This blog entry about my father, Ellison Blair, is an excerpt from the memoir Eisenhower Babies: Growing Up on Moonshots, Comic Books, and Black-and-White TV.
By Ronnie Blair
The world faced difficult times in the late 1930s. The Great Depression lingered, and Dad struggled to find reliable employment. Finally, at age 20 and with job opportunities scarce, he decided the army could provide the regular paycheck he so desperately needed.
Not that it would be an extraordinary amount. The peacetime army paid $21 a month [for new enlistees], according to Pearl Harbor Ghosts: The Legacy of December 7, 1941, by Thurston Clarke. Regardless, Dad enlisted and was inducted on July 5, 1940, in Richmond, Virginia. Although the United States was not at war yet, Germany was already causing problems across Europe, and five days later the Battle of Britain would begin.
Once Dad became a soldier, he was not destined to stay on the mainland for long. Two months after his enlistment, he shipped out for Hawaii, arriving in Oahu on September 26, 1940, where he reported for duty at Schofield Barracks.
Moving in such a short period of time from the back hills of Kentucky to the tropics of Hawaii must have been quite the culture shock. But in a sense Dad had traded one geographically secluded place for another, and Hawaii wasn’t a paradise for the 1940s infantry in the same way it is for tourists today.
Clarke wrote in Pearl Harbor Ghosts that “many servicemen loathed the Islands. Some had not seen their families for almost two years, and they pursued the lonely-man pastimes of beer drinking and card playing, fighting with local youths they called ‘gooks,’ and sitting on shoreline rocks, heads in hands, staring toward San Francisco. Their suicide rate was higher than on mainland bases, and in October 1941, one despondent soldier the newspapers called a ‘human bomb’ threw himself from the roof of the University Cinema onto the orchestra seats.”
The army was busy making changes in Hawaii as the summer of 1941 drew to an end. From August to September, the Hawaiian Division was reorganized into two divisions—the Twenty-Fourth and the Twenty-Fifth. As a result, the Nineteenth Infantry that Dad belonged to became part of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division.
On the fateful morning of December 7, 1941, Dad was assigned guard duty, though I’m not certain whether he was at Schofield Barracks’ main gate, somewhere else on the base, or perhaps at another location on the island that the army felt warranted a soldier’s presence.
That he was both awake and on duty at that early hour made him unusual among the men of the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Divisions. In his book Day of Infamy, Walter Lord wrote that many Schofield soldiers “were on weekend pass to Honolulu; others had straggled home in the early hours and were dead to the world.” Dad was neither on a weekend pass nor sleeping off a night of revelry on what, by all accounts, started off as a serene morning.
Somewhere around 7:55 a.m. he heard the hum of airplanes and looked up to see a fleet of planes in the distance. He had no reason to count, but they numbered 353. Initially, Dad paid them little mind. He knew they didn’t belong to the army, but the navy also had planes, and he assumed these might be navy pilots on maneuvers. An explosion from the direction of the harbor told him otherwise.
In an instant, the island was under attack. Smoke billowed from Pearl Harbor as the ships there were bombed and torpedoed. At Hickam Field next to Pearl Harbor, about 25 Japanese dive bombers dropped their bombs on army planes that were neatly lined up and provided easy targets. The Japanese also attacked Wheeler Field next to Schofield, similarly taking out aircraft.
Once they finished at Wheeler, the Japanese pilots turned their attention to Schofield Barracks, strafing the quadrangles and buildings. Soldiers at Schofield responded as best they could, firing machine guns, Springfield rifles, and pistols at the swooping Japanese planes. Here’s how one soldier quoted in Thurston Clarke’s book described the scene and the mood: “We wore World War I pie-plate helmets, were lightly armed, and our average age was nineteen. We all thought we were going to die.”
Dad spoke little about his actions after the attack began, other than to say, “I guess I had enough sense to shoot my gun.” Years later, he was still haunted by the memory of seeing “the dead bodies of all those 18-year-old boys,” likely a reference to sailors since Schofield did not suffer the brunt of the attack the way the navy’s fleet in Pearl Harbor did.
Dad’s Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division saw nine men wounded and one killed, while two soldiers with the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division were killed and seventeen wounded, according to the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division Association’s website. Corporal Theodore J. Lewis earned the unenviable distinction of being the first member of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division to be killed in action in World War II.
The attack lasted one hour and 15 minutes. As the Japanese planes retreated, their work done, no one on the island thought it was over. Military commanders assumed the air attack was the first wave, and they anticipated Japanese ships carrying an invasion force would soon arrive to take control of the island and make prisoners of everyone on it.
The soldiers of Schofield Barracks established positions all around the island to await that invasion, constructing pillboxes and stringing barbed wire along the beaches. Dad’s Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division was assigned the task of defending northern Oahu while the Twenty-Fifth took care of the island’s southern half.
Throughout the night of December 7 and into the morning of December 8, as President Roosevelt gave his “infamy” speech to Congress nearly 5,000 miles away, the soldiers eyed the darkness over the Pacific and braced themselves for a battle that never came.
The island, under martial law by now, remained jittery until June 1942, when an American victory at the Battle of Midway lessened the likelihood that my father would need to help defend Oahu from a second Japanese attack. Still, Dad remained in Hawaii for another year after Midway, but by September 1943, he and the rest of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division had relocated to Camp Caves, a training facility in Australia, where they prepared for battle against the Japanese in Dutch New Guinea.
Ronnie Blair is author of the memoir Eisenhower Babies: Growing Up On Moonshots, Comic Books, and Black-and-White TV.
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