Horrors of war’s onset remain vivid

On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Robert Lee saw the battleship USS Arizona turn red hot and heard it hiss like a tea kettle after it was hit.

He shot at Japanese warplanes with a .22 rifle, and joined the Hawaii Territorial Guard the next day for fear the island would be invaded.

Lee, now 92, had a front-row seat as a 20-year-old to the unfolding horror that would kill 1,177 crew members on the Arizona alone, by far the greatest loss of life that day.

His father, Alfred, was a civilian who operated the Navy water pump station that still exists as a derelict building at the far end of the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center access road.

The family lived in a Navy home on a hill above the pump house and a pier that was used to ferry sailors to and from ships. It’s now utilized for the Pacific Fleet admiral’s barge and boathouse.

Lee, who worked for Castle & Cooke, had a car and was on a date before getting home at 1 a.m. Dec. 7.

The 1940 Roosevelt High School graduate remembers awakening to what he thought was a door banging in the wind.

"Bang, bang, bang, bang, and I thought, ‘You know, somebody ought to shut that damn door,’" recalled Lee, today a volunteer at the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center.

When the noise persisted, he looked out at Battleship Row.

"There was no doubt in my mind as to what was happening," he said. "I was watching them drop their torpedoes and then they would do a big wing-over and come up right over Aiea very low, right off the end of Ford Island," Lee said.

Seventy-two years ago Saturday, war and a dramatic change in the course of history came suddenly to Hawaii and the United States with the arrival of those attacking planes.

The date that President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared would live in infamy, and that rallied the nation to "Remember Pearl Harbor," will be commemorated this year with the theme "Sound the Alarm."

The nation was unified through communication, and thousands of Americans answered the call to duty following one of the most pivotal moments in American history, the National Park Service says.

The Pearl Harbor Visitor Center will have 2,500 chairs set up on the lawn for the 7:45 a.m. ceremony.

The keynote speaker will be Max Cleland, a wounded Vietnam veteran, former U.S. senator from Georgia and current secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission. Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, also will speak.

But each year, it is the recollections of the dwindling numbers of eyewitnesses to the attack on a sleepy Sunday morning that continue to add texture, insight and detail to the attack that launched America into World War II.

Lee recalls watching the battleship Oklahoma start to keel over.

"It just came over, over, over until finally, with a big rush, it just came right on over, and that was really quite a shock to watch that big ship turn over," Lee said.

He also witnessed the battleship Arizona turn red hot after it was hit by an aerial bomb.

"The bomb had gone through several decks and had exploded in the (gunpowder) magazine," Lee said. "The hull of the ship turned the same red that you would see while they are working on a piece of metal — red hot."

There was an enormous "boom," and tongues of fire leapt hundreds of feet out of the ship, followed by a hissing sound as the pressure sought escape.

"That tremendous hissing sound of that fire remains in my hearing today," Lee said.

At one point, he said, he grabbed a .22-caliber rifle and started plinking away at the attacking planes.

After driving his grandparents and some neighbors up into the hills for safety, Lee returned and saw small boats start bringing oil-soaked sailors to the pier below their home.

While his father worked to generate water for fire operations around Pearl Harbor, Lee’s mother, Marguerite, grabbed some Fels-Naptha soap and along with other family members helped wash off the oil-soaked sailors with hoses.

"I can remember the anger (at the Japanese)," Lee said. "Sailors know a lot of words, and they used them all. My poor mother was subject to a lot of that."

Months later the same pier was used to collect the dead from the crippled ships. The family volunteered a sturdy wooden laundry table for the military to examine the dead, and a makeshift sawmill was set up on the landing to fabricate wooden caskets, Lee recalled.

On the day of the attack, Lee helped on ambulance runs to Hickam Field using conscripted delivery trucks, and wound up at the Territorial Guard’s armory in Honolulu, where he said University of Hawaii ROTC students were issued rifles and bandoliers of ammunition.

"Most of them had never touched a rifle before in their lives," Lee said. "Here they were, they were given instructions on how to load the thing with live ammunition. There were guns going off all over the place."

Lee, too, was issued a rifle. The next day, he signed up for the Territorial Guard.

"We all thought that we were going to be invaded," Lee said.

He quickly switched services to the Navy — never went to boot camp — and initially worked as a driver in the District Intelligence Office. He remembers seeing Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, who commanded one of five Japanese midget submarines and who was captured after his sub went aground off Bellows Field during the attack.

The military built a cell for Sakamaki inside a warehouse where the Navy Marine Golf Course is now, Lee said.

"They kept him warm and fed and dry — and very well guarded," Lee recalled.

News of the attack spread quickly, says Daniel Martinez, chief historian for the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument.

Cmdr. Logan Ramsay sent out the general alarm, "Air raid Pearl Harbor, this is not drill," at 7:58 a.m.

From the radio traffic, "it became quite apparent within an hour of the attack that something was going on on the island of Oahu, something serious," Martinez said. "And within the next hour after that, when the attack is almost over, the nation has bulletins in every household that Pearl Harbor is under attack."

At 8:40 a.m. Dec. 7, a radio broadcast went out: "A sporadic air attack has been made on Oahu. … Enemy airplanes have been shot down. … The rising sun has been spotted on the wingtips!"

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s first of three extras that day announced, "WAR! OAHU BOMBED BY JAPANESE PLANES."

Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan the next day.

The media played a critical role in getting word out,  Martinez said.

"From that point on, the people are learning that it was a surprise attack, and the phrase ‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ became the coin phrase for not only the Pacific war, but for the war in Europe, and it galvanized the nation," Martinez said.