OPPOSITE: Al Bodenlos at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, just prior to December 7, 1941
I enlisted in the Army on July 7, 1940, at Cleveland, Ohio. From there I went to Fort Hayes, in Columbus, Ohio, and later to Fort Ord and went through really rigid basic training. There, from my record, they found out I had a musical background, so they assigned me to the bugle section. There were about eight or ten bugles there.
I got to Schofield in Hawaii in July of 1941 and I was put in charge of fifteen buglers. I was bugle master of the 804th Engineer Aviation Battalion. I was still based at Schofield Barracks in December 1941, and it was a great base. They had a round building where they had the boxing matches and the hula shows, right there on the base. Entertainers would come out every week and put on hula shows for us soldiers, singing, dancing, and otherwise, with their ukuleles and guitars. They also had a roller-skating rink out there. I used to love to roller skate! I had my own roller skates, and we had a lot of things we did right at Schofield. We heard very little of the war in Europe in those days, in early 1941.
And you wouldn’t believe how idyllic Hawaii was before the war. We used to go out to Waikiki to the two big hotels out there on the beach, the Moana and the Royal Hawaiian. The Royal Hawaiian was quite a place. Out on Kalakaua Avenue they had some little cottages you could rent for a buck a night. And down the beach a ways was a real neat bar. It was a circular rotating bar and went around and around. It’s where the police station is now on Waikiki Beach. Of course I never drank much, but once in a while we’d go in there. If we couldn’t get a room at the Royal Hawaiian, or the Army-Navy YMCA was full, we would just walk down to Kapiolani Park, down toward Diamond Head at the far end of Waikiki, and sleep right on the grass. Well it was warm, you were never cold, and nobody bothered you. I wouldn’t do it today! But that’s what we did. And there were some old banyan trees—they’re still there—and one of them you could walk into, in there among all the roots and vines hanging down. There was this old Hawaiian gal, she must have been in her fifties—she seemed old to us then—and we called her mama. She was servicing the boys inside that banyan tree, right there in the park!
So I used to get my buglers out there in the morning for reveille, and we would play marches in harmony and they were beautiful. And the commander liked it, and my CO said that we should put together a drum and bugle corps. So on December 6, I got leave and was sent into Honolulu to buy instruments. I bought the instruments, had the receipts for them, and I got overnight liberty. So that evening a couple of buddies and I went out to Waikiki to watch a hula show. First we went to the Moana, but there wasn’t much going on there. But someone said there was a hula show next door at the Royal Hawaiian, so I went over there and watched for a while. They had set up out on the beach for the show. But that evening what I really wanted to catch was the battle of the bands at the old Army-Navy YMCA. There were bands from all the battleships, and the bands were putting on a concert. The USS Arizona band had been in the competition, and the band from USS Pennsylvania won that night. The next morning the Arizona band was back on their ship and down below passing ammunition, and that’s where they died.
But that band competition was something. The place was packed, so many guys had gone to watch the bands. I couldn’t get a bed in the YMCA, so I slept on a cot in the annex. That night I was looking forward to a beautiful Sunday the next morning. I was planning on going swimming at Waikiki, and maybe later to a bar.
So I got up the next morning, December 7, and while I was shaving we heard what we thought was maneuvers, and the announcer on the PA said, “All military personnel report back to your stations immediately.” And we thought, “Oh, boy, they’re calling maneuvers for us.” So we rushed across the street to the Black Cat Café for a quick cup of coffee and a hot cake, which we ate in about five minutes, and it cost about 10 cents. Then I went out and got on the shuttle bus to Schofield. The driver was an ethnic-Japanese guy. As the bus headed out toward Pearl Harbor we could see planes flying around up ahead and big columns of smoke, and we could hear explosions in the distance, and you could see the planes diving. It was quite a scene as the bus drove on that road right by Pearl Harbor. The attack was going on as we drove past. Planes were flying around and ships were blowing up. Somewhere near where the Arizona Memorial Visitors Center is today, an MP stopped the bus and pulled out the Japanese driver and arrested him on the spot! This guy hadn’t done anything—he was just driving the bus! So we had to get away from the bus because the Japanese planes were swooping down after they dropped their bombs, and with their machine guns they were shooting anything in sight. The MP said to get away from the bus because if it was hit it would blow up.
