My family and Pearl Harbor

The only member of my family who I know was at Pearl Harbor  when the Japanese attacked was a great uncle who was serving with the coast artillery at Fort Armstrong.  I have only the vaguest memories of him, one of him showing me a scar on his calf  that he said was from  a bullet fired by a strafing Japanese plane. We have a photo in which he is standing with other soldiers beside what look like water-cooled .50 cal. machine guns mounted in the backs of trucks on carriages that allowed them to swing up to a very high angle, so I suppose they were anti-aircraft guns.  I don't know what he did in the war.

 Another great uncle,  whom I never met because he didn't survive the war, was a flyer in the Army Air Corps.  He had been stationed in the Philippine Islands before the Japanese attack.  He flew P-26s and P-35s.  

Yet another great uncle also did not survive the war.  He was a naval aviator who won the Navy Cross posthumously during the invasion of Saipan.  He flew an FM-2.  While reading his squadron's history, I was astonished to learn that out of a total complement of 96 air crew, 31 were killed in action before the carrier was sunk by kamikazes during the Battle off Samar.

One of my grandfathers was a pilot with a pursuit group training in the states when the Japanese attacked.  His unit sailed for Australia at the beginning of 1942 and he served there and in New Guinea flying P-39s and P-40s before returning to the States. In 1944 he was sent to Europe and flew P-51s till the war ended.  He was a fun guy and always telling hilarious stories about high jinx on leave or some snafu or other when the subject of the war came up.  I just remember he was always making my grandmother either blush or laugh and she cried and cried when he died.
During the war she worked in defense plants.  I remember she said she assembled radios.  At  the time I thought she meant regular civilian radios but I suppose she must have meant some sort of military radio equipment. 

My other grandfather was a naval aviator and at sea on an aircraft carrier when the war started.  He participated in three of the five big carrier-to-carrier battles of the Pacific war, flying F4Fs and F6Fs.  He never said much about the war or flying F9Fs in Korea War or his later service.  He did write about some of his experiences and seems at one time to have planned to write a memoir of the war.  But he never did.  He was kind of a stern guy and I was a little bit afraid of him,  but his wife--my grandmother--said that the war had changed him and made him withdrawn and cautious around people.  He was good to us,  though, and always had dogs.  He taught me how to train dogs, how to track wild animals and understand  nature. He once told me when I said I was scared to sleep in a tent in the high mountains that the farther you are from people the safer you are, and you are never more safe than alone in the wilderness, as long as you are not careless and know what you are doing.  So he taught me to know what I was doing and not be careless.

My other grandmother was a Navy nurse during the war, and served on board a hospital ship in the Pacific. The only thing I can recall about that that she mentioned was that they used to sail alone, unescorted, with searchlights illuminating the red cross painted on the side of their ship until a kamikaze dove into one of their sister hospital ships and almost sank it.  After that their ship sailed with a destroyer escort and lights off.
For each of them, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed their lives forever.  It was the anchor point of all that happened after and how they remembered what happened before.  I think the only comparable episode as far as changing the lives of so many ordinary Americans in our history might be Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War.  I guess 9/11 has in very many ways changed us, but that seems to have been more a gradual increase in travel inconveniences and some random terrorist attacks.
Most people haven't served or had family members serve in the armed forces, and even if they have, let's face it, not all that many have been killed or wounded compared to World War II.  Those of us who have served, and have had the war touch us personally, are a tiny minority of Americans.   My direct experiences happened years after 9/11 and hardly seem related to it at all, while my grandmother dodging kamikazes off Okinawa in 1945 was very much aware of the connection to Pearl Harbor.