Kentuckians and Pearl Harbor

Stories from the Day of Infamy

Berry Craig

• Publisher: South Limestone
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781949669275
• eBook ISBN: 9781949669299
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

When the air raid alarm sounded around 7:55 a.m. on December 7, 1941, Gunner's Mate Second Class James Allard Vessels of Paducah was preparing to participate in morning colors aboard the USS Arizona. In the scramble for battle stations, Vessels quickly climbed to a machine gun platform high atop the mainmast as others descended below decks to help pass ammunition up to gunners. At 8:06, a bomb exploded and the Arizona sank. Vessels's lofty perch saved his life, but most of his shipmates were not so lucky.

In Kentuckians and Pearl Harbor, Berry Craig employs an impressive array of newspapers, unpublished memoirs, oral histories, and official military records to offer a ground-up look at the day that Franklin D. Roosevelt said would "live in infamy," and its aftermath in the Bluegrass State. In a series of vignettes, Craig uncovers the untold, forgotten, or little-known stories of ordinary people—military and civilian—on the most extraordinary day of their lives. Craig concludes by exploring the home front reaction to this pivotal event in American history.

Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor swept away any illusions Kentuckians had about being able to stay out of World War II. From Paducah to Pikeville, people sprang to action. Their voices emerge and come back to life in this engaging and timely history.

1

America and Japan

“Face-to-Face Like Duelists at the Salute”

FDR’s eleventh-hour message to Emperor Hirohito “in the midst of darkening war clouds in the Far East” merited a front-page banner headline in the December 7, 1941, Louisville Courier-Journal. The paper provided no details about what the president wrote. But it reported that the December 6 letter “was viewed as possibly a step of last resort to avert an open break with Japan, since it was considered unlikely that Mr. Roosevelt would communicate directly with the emperor unless virtually all hope had been abandoned of a satisfactory adjustment of Japanese-American difficulties through the usual diplomatic channels.”¹

But Hawaii was in the local news before the first Japanese warplanes appeared over Oahu. Coincidentally, the morning paper published a letter from a Falls City sailor at Pearl Harbor and a staff writer’s Hawaii travelogue. Radioman Third Class Herbert R. Purdum of the destroyer Fanning wanted his dad, the Salvation Army major Harry L. Purdum, to do him a favor: tell everybody back home to quit worrying about military morale in Hawaii and “take care of their own.”²

Young Purdum, a Louisville Male High School grad, edited the Fanning Forum, the ship’s newspaper. “We don’t need any encouragement but from all the discussions I’ve heard lately, the civilians do,” he advised his parent. Luckily for young Purdum, the Fanning was a long way from port on December 7. The “tin can” was steaming back across the Pacific Ocean, helping escort the aircraft carrier Enterprise, which had ferried marine planes and pilots to US-held Wake Island in case trouble brewed with the Japanese. The task force was due back at Pearl Harbor at 7:30 A.M. on the seventh, but heavy seas slowed the refueling of the carrier’s destroyer screen. At 6:15, the ships were still about two hundred miles west of Oahu.³

Purdum’s story made page 12; the Courier-Journal printed the travelogue on page 35. Nobody who read the story knew it would be at least four years before tourists from Louisville or anyplace else could take Tom Ochiltree up on his invitation to visit the territory of Hawaii, 4,370 miles west of the Bluegrass State’s largest city.⁴

Ochiltree described what he claimed was a typical passenger ship departure, which inexplicably “always is about 43 minutes late in casting off.” Hawaiians “stack flower leis around your neck clear up to your ears when you depart and shake your hand or kiss you, as the case may be.” Homeward-bound holidaymakers toss “bright colored paper streamers” to locals ashore. The Royal Hawaiian Band belts out music that “cuts you all up inside; the way ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ does someone from the Bronx,” he deadpanned. “By the time these native musicians and singers get around to ‘Aloha Oe’ everyone is having a real good cry.”⁵

As the vessel shoves off, Hawaiian boys dive into the harbor from the ship or from the dock while appreciative travelers toss coins to them, according to Ochiltree. Speedboats trail the vessel as the last lads to go ashore “do beautiful swan dives from the top deck.” Passengers drop their leis into the Pacific as the ship rounds Diamond Head, the extinct volcano almost everybody recognized from picture postcards, geography books, and newsreels. “Over they go, ginger, carnation, tuberose, gardenia and orchid necklaces—enough to make a mainland florist weep. The wake of the ship carries these flowers back toward the islands, a sign that the visitor will return some day,” Ochiltree noted. He explained that the arrival of cruise ships is about “the same except that the shore boats bring people out with their presents of flowers.”⁶

The scribe marveled that Hawaii was the only place on earth “where a volcanic eruption is the signal for people to go on a holiday”: “It’s like the opening of the baseball season in Brooklyn.” Explosions were interrupting the Sabbath peace in Hawaii about the time Louisville residents were finishing Sunday lunch. The blasts were humanmade, not natural; the danger was coming, not from deep inside the bowels of the earth, but from a clear blue sky. The peril was not deadly lava. A lethal rain of bombs, torpedoes, and strafing fire was falling on thousands of unsuspecting and bewildered servicemen and -women at Pearl Harbor and army, army air force, and marine bases and camps nearby and elsewhere on Oahu.⁷