Meanwhile the attack was still going on and Japanese planes were zooming right over us. We all took cover in a ditch by the road and watched the show. The Japanese planes were coming in real low right over us on their strafing runs of the harbor, and I swear I could see the faces of the pilots. I could see a ship had turned over—I found out later it was the Oklahoma—and the Arizona was burning and putting out a huge column of black smoke. The breeze was at our backs and was blowing all the smoke out to sea, so we had a real good view. The harbor was just aflame.
After a while they found another driver from somewhere, so we got back on the bus and headed to Schofield. By then my outfit was deployed at Wheeler and the other bases, because we were an aviation engineer outfit attached to the Seventh Air Force at Wheeler Field. And when we went by Wheeler we could see our engineers filling craters in the runway even as the attack was still going on! They were also pushing the damaged and burning airplanes off the runways with their bulldozers. The 804th was the very first Army ground force in action that morning. We got a great citation for being in action right away, about seventy minutes after the initial attack. The only other comparable one was an engineering outfit in the Philippines, and they got a similar citation.
So my duty then, because I was bugle master of the battalion I automatically became a courier, so I rode a motorcycle delivering messages to the different bases. That was my function that started on Sunday morning and continued for two days. When I got to Wheeler with my first message they were still bombing and shooting. That night, I had to get on a truck going from Schofield to Wheeler, which was almost right next door, and the driver asked me to lay on the right fender because on the right side of the road was a drop off, and of course they had to keep the lights off the truck because of the black-out order. So I was the guide on the right bumper, getting that truck down that narrow road and by that drop off. I was panic-stricken because I thought, God, if that damned truck goes off the edge I’ll be killed, because the truck would roll on me as it went down the hill. That was probably the most scared I was the entire day of December 7 until that evening when it all sunk in!
I don’t believe we got any sleep all that night, because there were rumors of invasion on the windward side of the island. And we were ready for anything, with our rifles and helmets on. We were waiting for them!
So I spent the next two days delivering messages, and then I spent half the third day literally passed out because of exhaustion. After that I was at Schofield for almost a year.
Then I was shipped to Canton Island, in an engineering outfit again. Our group worked on the desalinization unit. Canton was out in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific with no fresh water, so they needed this “desal” plant. I was there for sixteen months, from late 1942 to early 1944. There really wasn’t that much to do there except swim in the lagoon. We had movies. We had a little rec room with a Ping-Pong table. We had those great big records of radio programs, Bob Hope and all those. They’d send those to us and we would listen to them. You could have beer or soft drinks when they had them. Our dress was khaki shorts and white T shirt, sandals and dark glasses, which I never wore, which is probably why I had cataracts. The duty was good and I figured I was out of harm’s way. But there were no women there! Right when I was ready to come back, then they brought some nurses over. Well, you know who got ahold of them—the officers! We never saw a gal over there except from a distance right at the end.
I was back at Honolulu for a while, and then back out to Tinian, Guam, and Saipan. I ended up in air-sea rescue at Okinawa after the war ended.
For years I wiped everything out from the war, and my family never asked me one thing about it. I found later they thought it would upset me. I just wiped it out of my mind. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t join the Pearl Harbor Survivors until 1990 because I didn’t even know they existed until a friend of mine was at the convention center, and he said, “You know, Al, you can get a free Pearl Harbor license plate.” Well, it wasn’t free but that’s when I joined the Pearl Harbor Survivors, and that brought everything back to light again. I got involved in speaking at schools and universities and I tell the story of Pearl Harbor. And of course there were the acquaintances I had in the Arizona band. I became friends with them because of our musical background—remember I was a bugler—and I never saw them again. They’re still there on the Arizona and in my heart.