WAYNE “JIM” JOHNSON
ARMY AIR FORCE

The government was going to start registration for the draft. So me and a bunch of the boys who were hanging around a little mom and pop grocery store decided we’d join up with the National Guard. What I wound up as was a waiter in the officers’ mess. Well, I complained about that, so we had an old mess sergeant who told me to go see the sergeant-major up at division headquarters, to see if I could get a transfer. He rattled off a bunch of rigmarole to me, but what it came down to was that the only option I had was to take foreign duty. That was Panama, Philippines, or Hawaii, and I decided Hawaii would be about the best place to be. Then they told me I could put in for Officers’ Candidate School, but I told them, “I’ve had enough of you suckers—I don’t want any of that.”

Well, finally the papers came through for Hawaii, and in San Francisco I got aboard an old Army transport. We came to Honolulu, and I saw Diamond Head and all that and I felt elated. It was a beautiful-looking place, and we all thought that was swell, and the island smelled so good.

They had me over at Bellows Field on the windward side of the island for a little while. I was there about a month-and-a-half, until October 31, 1941, and I remember that date quite clearly, because I had a couple of real sore arms. The night before I’d been in to Honolulu and I got tattooed—a big eagle on one side and a great big palm tree and a hula-hula girl on the other. The next morning I could hardly wear a shirt! I’d try taking it off, then the sun would burn on me, and that was worse. I had those duffel bags and laundry bags to carry down and put on the bus, and it was just misery.

When we got to Hickam Field I thought I was in heaven. Everything was nice, newly painted, and there were great big barracks open to the air. That barracks was a big thing—a nine-wing building three stories high. It had a mess hall that would seat 2,000 people. All we had was Venetian blinds and screen wire on the windows and great big overhangs to keep it cool. I was up on the third floor. Chow was good—cafeteria style.

Well, the first thing I know after we get there, they lined us up and said, “There’s two things you have to do in this man’s Air Corps here— you’ve got to pull a month of guard duty and pull a month of KP.” Well, I wanted to get the worst over first, so I volunteered for a month of KP.

I’d just finished my month-long KP assignment on Saturday, December 6. This fellow I knew had a private airplane license, and he was going to take me and another fellow out and fly us around first thing on Sunday, December 7. So we got up early that morning, shaved and showered and put on our clean uniforms, and went down to breakfast. After breakfast we were waiting around on our bunks there for the bus to Honolulu, so we could drop off at John Rogers airport. So, we were sitting there, chit-chatting and taking life easy waiting for the bus, and about that time we heard a pretty loud bang. Well, we didn’t think too much about that because a day or two before some people with firecracker cherry bombs had set them off a ways down in our same wing, and in a hollow building like that it made quite a bit of noise. And at the same time we heard these airplanes flying, but we didn’t think too much of that either because carrier plane pilots were always flying in to Pearl Harbor for the weekend. So, we heard two or three of those bangs go off, and then we heard some more go off, and they were closer. We looked out of the window and saw some airplanes down west of us where they had Air Corps Supply. That was a big civilian repair and work place for the airplanes. And out there, about 300 or 400 feet up in the air zooming past, was an airplane with the rising sun painted on the wing. Well, that just didn’t jibe with what they’d told us at our big Thanksgiving dinner, about how we didn’t have to worry about attack because we were so invulnerable that nobody would try it. Well, when I saw that rising sun I knew somebody had lied to me! We knew, of course, that we were having trouble with Japan, and when we saw that meatball on that airplane we knew we were into it.

I was on the second floor at that point, which I figured wasn’t too much protection, so we all decided to get out of that place. We went downstairs and stood on the steps, and we saw two or three more Zeros fly over, and we could see bombers up in the sky over Pearl Harbor. They looked to be up about three or four thousand feet. There’s a big parade ground there to the north of Hickam Field barracks, I guess about a city block square, and we took out across that thing, about fifty or sixty of us. On the other side was a bunch of old wooden barracks, and we ran down around them and looked back and could see they’d done a lot of damage up there at Air Corps Supply. Big black smoke was billowing up.

I guess all that consumed about twenty-five to thirty minutes. Then there was the question of what the heck are we going to do? Now, just over to the west of us was the fire station and a kind of brig. Just about then they hit that brig and fire station and did quite a bit of damage. There were quite a few casualties. Well, if I’d chosen guard duty first instead of KP, that’s where I’d have been, and I’d have been killed or injured for sure.

So we were hiding down there among those wooden buildings and we weren’t doing any good, so we decided to go back and get into the armory and get some rifles and gas masks and pistols and so forth, and ammunition. A bunch of us headed back—thirty of us or better—back to the barracks to get in the armory for our section, down on the first floor. Well, it had a steel door and the door was locked. Most of the noncoms and anybody else in authority who had keys had taken off for the weekend, so we got down there and tried that door—five or six of us—and we didn’t budge it. Finally the whole bunch of us got together and we just rammed that door open by using a group of bodies as a battering ram. The guys up front, and I was one of them, we got pretty well squashed.

We got rifles and ammunition and bandoleers of 30.06 ammunition. Back outside I looked up and these Jap planes were still coming across once in a while, and I said, “We can stand right here and if we all fire up at them as they go by somebody’s liable to hit one of them.” But we never did hit one.

Meantime some other guys got into the armory and got some .30-caliber air-cooled machine guns, and I think one .50-caliber, and they went out on the parade ground and set up the darn things. They’d had more training on such things than we’d had. About that time, here came the sergeant. He said, “I want thirty guys to fall out here right now. We’re going to go over to the headquarters building for guard duty. We’ll march over in formation, and the first guy that breaks and runs, I’m going to shoot.” We formed up in two columns and started across the parade ground west of the headquarters building, when here came some Jap planes again, machine-gunning all the way across that field. We all scattered like quails and hit the dirt, and the sergeant didn’t shoot a one of us!

After things kind of quieted down, they assigned a group of twelve or fifteen of us to take 4x4 trucks and go down to the commissary and get GI cans—brand-new ones—and they sent us to fill the cans at the swimming pool and then haul the water to the hospital. We made about six trips doing that. The reason was they didn’t want to take any chances on saboteurs having poisoned the water supply. We had all those Japanese-Americans working there, and we didn’t have any way to know where their loyalties were. And those cane fields there, people could slip around and hide in there pretty well if they wanted to. There were all kinds of suspicions and rumors going on, and they weren’t taking any chances.

So, after we got squared away following the attack, I stayed in the Army Air Corps until I finally ended the war in the Air Transport Command, flying cargo all over the Pacific.