This detailed account of Dec. 7, 1941 written by Lawrence M. Kirsch has never before been published and was made available by Kirsch’s sister-in-law, Barbara Kirsch of Yucaipa.
Editor’s note: This is a detailed account of the day of the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, written by Lawrence M. Kirsch, a one-time Southern California reporter and at that time an Army Air Corps pilot stationed at Honolulu. He offers a look at what that chaotic day looked like and his reaction to it. This document, never before published, was made available by Kirsch’s sister-in-law, Barbara Kirsch of Yucaipa.
Across the street came two friends and their bathrobed wives, running with panic from their apartment, which is closer to the field. We see one plane veer, nose down, and its machine guns begin to spit, loud and close. One of the two girls falls flat. I run up to a non-com’s house on the main street and squat against the wall facing the field. I stick my neck around the corner to see if it would be safer on the other side, but planes are diving from all angles now in a methodical pattern. I might as well face the hangars and watch the show, even though the huge air-base barracks across the street may offer a tempting target to a bomber.
Across the street stands a field guard, calmly watching the proceedings as he leans against a small tree. Does he think the whole thing is some kind of maneuver or is he daffy? Bullets finally zip around him. Two more soldiers, prone beside a lumber pile near him, yell and beckon him to cover, but he ignores them.
Running down the last fifty yards onto the ramp is like ascending into some noisy black and red pit. Row after row of parked P-40s standing like patient blind men, are ablaze from the incendiary bullets. I feel that they have been awaiting a terrible and unknown doom. Only an occasional one, here and there, had failed to ignite, even though riddled with shells. The hangar line is devoid of any life – it is a lurid stage, set for a horrible scene.
The first plane I try to start grinds furiously and refuses. Gas drains from the holes in the tanks and I sit on windshield glass which has fallen on the seat. Our own fiercely burning hangar draws our attention. Ammunition stored there keeps banging away, exploded by the heat. Part of the iron walls had fallen over an outer portion of the cases of 50- and 30-caliber shells, stacked there recently in preparation for a move to another island to the west. We push and tug the iron away, form a line and pass the heavy boxes of ammunition, arm to arm, from the insides of the hangar to safety on the ramp.
One plane crashes a half-mile from the field, and in later hours about fifty-three persons claim to have made the shot which got it. The lieutenant with a shotgun; a private with a pistol; a civilian with a .22 rifle; a ground machine gunner – all are sure they are the killers! I like the story about the one GI who was missed after the raid and everyone thought he had taken off for the hills. But someone finally remember seeing him running across a street just a bomb hit the corner of the nearby barracks. He must have been nearly a direct hit. That bomb blew a running man’s head one way and his body another. Anyhow, not a particle of this first GI was ever identified.
Around one p.m. I get in on a patrol flight of four patched-up planes. There is not an instrument working in one of them. Below us, southwest of the island, about fifteen or twenty navy ships are zigzagging around in their methodical patterns. We can’t see if they have any opposition, but there is anti-aircraft fire in a line of black puffs high above the ships.
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