THE DUNGEON

FORD ISLAND The lush, green Nob Hill neighborhood on this island’s northeastern end is filled with graceful, Craftsman- style single- family homes dating to the 1930s, with swaying palm, mango and acacia trees scattered about.

It’s a time capsule carrying visitors back to a peaceful moment on Dec. 7, 1941, when Navy officers and their families awoke here on that Sunday morning just before the Japanese attacked.

There was a sanctuary here when the bombs fell. It lies beneath the home of an admiral on the northeastern tip of the island. Beneath that home is a cavernous, concrete bunker that during World War I was a gun battery, later deactivated.

It came to be called the Dungeon. When the threat of war loomed in the Pacific in 1941, Navy families on Ford Island learned that the bunker would be their bomb shelter; when the Pearl Harbor attack came, that’s exactly how it was used.

“Those children and women streamed to here and were in the bottom of this building,” said Daniel Martinez, chief historian for the Arizona Memorial.

On a recent morning, he led visitors on an unofficial tour of this historic site. The bunker consists of a long, underground tunnel axis leading to two gun emplacements and series of ammunition storage rooms blocked with heavy, riveted metal doors.

Just a thousand feet away, the USS Arizona blew up shortly after 8 a. m. from a bomb strike.

“The sound was just horrific,” Martinez said. “This place probably shook.”

As the women and children huddled for safety, wounded sailors who had made their way to shore from Battleship Row were brought into the Dungeon for medical care.

“People were seeing for the first time,” Martinez said, “their sailors badly wounded and dying.”