In the panic of the Pearl Harbor attack, a PBY and her ad hoc crew managed to get airborne—but the real challenge was getting back in one piece.
From 1939 to 1942, I was assigned to squadron VP-23, based in Hawaii. An antisubmarine patrol of the fleet operating areas in use, flown by PBYs, was in effect at the time of Pearl Harbor. There were numbered areas around Pearl Harbor where battleships, cruisers, destroyers, or whatever would go to operate and train. The arrangement was that the naval air stations at Pearl Harbor and Kaneohe would alternate, because the daily requirements would vary. One would have six duty planes, and the other outfit would have six standby planes, so that on any given day, if they needed seven airplanes to patrol the operating areas, they would take all six of the duty planes and one standby plane. If they didn't use all of them—as Kaneohe didn’t on the morning of the seventh (they used only three)—they had three sitting on the ground, and my six over in Pearl were also on the ground. I was there with the group the morning of 7 December for that purpose.
We were not awakened at 0630 and were not warned that our services would be used that day. I got up at 0745 and was in the shower. Ford Island was a rather funny place as far as acoustics and seismology were concerned. The coral formations of the island were such that every time a cane train came along Aiea, you could feel vibrations all over the place. It was sort of a floating island. I didn’t hear very much at first, but when 1 got out of the shower, airplanes were flying around, and I thought the stupid doggone Army aviators didn't know enough to stay in bed on Sunday morning. There were some rather loud noises and vibrations on the island, and I went to the window with a towel around me.
A bunch of black smoke was coming up from down near our hangars. They had a trash dump down there, and I thought it was very, very peculiar that they would be burning trash on Sunday morning. I couldn't figure that one out, and I looked over toward Barbers Point and Ewa, and there was a U.S. Navy torpedo plane (a TBD) steaming up. I said, "Good God, that guy's going against the course rules," because we were all supposed to steer out and go down that way, but we didn't come back that way. It kept on coming and got up approaching Pearl City over where the Pan Am docks were.
The plane had a torpedo on it, and I thought that was really peculiar. Then, it turned and headed right for me. The pilot dropped the torpedo, and, of course, I was in a three-ring circus watching that torpedo track coming across while at the same time this guy ducked up over the Utah (AG-16) and banked by my window in the bachelor officers' quarters, about 50 feet away. I could practically see the configuration of his eyes. The thing that particularly struck me was the great big round meatballs around each one of those wings—let's say I was surprised.
I decided it wasn't a TBD, and I noticed that the Utah had just received her calling card. I knew it was for real. It's a little bit confusing as to what happened next. I do know that I was caught with my pants off, which I rapidly corrected, but that's about all. I went below, where women and children from the quarters—the few that were there—were piling into the basement of our concrete building. At some time, some kind soul must have come by and offered us transportation, because I got down to the ramp at I would guess 0820 or so.
We got down to the squadron area—Lieutenant Tom Moorer's squadron. In spite of his recollection that most of this stuff happened by strafing, I do know that the squadron hangar was hit with bombs, and I think they were 250-pounders. Moorer's planes were either in the hangar or very tightly packed, and they had an extremely small ramp on the far side of the hangar; there were maybe eight or ten planes. Much later, somebody just came in and took a bulldozer and pushed what was left off to one side. The next day, you could see on the ground the outline in ashes of the PBYs that had been parked along the front of the hangar. The other hangar that was in use right opposite of Moorer's—there were three of them—had gotten two bombs, I think, through the roof. They didn't set off any fires, but they destroyed the planes that were in the hangar. Our hangar didn't get anything, so when I got there, a plane had been rolled out, gassed up and ready to go. Whether it had been parked outside and managed to escape or whether it had been in the hangar, I don't know.
