“This place probably shook.”Īs 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. “The sound was just horrific,” says Martinez. Just a thousand feet away, the USS Arizona blew up shortly after 8 a.m. Beneath that home is a cavernous, concrete bunker that during World War I was a gun battery, later deactivated. It lies beneath the home of an admiral on the northeastern tip of the island. There was a sanctuary here when the bombs fell. 7, 1941, when Navy officers and their families awoke here on that Sunday morning just before the Japanese attacked. It’s a time capsule carrying visitors back to a peaceful moment on Dec. service members visit the monument in dress uniforms to pay homage.įORD 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. Rippel, who authored a history of the base titled Marine Corps Base Hawaii on the Mokapu Peninsula, says Japanese military personnel who today train here jointly with U.S. A mound of rocks and a plaque fix the spot where a Japanese Zero fighter plane crashed after sailors shot it down. One of the most unusual war markers from the attack is just up the hill from the seaplane hangars. Hangars and the seaplane ramp still bear the markings from bomb impacts, and cannon and machine-gun fire.Īll are off-limits to the public because this is an active military base. One Catalina seaplane shot and sunk by the Japanese lies today at the bottom of the bay. Before he passed away in 2010, he was America’s oldest-living recipient of the Medal of Honor.Įighteen sailors and two civilians were killed in the attack at Kaneohe Bay. Kaneohe was one of several airfields across Oahu targeted by the Japanese before they concentrated their attack on the Pacific fleet moored at Pearl Harbor.įinn, who fought for two hours from his makeshift machine-gun position, managed to survive the attack and live to be almost 101. There were PBY Catalina seaplanes here, used for long-distance reconnaissance and submarine warfare. 30-caliber machine gun out in the open on the ramp and started blasting away at enemy aircraft. MARINE CORPS BASE HAWAII - Somewhere across the broad, windswept seaplane ramp off Kaneohe Bay, Navy Chief Petty Officer John Finn fought out in the open until he was almost shot to pieces from shrapnel, suffering more than 20 wounds.Īs Japanese fighters and bombers pummeled what was then Naval Air Station, Kaneohe Bay - 30 miles northeast of Pearl Harbor along Oahu’s Windward Coast - Finn set up a. “The reason I love the ship so much is that nobody else seems to.” “It’s frustrating to me,” says Taylor, who has led small groups to see the sunken ship when he volunteered for the Navy public affairs office. But that is still at least a few years away. The National Park Service manages the site and hopes someday to bring tourists to visit. The Navy worked for years trying to salvage the vessel before giving up. Sixty-two sailors were killed in the attack, most of them trapped when the ship rolled over. It had been stripped of its big guns and had a crew of only 525. Commissioned in 1911, it was converted to a target vessel in 1931 for planes doing practice bomb runs. The Utah was not a lucrative target for the Japanese in 1941. Tomich posthumously was awarded the Medal of Honor in 2006. If he hadn’t secured the boilers, they would have exploded.” “He ordered everybody else to leave,” says Taylor, 77, who has become an unofficial historian of this hidden memorial. Tomich, 48, purposely stayed below decks after the explosion. “He was down in the engineering spaces,” Taylor says of the Utah’s chief watertender, Peter Tomich, whose body was entombed in the wreck, along with those of dozens of other sailors.Īll were trapped when the ship capsized minutes after being struck by a Japanese torpedo. Taylor, who once worked at Naval Brig nearby and brought prisoners here to raise and lower a nearby flag and learn discipline, knows every detail of the sunken ship and tells its stories.
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