Almost every sailor, soldier, or marine—and many army air force men—arrived in Hawaii by ship, usually landing in Honolulu Harbor, where the Aloha Tower loomed as the tallest building on the islands. Those who left from the East Coast traveled Albert Owen Rowe’s route. But the Louisvillian’s ocean voyage to Schofield Barracks, Hawaii’s main army base, was anything but a holiday cruise. “Rode the U.S. Army Transport Leonard Wood from New York to San Francisco,” the twenty-one-year-old Male High graduate wrote home in a letter the Courier-Journal published in mid-March 1941. “I was so far down in the hold I didn’t see daylight for a week. Got so seasick I lay in my bunk three days straight. Too sick to move or eat.” Rowe did not spare the gory details of a malady shared by many landlubbers on the high seas: “Did you ever vomit when you hadn’t eaten for over three days? It was the worst physical experience I’ve ever known. You start getting better after the fourth day.”⁸

Assigned to the Eighth Field Artillery’s Regimental Headquarters Battery, Rowe had soldiered in Albany and Plattsburgh, New York, where he joked that he “was doing all right”: “private hotel room, maid service, 9 o’clock reveille, dollar forty per day for meals, etc.” He claimed he “got tired eating in restaurants”: “Same as when I was working at Thompson’s at 4th and Walnut in ’36.”⁹

Rowe confessed: “The sudden change from knee-deep snow in Plattsburgh to 105 in the shade in Panama gave me acute spring fever.” He spent two days and two nights in the Canal Zone, where he picked up some souvenirs and local currency and observed that “four out of five doors is a saloon.” He explained the canal’s geographic oddity: “[Its] Pacific side … is twenty-seven miles east of the Atlantic side. In other words you go east to get west down there.” He said that traffic flowed left, British style, making it hard for an American “to dodge traffic when all cars drove on the wrong side of the street”: “You always look the wrong way. And the bus drivers cuss you out.”¹⁰

Rowe said it took the Wood eight days to reach San Francisco, where he was billeted at Fort McDowell on Angel Island. He was switched to the transport U. S. Grant for the Oahu leg. Before heading for Hawaii, the ship “stopped at Alcatraz to pick up laundry done by the convicts.” Evidently, he had conquered his seasickness. He said the Grant was “smaller and slower and rocks more than the Wood but … feeds better.” He did not say how long it took to reach Hawaii, but he did say that the Grant docked at Honolulu at 10:00 P.M.: “Noticed the time by the Aloha Tower clock.” He rode a train past Pearl Harbor, observing the Pacific Fleet “lighted up”: “Myriad lights of red and white against a background of midnight blue spread out as far as the eye can see.” He said he was “stooging in the supply office here”: “Got enough material about Oahu and Hawaii to make a book.” He cautioned that US military personnel were prohibited from saying anything about statehood, that the local weather was like Louisville weather in June, and that his outfit was athletic—“everybody but me boxes, runs, plays tennis, etc.” He preferred to “get in a lot of flying time—on my bunk.”¹¹

Rowe liked what he had seen of Hawaii, noting that “all classes, creeds and colors are mixed here,” adding that he might enroll in the University of Hawaii should he “get the time, money and opportunity.” Meanwhile, he was basking under a tropical sun, reading and studying, when he was off duty. He suspected the home folks were freezing in late winter: “This time last winter, I was sleeping in a tent, with the snow six inches deep and the temperature deeper—12 below.”¹²

An editor’s note that appeared with the letter said that Rowe “was the ‘perfect recruit’ signed up by the Army two years ago in Louisville.” The soldier-to-be “gave the correct answer to every question asked by the enlistment office and attained a rating of 97.25 percent.” Too, recruiters claimed that he “was the most nearly physically perfect applicant here in the last twenty years.”¹³

At Wheeler Army Airfield, next to Schofield Barracks, Private Elliott C. “Bim” Mitchell Jr. of Paducah was so pleased with army life that he wrote his hometown recruiter, Sergeant P. A. Wymore. Wymore had signed Mitchell up in October 1939. Mitchell, twenty-three, advised the sergeant that he was with the Eighteenth Air Base Squadron and learning aerial photography.¹⁴

“The teaching staff is excellent and I am already able to turn out very creditable work,” Mitchell penned. “Conditions are ideal for this work and I am most satisfied with the way things have worked out so far.” Besides enjoying military schooling, he was having “a wonderful time doing other things,” including instructing pilots in instrument flying in the Link Trainer.¹⁵

Mitchell swore army chow beat home cooking, a revelation his mother might not have appreciated: “For variety and excellence the food here can’t be surpassed. I have gained 20 pounds on it and feel fit as a fiddle.” He was happy with his army dentist, adding: “It was certainly a pleasure to get such excellent work and not have to worry about paying for it the first of the month.”¹⁶