At that stage of the game, because we had been doing everything as individuals, we just took whichever plane was basically available. I'm sure that I had been assigned one, but I didn't necessarily fly with it at all times. Shortly after I arrived, our skipper, Lieutenant Commander Massie Hughes, showed up. His quarters were on Ford Island, so he had wheels. With pants over his pajamas, he had dashed to wing headquarters for instruction. There, he had been given a search sector from the plan drawn up by Commander Logan Ramsey that morning after an earlier report of a submarine sighting. 1 assume Ramsey thought this assignment would be the first of several, rather than the only one to be actually conducted, but it was probably the most likely sector in which to find something.
In any case, Massie saw me and the plane ready to go and said, “Come on, Jimmy, I’ve got this search sector, so we’ll go out and look for them. Pick yourself a crew.” I guess the regular plane crew was with the plane, but I was looking for another pilot and some people who could hit something to man the guns. Fortunately, I was the squadron gunnery officer at the time, so I didn’t have too much trouble picking Ensign Theodore “Swede” Thueson for the third pilot and bow gun position and a couple of sharpshooters for the waist gun positions.
Our makeshift crew took off without many of the formalities. Massie and I were in the pilots’ seats. Normally, the skipper would have been at the controls, but for some reason, protocol was bypassed, and I made the takeoff and landing and did most, if not all, of the flying that day. As soon as the beaching gear was off, there was no thought of wind direction, channel, or warmup; the throttles went on full, and we headed generally toward Middle Loch. During the takeoff, I did notice some heavy timbers that caused me to do some juggling to avoid hitting them with my wing-tip floats. I always thought they came from the topsides of the target ship Utah when she overturned. In any case, I made a mental note that this would be something to bear in mind on our return—when and if.
We did this takeoff right in the channel, on the northwest side of the island. It was not our regular channel; it was just water. But I could see far enough ahead that I knew I could get off before I got there. This was strictly an unorthodox takeoff, but it was the best I could do at the moment. I never thought about it in terms of whether it was a five iron or a pitching wedge, but this was a pitching-wedge takeoff run. There wasn’t any driver—I knew by eye what I needed.
I really wasn’t looking for altitude, because as soon as we got airborne and my wingtips were up, I took off for Barbers Point at such a level that if the tail gunner wanted to, he could have cut cane all the way. I found out later that before we got to Barbers Point, one of my gunners had shot up all of his ammunition on the way out with somebody coming after us, but I find it unlikely that anybody could have missed me.
There seemed to be a lull in the attack when we took off. I did not see any fighters making strafing runs, and 1 assumed the fighters were otherwise occupied at this stage of the game. We were on the opposite side of Ford Island from any torpedo planes or dive-bombers that were making runs. They wouldn’t have bothered with me anyway, because they had something else to shoot at. I would assume that my only problem on takeoff would have been fighters. The rest of the people were busy with what they came to do; they weren’t looking for planes, I guess.
I took off about 0830, but I wasn’t the first U.S. Navy plane to get off. There were carrier planes there. I’m sure the Enterprise (CV-6) didn’t have all of her airplanes on board. People were taking off in anything that was available. They had some amphibious biplanes—J2F is what they called them. People were getting up in anything that they could throw a rock out of, as far as I know. But I was the first—as far as I know, the only one—to get off in a PBY.
I have tried to reconstruct what sector we were in as best as I can from memory. We had gone by the southern side of Kauai on the way out, and we’d come back around the northern edge of Kauai on the way back. I found something, and fortunately it didn’t turn out to be fatal, although I’m sure it startled everybody on both sides. We passed the Enterprise and the cruiser division that was with her. Because of my years on cruisers—two before and after Pensacola—I was thoroughly familiar with their outline. They were the first things I saw, so we didn’t panic, although we were rather close on board because of the haze we had at that time. It was too late to change course, and, surprisingly enough, I seem to remember that I kept thinking of recognition signs. Being aviators, they recognized a PBY when they saw it, and I don’t think the Japanese had anything that looked exactly like it.
