i was making poor grades and i hated school.

That's a pretty good reason.

Did you go into the Navy right at first or did you work some jobs?

I worked for a service station for a while

and, uh,

my brothers,

two brothers who joined the navy in

i found out that they

liked it so well

that when I was old enough, I would go into it, too.

I went in at 18.

and so you went off to San Diego

for training and then

I was

transferred to

hawaii then

for assignment

Now were your brothers in San Diego when you were training there?

They, uh,

They were aboard

the Arizona - they were at sea a lot.

They would come visit me when i was

in the training - yes.

Now you talked about trying to train for electrician's school because that's what

your brothers were doing.

See, both of them were going

uh... through electrical

training and I thought that would be good idea for me -- when we would come out of the Navy

would set up an electrical

program

-- we'd have our own business and uh...

uh... I flunked electricity (laughter)

and then they automatically put me in the

ordinance school

ordinance school and electrical school were combined the first

few weeks

and then after you got the preliminary

then you separate -- one goes to electricity

and one goes to armament

So they figured if you could not fix things, you could blow them up? Yeah! (laughter) I never thought of that way but,

yes,

I found in the basics I enjoyed gunnery

a lot better than the electricity

and so i was actually pleased that

got put in with the

gunnery school. So your specialty was called . . .

what did they call your . . .

aviation ordnanceman

and did they also call you a machine-gun mechanic? Yeah. That was the

nickname.

machine-gun mechanic, because

our main job was maintaining

machine-guns that were being used

uh... not only

by the individuals but by those that were installed in the airplanes

uh... we have some that were installed in the wings and some were installed

in the cockpit and so

uh... do our job to maintain those and keep them

in good shape

keep them clean

every time they were used, we had to take them out and clean them

And you were also trained to shoot them? Oh yeah. Oh yes. We went

through the

gunnery school in

which we were given a

permission to have

practice in shooting the guns that we were taken care of.

Now in gunnery school, didn't they put dummy shells every tenth shell?

Oh yeah! What was the purpose for that?

so you wouldn't shoot up the whole belt of uh...

they only gave us a short belt of ammunition

for each

uh... student

and uh...

they didn't want one student to shoot up all the

shells and the rest of us not have anything so

we would every ninth shell

we put in a dummy

and it would quit -- it wouldn't fire. So it would shoot ten shots and then quit? natural so it's hard to shots and quit

Yeah. And then you would have to re-cock it. Re-cock it

and then shoot another ten.

now, umm

so you get stationed over it

Pearl Harbor. Yeah. How did you feel about getting duty in Hawaii?

well uh... I had some feelings about it uh...

I uh ...

it wasn't what my first choice was but i found I liked it better than my first choice

What was your first choice? I wanted to be aboard ship

-- my brothers were aboard a battleship and i wanted to aboard that battleship too

but.. they...

since I took the aviation

gunnery

uh...

uh... they sent me to an

aircraft

station

where I was to maintain the

airplanes instead of uh...

just the big guns. So you're stationed on Ford Island in Hawaii. Yes uh-huh. And what kind

of airplanes did you maintain?

we had the

J2Fs mainly

they were an amphibious plane which you could land

in the water or on the land

Were they just for patrolling or?

bombing? They were for patrolling and also

practice uh...

training

the pilots

So you are on Ford Island and maintaining sea planes including PBY

patrol bombers and uh...

so it's about ten minutes to 8 o'clock on a December morning

nineteen forty one

and what happens?

Well, there was this bunch of planes flying overhead and

we thought there were some of our carrier planes coming in from sea

so we didn't pay much attention to 'em

and then they started diving on us and dropping bombs

and we knew then they weren't our friendlies

and when one them came flying over our hanger

we could see the symbol of the rising sun under their wings, we

realized we were being attacked by hostile forces of the Japanese Imperial

Navy

i was standing outside the hanger

in just a little ways -- about a hundred feet away -- was a high explosive

magazine where

our ammunition was stored and our bombs

and I was quite sure that that would become a target so

my fear turned to terror

because uh...

