Remembering Pearl Harbor
Survivors tell their stories
ARMANDO (CHICK) GALELLA was a 20-year-old kid from Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., an Army enlistee now 5,000 miles west of Washington Irving’s old Hudson Valley haunts. On the Sunday morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Galella held a day pass to bolt the busy base at Pearl Harbor for a trip into Honolulu.
“So I get up early — around 7 o’clock, to have breakfast,” he recalls of the uneventful start to his day. “I had about $7, $8 in my pocket. I get the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, to see what’s going on stateside. And I’m walking.
“All of a sudden: BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! We knew immediately we were being attacked. And we had no more chance than a snowball in hell.”
Brooklyn’s Clark Simmons was below deck on the battleship Utah, enjoying a three-day Pearl Harbor R&R stay. “Or as we told our families,” he recalls slyly, “time to go visit the library.”
A flustered shipmate appeared just before 8 a.m. to announce something incredible and implausible was happening up top: Dozens of fighter planes were attacking. One of the ships docked alongside the Utah had already exploded.
A skeptical Simmons needed to see this with his own eyes.
“I went to look out the port(hole), and I could see them attacking the Utah,” Simmons remembers of the incoming Japanese attackers emerging from the scattered clouds 75 years ago.
“Fighter planes, making a run at the Utah, bombing and strafing.”
Standing on the deck of the dry-docked battleship Pennsylvania, Frank Edmond enjoyed the scent of Hawaiian flowers and the view of Pearl Harbor’s calm waters.
One night earlier, in a Navy “battle of the bands,” the horn player and the rest of his musician colleagues from the ship swept to victory — as the best of the competing groups.
“It was a great morning out there,” he reflects now. “Pearl Harbor was such a beautiful place at that time.”
He was soon standing slack-jawed, like the rest of the U.S. military might assembled at the naval base and adjoining Hickam Field, as the gorgeous Pacific morning exploded into chaos.
The blue sky glowed red with bursts of machine-gun fire as the roar of incoming planes filled Edmond’s ears.
Some of the planes were flying incredibly low, their pilots visible to the naked eye of American fighters on the ground. Each aircraft bore the red Japanese Rising Sun, clearly visible and leaving no doubt about the origin of the attackers.