The rest of that flight was a weird one. I won’t say it was thrilling, but it was cause for thought. One of the impressions I had was of Massie sitting, I believe, in the left seat and the incongruity of seeing his pajama legs sticking out from under his pants. The thing I remember most is that his running remarks throughout, of rather an obscene nature, were applied more to U.S. congressmen than they were to the Japanese, in view of the flak we had been getting.
Throughout the rest of the flight, I wondered what the hell was happening back home on both Ford Island and out in town. The out-in-town part involved one of the old stories that used to go around in Hawaii. Practically all of us had Japanese maids or Japanese-American maids. With their dual citizenship, you never really knew which took precedence.
The story used to be that someone decided to ask their maid, “If we have a war with Japan, would you kill us?” She answered, “Oh, no, you my master. I kill Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jones’s maid kill you.” Well, you didn’t really believe that, but damn it, when you’re sitting out there and you have a Japanese maid at home, a young bride, and a year-old child, you start wondering what’s going on back there. Then, you sit there and you say, “I wonder who’s in charge back at Ford Island.” Nobody tells you anything, and you go on wondering, “Suppose we find this group. What then?” In addition, you think, “I guess we’ll be able to get off the plain-language dispatch before we get shot down, but if we do, is anybody going to hear it? And if they hear it, what in the hell can they do about it?”
I didn’t hear anything on the radio during this patrol—not word number one. We came back around 2030, after a 12-hour hop, or somewhere in that neighborhood—it was definitely after dark, as black as the inside of a cow. When we got to Barbers Point, it was raining like hell, and we tried to call somebody on the radio and got no answer. I don’t know whether it was because we weren’t transmitting or because nobody was listening at the other end. I decided that the first thing to do was to try to act as friendly as possible, and that meant turning on every light that we could think of, because only a damn fool would try to come in in the dark.
The next idea was where to land. Under normal circumstances, the landing area closest to our ramp would have been the dry dock channel, but dredging rigs were set up there, along with long, big pipes to take the spoil somewhere, so that narrowed the channel down in the dark. The only light on the island anyway was the Arizona (BB-39) burning, which wasn't much help in making a night landing.
We decided that the best bet would be the Pearl City channel. We hoped that somebody had had the foresight to go out there in the day and clear up the debris in the channel. This was a very fortunate decision, because had we elected to come in in the other channel (which, incidentally, had a row of approach lights right on the edge of the land as you were making your approach), we'd have landed right in the mast of the Nevada (BB-36), which was firmly beached right smack-dab alongside those landing lights—but we didn't. We landed over in the other place. Somebody was thoughtful enough to remove the debris, and we went cheerfully along our way, acting friendly as all get-out.
At about that stage of the game, however, four fighter planes from the Enterprise came in, without taking the precaution of acting friendly, so people got unfriendly on the beach, and this started the biggest fireworks display ever seen in Hawaii. We were only seeing one round in five, but the tracers lit up the sky like crazy, and the shrapnel was falling around like it was rain in the water. During the day, the guns for 35 airplanes were in the unharmed armories of the three hangars, and they had all been deployed around the parking areas, joining in the celebration. The Army was shooting off some of its small antiaircraft stuff, too.
We finally got to the ramp and were on board the air station. I don't remember that our plane had any holes in it. Nobody was hurt in the plane, and I don't believe that the plane was damaged. It's almost unbelievable, but unbelievable things happen.
The story that was going around once we got on the ground was that the air station expected an airborne landing. So, during the day, they parked fuel trucks, oil barrels, and everything else in a random pattern all over the landing field. Sometime during the night, an F4F fighter came over there to make a landing—without any warning or any instructions from the tower or anything else—and proceeded to land and taxi off of the field without hitting anything. The next morning someone rook the pilot down there and showed him what he had landed in, and he fainted dead away. They had done this design so that nobody could make any kind of a landing, and here this guy comes in, the night black as the ace of spades; and he didn't hit a thing. It took some of the wind out of their sails in their method of distributing obstacles.
*Excerpted from The Reminiscences of Captain James R. Ogden, U.S. Navy (Retired), which is in the Naval Institute's oral history collection.