that was only

less than a hundred feet away

it would have probably leveled our hanger

but anyway

uh... I went into the hangar and about in the middle of the hangar is a big steel I-beam

supporting the roof and it was sort of like

it was big enough that i could squeeze into the recesses of it and have

steel on three sides of me and I put that steel between me in the magazine

and i waited for that

place to blow up

fortunately there was a

even though there was a

a pilot had been assigned to hit that target, he dropped his bomb in the wrong clump of trees

and his bomb

landed in a vacant lot

didn't do any damage but make a hole in the ground

but uh...

fortunately they never did hit

uh... our storage for ammunition

so you're hiding in

the I-beam and what are your buddies doing?

well

a couple of my buddies

picked up some forty five caliber pistols that had been used on watch the

night before

and went out and started shooting at these

planes with these pistols

here i am an aviation ordnanceman, a trained aerial gunner with access to machine guns

and I'm hiding in an I-beam. So I begain to feel so ashamed of myself

so I left my hiding place and went into the armory where the machine guns were stored

some other ordinance men had gathered so we took our machine guns and

put him in the mounts of the planes parked on the ground outside the hanger

and uh... and the last one I put in was in the waist hatch of a

PBY Catalina patrol bomber and got behind that gun and manned it for the rest of the attack

... and I wasted a lot of bullets that morning.

Now you had a little difficulty before you put the gun belts in

didn't some of those gun belts have dummy shells in them?

oh yes

these belts were belted up

for use of uh... oh

gunnery practice and so

to keep from shooting up a whole belt in one burst

every tenth shell was a dummy

it would make this gun

stop shooting

and so I had to through all of them pull those out and put live ones in their place

before I could

actually use it to shoot back at the Japanese. So you and your buddy, Aubrey, are

pulling dummies out as quick as you can and shoving real shells in

and handing the belts to the guys who want to

use them in the machine gun. Right. So that kept you busy.

So you finally get all those belts fixed up. Now you mentioned to me that

these were thirty caliber machine gun and the fifty calibers which

you wish had of had

-- where were they?

They were still in sort of like storage

they were in boxes that have been covered and they had been

coated with cosmoline

uh... to keep from rusting

so we had to get those out of the boxes -- at first we had to get them

brought over... Now you did that after the attack

uh... you didn't actually use those during the attack -- the fifty calibers.

We never did get them ready in time to use before... You could have used those couldn't you have?

Wouldn't they've done more damage to the... Oh yes,

uh... they had much larger shells

and they had incinerator bullets that if they hit the

plane with incinerator bullets, the plane

uh... would burst into flames.

So you're shooting at them with a smaller gun, the thirty caliber... Right.

So you finally get the gun belts ready and you're all shooting away.

You grab one of the guns in the waist hatch of the PBY and start shooting. start shooting right you should anything

Did you shoot anything down?

uh... well I had a part in helping to shoot it

so many people were shooting

that nobody got -- you might say -- the lone credit for it.

In other words, you were all shooting at the same plane.

We were all...

well what happened is that they had dived into the East part

of the airport and dropped their bombs and pulling out of their drive across the runway

heading right over our hanger

and uh... we had several of our guys

shooting at him

and we could see our tracer bullets penetrating his fuselage burst into

flames

then uh...

instead crashing out in the channel

he does a little arching dive and purposely crashes

uh... on the crane deck of the USS Curtis and that became known as

the

first uh... kamikaze of world war two

and uh...

so

you know at least one that you guys altogether shot down

now besides shooting at the planes, you have time to notice that

something was happening out in the water

Oh yeah. Boy! Just right off the shore

uh... less than a hundred feet from where

our hanger was located

there was a little Japanese midget submarine

had come to the surface just enough so that they could fire

uh... their torpedoes

at the USS Curtis

they had launched one torpedo but they missed their target but before they could

launch a second one

the USS... uh...

uh... the.. what was it

The Monahan? Huh?

Was it the Monahan? The Monahan. Yeah.

The USS Monahan came steaming down

uh... the channel to get out of the harbor and they spotted that little submarine and they rammed him

just forward of the conning tower and then they dropped two depth charges on him as they passed over

naturally that was the end of their Nipponese Naval career

The skipper on the Monahan had

his ship going so fast to keep from blowing off his own fantail

dropping depth charges in shallow water like that, they couldn't make the bend in the

channel and ran aground over on Waipio peninsula.

It took them about an hour to get off that mudflat.