On December 7, 1941, at Schorfield Barracks, Hawaii, I had been relieved as a company commander in the Third Engineer Battalion, Twenty-forth Division, and reassigned to Camp Beauregard, Louisiana. Scheduled to leave on December 8, we had sold our car, and all our furniture was packed and down at the dock. And on this Sunday morning my wife, Jean, and I were sleeping late on cots in our now-empty house at Schofield.
We were awakened by the sound of airplanes getting louder and louder, but we didn’t think too much of that because our house was right next to the edge of Wheeler Army Air Base. Then, the next thing we knew there was a loud crash that shattered the glass in our windows! We jumped out of bed thinking one of our planes had crashed right near us. Then we looked out and saw airplanes with the Rising Sun on ‘em and knew they were Japanese! They were firing their guns and flying right up our alley heading for the barracks of the Third Engineers. They were so goddam low you could see the pilots’ faces and their white neckerchiefs. I ran to get my pistol, but then remembered I had turned it in and didn’t have any antiaircraft to fight back with. They were bombing the airfield right across the way from us, but the big crash had been from a bomb that missed the field and exploded in the general’s front yard, just across the street from us.
I said, “Jean, you’d better stay here. I gotta go over and report to the battalion.” Then I went and reported to this colonel, and he said, “You’re going to take over your old company.” So I raced over to my old company, and, Jesus Christ, it was pure pandemonium! Now, I’d been relieved, and they’d appointed a new CO, but because I was seasoned in the job, I became the senior company commander. Things were confused as all hell, and about that time there came hordes of Air Corps people from Wheeler. They’d already been bombed over there, and a lot of them killed and their airplanes burned up. “We want to borrow rifles,” they hollered! “We don’t have any weapons!” We did have some extra rifles in the supply room, so I told the supply sergeant, “Give ‘em the goddammed guns and ammo. They are gonna go out to shoot airplanes.” I am sure they didn’t hit any, but we gave ‘em about fifty Springfield rifles and ammo. The way it was in the old Army, boy, you never let a weapon go without a receipt. But I told the sergeant, “The hell with the receipts! We’re at war!”
So they went out and shot at planes but didn’t bring the rifles back. Then, before I was due to leave Hawaii the Army said, “You’ve got to find all those rifles or you’re gonna buy ‘em! So we advertised in every paper in the Hawaiian Islands saying, “ALL RIFLES WITH THESE SERIAL NUMBERS MUST BE RETURNED!” And can you believe it, before we left Hawaii in August I had all the rifles back but nine.
We had spent two or three years building bunkers at Wheeler so that in case of attack their airplanes would be protected, but the Army’s commanding general was so fearful of sabotage by local Japanese that he ordered the planes to be all bunched in the open in front of the hangars where they could be guarded. The result was it took only one or two bombs to set them all on fire, and they melted and fell down like dead people. Little piles of junk all perfectly lined up.
We didn’t know where to go, because we had never had our alert stations defined under the new division set-up. So, we didn’t move out for two or three days. In the meantime, the colonel said to me, “Harvey, we gotta have slit trenches over there in the residential areas. I want a whole bunch of slit trenches over there. You get all the earth-digging machines you can and start diggin’ those trenches!”
I said, “Colonel, you remember the last time you had me dig slit trenches? I cut the cable to Honolulu and goddamned near got court-martialed for it.”
“Damn you!” he said, “I want you to dig slit trenches!”
So we got the ditch diggers and started. We put trenches by all the houses, and we also cut the electric line, the cable between Schofield Barracks and Honolulu, and the water line. We had trenches—some of the ‘em filled with water—and we were out of communication with Honolulu and had water running a foot deep down the main street of Schofield Barracks. And I caught holy hell for it. That night, God almighty, it was terrible! People didn’t know what the Japanese might have out there. They did know they had been able to come with all those airplanes and shoot our airfields and Pearl Harbor all to hell. And if they could do that they just might have troop transports out there, too. There were rumors all over the place that the Japs were landing at Ewa, Barbers Point, even Diamond Head. So, I’m tellin’ you it was worth your life to go out! People were shooting at anything that moved! They were especially ready to shoot at anything that flew, and if I’d have been a pilot, I’d never have taken an airplane up that night. At Pearl Harbor our antiaircraft gunners actually did shoot down five of our own airplanes coming in from their carriers out at sea.
That night the colonel called me to set up machine guns right outside the CP instead of up on top where they used to be. Then he got into the nearest cellar and called the company commander and said, “We’re never going to make it through the night! The Japanese are landing at Kahuku!” Well, I doubted that very much, but I told him, “All right, Colonel, goddammit, if they do come in here we’ll get together and fight the sunzabitches!”
Then he’d say, “I smell gas!” and run and ring the gas alarm. And that caused some more pandemonium. Pretty soon everybody had a gas mask on but the first sergeant and me and some private. And I’m running up the stairs hollering, “Take those goddamn masks off! There ain’t any gas.”
A couple of days later I was ordered to take my company out to the North Shore in the Haleiwa area to support the Twenty-first Infantry Regiment, commanded by Colonel Doc Cook.
Then by late August when it had become obvious that Hawaii was not going to be invaded, my original orders for change of station were reactivated. We came back to the States on the Republic in an eight-ship convoy that included the battleship Tennessee, which had been bombed and shot up at Pearl Harbor and was being returned to the Bremerton Navy Yard for repair, refitting, and modernization.
From the States I was sent to Europe, and that is where I spent the rest of the war and wound up as a brigadier general. Then, as my final career, I wound up spending nine years as president of a small—but one of the finest—engineering schools in the entire country, the South Dakota School of Mining and Technology.