Seeing the Attack on Pearl Harbor Through New Eyes

When the Japanese attack on the American naval base on December 7, 1941, Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter Elizabeth MacIntosh wrote an account of the attack that was so graphic that it was not published.  The Washington Post has now published this first hand reportage.

Her editors assigned MacIntosh to cover the Emergency Room in Honolulu–

The vision of death became reality when I was assigned to cover the emergency room of the hospital.

The first victims of the Japanese-American war were brought there on that bright Sunday morning.

Bombs were still dropping over the city as ambulances screamed off into the heart of the destruction. The drivers were blood-sodden when they returned, with stories of streets ripped up, houses burned, twisted shrapnel and charred bodies of children.

In the morgue, the bodies were laid on slabs in the grotesque positions in which they had died. Fear contorted their faces. Their clothes were blue-black from incendiary bombs. One little girl in a red sweater, barefoot, still clutched a piece of jump-rope in her hand.

Firefighters from the Hickam Air Force Base carried the victims in. The men had a red T marked on their foreheads, mute testimony of the efficiency of first-aiders in giving tetanus shots to ward off lockjaw. The body of a man with a monogrammed shirt, H.A.D., was marked DOA (dead on arrival), trundled off to make room for victims who were still breathing.

MacIntosh’s piece is worth reading in its entirety to show how the reality of what Europeans had faced in World War II was immediately understood by this first hand witness to expansionist aggression by Axis forces on America.



History buffs should also be interested in seeing a  documentary “Pearl Harbor Declassified”  for  the Military Channel (now known as the American Heroes Channel) which uses modern stabilization techniques to give a frame-by-frame account of the first 15 minutes of the attack on Pearl Harbor.





The stabilized images more clearly shows the carnage and the tactical successes of the Imperial Japanese attack.  However, Admiral Chester Nimitz pointed out many of the missed opportunities of the surprise attack.

The timing of the attack spared many American lives.  The Japanese attack was at 8 AM on a Sunday morning, so nine out of ten sailors were on shore leave.  Had these same ships been at sea and sunk, the casualty count would have been 38,000 instead of the 3,800 servicemen.

Japanese bombers targeted the battleships which were arrayed in a row.  But these Imperial Japanese attackers never bothered to destroy the dry docks.  Had the docks been bombed, it would have required towing each of these ships to sea to repair them. But since the ships were in shallow water and could quickly be raised rather than requiring them to be towed to America.

It is ironic that the attack may have been prompted by an American oil embargo to the Japanese but the Imperial air attack failed to target the Pearl Harbor fuel depot.  If Japanese bombers strafed the tank farm near the submarine base, which were just five miles from the docks of Pearl Harbor, it would have destroyed every drop of oil America had for the Pacific Theater.




[The piece originally ran on District of Calamity on December 7, 2014]