Mitchell found the Hawaiian weather agreeable, too: “I have acquired a swell coat of tan at the beach.” He cited other pleasant diversions from army routine, including swimming, baseball, boxing, bowling, and movies besides “other sports.” He concluded: “Yes sir, taking everything into consideration I am doing all right, not only learning to do things I wish but also aiding materially in protecting our country. It’s a shame that everyone can’t have the same advantages I am enjoying and I strongly urge anyone considering signing up to do so without delay for it’s a great life and the KP’s are too far apart to worry me.”¹⁷

It seems likely that Mitchell knew Sergeant Leslie Zeiss of Paducah, who was also at Wheeler Airfield. He, too, wrote his hometown paper. The Sun-Democrat published his letter with a tongue-in-cheek editor’s note: “[Zeiss] has either being doing a lot of research work about his new environment or has been reading some guide books.” Anyway, the sergeant advised: “Hawaii is the land where they play football without shoes…. Aloha means hello, love and goodbye (Hollywood has a word—marriage—which means practically the same thing)…. [R]ain is called liquid sunshine.”¹⁸

Waves, Zeiss added, “roll for over a mile at Waikiki beach”: “Gardenias are bought for a nickel a bunch…. [T]he temperature averages 75 degrees day and night the year round…. [T]here is no word for weather, which never changes.” Hawaii was snake free, Santa Claus showed up in an outrigger canoe, schoolgirls wore orchids in their hair, and there were no billboards. He said the locals pronounced w as v and ran “toward instead of away from a volcanic eruption.” Everybody was treated to the sight of “several rainbows practically every day.”¹⁹

On November 5, the day Hirohito endorsed the Pearl Harbor attack plan, another Kentuckian wrote home that the United States would invariably fight in the war. But he added that Japan was afraid to strike Hawaii. The Louisville Courier-Journal published part of the lengthy missive on December 21 “to show that they were even wrong in Hawaii.” The letter’s unnamed author boasted: “We are about 6,000 miles from Japan—farther than you are from Europe, and Japan could never bomb this place unless she sent airplane carriers out and it would be too long a trip to make without refueling, and an airplane carrier could never get within 1,000 miles of this place.”²⁰

He described Pearl Harbor as “a wonderful sight” with “so many battleships that it is impossible to count them”: “Submarines, etc., then these two large flying fields here and army camps all around the island.” He said: “[Military aircraft] are on constant patrol duty and so are the ships. Japan knows all of this, I suppose, and that is why they are afraid of us.” He recounted lying on Waikiki Beach at night and watching “searchlights pick out planes in the sky”: “I think every mountain on the island must have a searchlight on it.” He wished he could reveal “how well fortified this place really is”: “Then no one would worry about us out here. I think it is the ships in the Atlantic that will see the action.”²¹

Tom Ochiltree was not so sanguine; four months before the Courier-Journal published his tongue-in-cheek travelogue, it printed the staffer’s sober assessment of Hawaii should war break out there. Conflict involving the United States would turn the islands’ economy upside down, he predicted in a story that ran on August 3, 1941: “Despite their perfect climate, the islands are not self-sufficient.” He said Hawaii had nearly no diversified farming. The economy was based on growing pineapples, sugarcane, and cattle: “If war should come, the military authorities will force the plantation owners to plow up their lands and plant general food crops. The fields to be so used have already been designated.”²²

In his travel story, Ochiltree had detailed passenger ship arrivals and departures. He said that island papers no longer reported comings and goings of naval vessels. But he wrote that it was hardly a military secret that Oahu was one of the world’s most heavily fortified locales: “This summer Pearl Harbor was jammed with units of the fleet, with battleships moored side by side like rowboats at an amusement park lake. It is possible to see squadrons of planes wing their way out to sea over Waikiki any afternoon while just off that famous beach the battleships and cruisers can be seen.”²³

With the possibility, if not the likelihood, of war between the United States and Japan increasing, “there are no two people on the islands who seem to agree regarding the loyalty of the [local] Japanese population,” Ochiltree wrote. “But somehow your sympathies go out to these people when you hear Japanese schoolchildren, during recitation in their history classes, refer at great length to ‘our forefathers who landed on Plymouth Rock.’” Deteriorating relations between Washington and Tokyo had “produced as a by-product the complex problem of how to deal safely and fairly with the Americanized Japanese of the Hawaiian Islands.”²⁴ (Overwhelmi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. America and Japan: “Face-to-Face Like Duelists at the Salute”
• 2. “We Are Too Big, Too Powerful, and Too Strong”
• 3. The Arizona and the Oklahoma
• 4. Elsewhere on Battleship Row
• 5. Cruisers, Tin Cans, Friendly Fire, a Cutter, and Marines
• 6. The Dungaree Navy
• 7. The Army
• 8. Civvy Street, Hawaii
• 9. Keeping the Home Fires Ablaze
• Epilogue: Survivors Post–Pearl Harbor
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Illustrations