges of tales as we arrive. Dusk falls soon, and with it comes our first blackout. A cigarette butt may be a beacon to the enemy, or death to its owner – so nervous are the guards. Walking about is dangerous to shin and head alike, and the repeated challenge: “HALT! Who goes there?” makes one jump every time. We fumble about in the mess tent munching a scant supper and we talk in low, tired tones. At present, we discover we are the strongest squadron on the island.

For a time after supper we sit in cars, drink canned beer, and listen to mainland radio broadcasts of the blitz which had struck.

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A glow of light across the mountains, from the Honolulu side, attracts our attention, and we surmise it is a fire or anti-aircraft shooting. It turns out to be the latter, which mistakenly shoots down some of our own Navy planes, coming in off a carrier.

A flash pinpoint of light at the end of the runway lures a bunch of us out. Like boys playing cops and robbers, we stoop low and run in courses from dune to dune. And keep reassuring ourselves that we are not jittery by saying, “Yes, I’m sure I saw a light.” One officer raises a hullabaloo when he finds a crouching figure in a hole. It turns out to be a guard, almost too scared by the ruckus to talk. It is pitch black and spooky, a steady wind whispers and coughs in from the sea.

Finally, exhausted, I crawl into a bunk. It belonged to one of the killed fliers. Before I start to doze, there is a far-off mumbling and then a bellow, “MAKE WAY FOR THE PRISONERS!” Out of the tents we dash.  About five soldiers with pointed rifles are herding two little sweat-shirt-clad Japs to the guardhouse. They have been showing lights from a shack in a cane field.

“Keep your hands up, you dirty sonsabitches.” The sergeant in charge keeps up a steady, loud monologue. Who is more frightened, I wonder, himself or the prisoners? “Stop here,” he roars. “Don’t MOVE!”

We get back to bed when they’re taken inside the guardhouse for questioning. I can’t keep awake much longer. What a long day it’s been! I am too exhausted to review it all; too glad to be in bed to think what the day’s doings may mean to history and to our own futures. Somehow I feel at peace; they will not come back.

“Make W-A-A-Y for the prisoners!” My eyes open again. More treading of feet up the hill to the guardhouse. I cannot budge – just strain to hear what is being said. The commotion dies down again after a bit.

Two pilots in the next tent get up and talk around outside. One of them utters, “I just can’t get to sleep. Don’t feel like it at all.” An answer, and their footsteps and low voices drift away.

The wind whooshes about the tent. It brings the sound of the season. Above my head the loose canvas of the tent flaps lazily – soothingly.

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