Seventy-four years ago today Catherine Kobayashi witnessed the trauma of the Japanese attack on Oahu as a young nursing student at the Queen’s Hospital, a day that is seared in her memory, while her experience is a reminder that civilians — as well as the military — suffered greatly on the day of infamy.

Island residents also lived with the uncertainty of what would come next from the empire of Japan — digging bomb shelters and toting gas masks in fear of another attack.

American dead on Oahu totaled 2,403, including 68 civilians, most of whom were killed by anti-aircraft shells landing in Honolulu, according to the Navy.

Kobayashi, whose last name was Kwon at the time of the attack, was an 18-year-old, brand-new nursing student studying at the University of Hawaii and living at the Harkness building dorm at Queen’s when the bombs started to fall.

After seeing Japanese planes flying so low they made the trees rustle, and hearing explosions, Kobayashi and her roommate also heard the ambulances arriving at the hospital emergency room, where they witnessed the mounting carnage.

“We saw these trucks coming in, and we saw arms hanging out of them. We saw them on the curb and said, ‘Oh, these are all dead bodies!’” she said of the sight, which took her breath away.

Kobayashi, now 92, said it was turmoil “because all these bodies were coming in, and they didn’t know what to do with all (of them) — there were too many.”

Relatives had to come in and identify their loved ones, in this case residents of the Nuuanu area, where a bomb exploded, she said.

Queen’s, now called the Queen’s Medical Center, also had to cope with the wounded. The hospital, then smaller, probably had a maximum capacity of about 350 on Dec. 7, 1941, said Kalani Kaanaana, coordinator of the Native Hawaiian health program at the hospital.

“From what I can tell, and from what we have a record of, we cleared about 100 beds the morning of (the attack),” Kaanaana said. “The census was at about 339 that morning, and they cleared about 100 beds and about half of them were filled with casualties.”

A hospital supervisor told Kobayashi and her roommate that night, “’We need to have somebody sit with patients,’ (but) we’d had no training at all,” she said.

“So she and I went, and they gave us (each) a patient, and I can still see this man — these are local guys,” Kobayashi said. “She had one and I had one, and they were not conscious. They were dying, and they told us, ‘You just sit here, and if they stop breathing’ — they gave us a number to call.”

The Roosevelt High School graduate recalls that “all I did was pray,” adding, “I said, ‘Dear God, don’t let that patient die,’ and I’d look at him to be sure that he was still breathing.”

Handwritten patient admission logs from that day tell of the grisly effects. Among the dozens of notations: “amputation right arm,” “amputation both legs,” “compound fracture” and “removal foreign body, right chest.”

Within the first hour of the bombing, 200 people had arrived at Queen’s to donate blood, Kaanaana said. By 2 p.m. that number had risen to 500. Over the following 16 days, 4,000 people donated blood at Queen’s, he said.

According to the Navy, within 10 minutes of the attack, casualties began arriving at the Naval Hospital at Pearl Harbor, and within the first three hours, the hospital received 546 casualties and 313 dead. By day’s end the hospital reached a patient census of 960 casualties.

Casualties from Hickam Field began arriving at Tripler General Hospital at Fort Shafter within 10 minutes of the attack, the Army said. (The current Tripler Army Medical Center wasn’t completed until 1948.) The Red Cross activated aid stations.

Kobayashi recalled the uncertainty after Dec. 7 also was horrible.

“They dug holes — I don’t know how many — in the Queen’s grounds for bomb shelters, and we were all assigned gas masks that we carried no matter where we went,” she said.

The day after the attack, a bomb that didn’t go off on Dec. 7 exploded up in the heights at 4 a.m., “and we thought they (the Japanese) had come back,” Kobayashi said. “It was the most frightening thing in our lives.”

Her father was Korean; her mother was from Spain. One brother served in the Army and was sent to China; another was a B-24 bomber pilot in England. When his plane was shot down over France, he parachuted out and was turned over to the Germans and held in a POW camp, she said.

The Nuuanu resident said her father, Kwon Mon Soo, had witnessed the Japanese execution of his father and his father’s brothers in Korea, and “he always said, ‘You can marry anybody but never marry a Japanese,’ because he remembered the trauma.”

At Queen’s she met Clifford Kobayashi, whom she eventually married — but not before her father had a thing or two to say about it.

“I said, ‘I can never marry a Japanese,’ but he (Clifford) was very persistent,” she said.

Later a doctor, Kobayashi wrote to her father asking for permission to marry her, “and my father has a lawyer send him back a letter forbidding our marriage,” she recalled with a laugh.

They married anyway, and her father came to love his son-in-law, Kobayashi said.

The reconciliation then parallels the reconciliation that will be on display today between the United States and Japan, one of America’s strongest allies 74 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the bitter Pacific war that followed.

The theme of the commemoration at Pearl Harbor is “Pathway to Reconciliation: From Engagement to Peace” and focuses on the rebuilding and solidifying of the friendship between the two countries.

“I’ve been to Japan, and I realize people are people no matter what nationality they are,” Kobayashi said. “You realize no matter what race you are, there are good and bad in that race. And all I know is, as I get older, I’m more accepting of people.”