Chapter III: Part 3

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_

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_.

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).

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.

WORLD WAR II COMMEMORATIVE SERIES

_DIRECTOR OF MARINE CORPS HISTORY AND MUSEUMS_
=Brigadier General Edwin H. Simmons, USMC= (=Ret=)

_GENERAL EDITOR,
WORLD WAR II COMMEMORATIVE SERIES_
=Benis M. Frank=

_EDITING AND DESIGN SECTION, HISTORY AND MUSEUMS DIVISION_
=Robert E. Struder=, Senior Editor; =W. Stephen Hill=,
Visual Information Specialist; =Catherine A. Kerns=,
Composition Services Technician

Marine Corps Historical Center
Building 58, Washington Navy Yard
Washington, D.C. 20374-0580

=1992=

PCN 190 003116 00

For sale by the U.S. Government Printing Office
Superintendent of Documents, Mail Stop: SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-9328

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. Some have been repositioned to improve the appearance of pages in eBook format.

The Frontispiece originally was printed across two facing pages, so part of the photograph was lost in the binding. In this eBook, the two parts of that photograph have been combined into one image, with a vertical white gap indicating the lost area. The complete photograph used by the original book may be found by searching the Internet for images of “ford island pearl harbor attack”, but this eBook only used what was in the original book.

Ship identifications in the original book sometimes were printed with a hyphen (BB-43) and sometimes with a space (BB 43). In this eBook, they always are printed with a hyphen.

Page 32: The text on this page was superimposed on a background image that was too faint be reproduced in this eBook. The caption of that image is:

Photo of USS _Arizona_ Memorial, 1991, by Maj Charles D. Melson,
USMC (Ret)