Remebering the Pearl Harbor Attack

Today is December 7, the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Being a writer for a newspaper sometimes allows me really cool opportunities, like this one: interviewing a survivor of the attack.
Dorothy Chenchick’s husband was a tech sergeant in the Marines, and they had been at the Marine base by Pearl Harbor since June of 1941. Dorothy was only 18 years old, and pregnant with her first child. They were living on Ewa Beach where most of the families of the Marines lived.
She and her husband woke up around 7 a.m. with the noise. She looked outside and saw all the black smoke, and they ran out in the yard where they watched the Japanese planes circle and come around again.
The planes came around right around over their house. A plane dived so close she saw the pilot’s face and the fur of his coat around his face. The plane was so close she could have hit it with a rock, but she didn’t wait around to give it a try. She high-tailed it back into the house. Later they found 37 bullet holes in their house.
Dorothy’s husband put on his uniform and ran to the base to see what he could do. She didn’t see him for three days, and didn’t know if he was a live or dead during that time. She heard later that he had climbed inside a bulldozer and had moved burning planes away from those that were still intact, and helped to save lives.
“Everyone was very courageous that day,” she said. “It was bedlam. It’s been 67 years, and I still remember it vividly,” she said.
Dorothy said that the houses being shot up are part of the story that isn’t often told. Women and children were shot inside their houses, and she remembered one Marine that stood on his front lawn and shot at the planes with his pistol. Dorothy was so scared she packed everything she owned.
“I didn’t like it at all! I was leaving!” she said.
Dorothy talked about what a well-planned attack it was.
“The sailors had all been out Saturday night drinking, so many of them were drunk, and then we had maneuvers all the time so people weren’t paying any attention to the planes until they heard the shooting,” she said. “It was just devastating what they did to those ships.”
Dorothy said there were beaches along the front of her house, and there were bunkers built along them where some soldiers had taken refuge. There was no food in the bunkers, and the soldiers hadn’t eaten since Saturday night, so she and some of the other wives made the soldiers sandwiches. She said some of the other women wanted to preserve their food since there was no telling when supplies could be shipped in again, but Dorothy told them, “These soldiers are protecting our freedom, and we’re feeding them!”
The first night after the attack, all of the military families on Ewa beach were called to stay in one of the lieutenant’s homes.
“In that time the officers and the enlisted people were not ever together,” she said. “You never even communicated with them. It was the first time we were ever around officers.”
During the night there was another air raid alarm, and she said they all thought the Japanese were coming back, but it turned out to be American planes.
“Our planes were trying to come in, and they had an air raid alert, and we tried to shoot down our own planes. That was something else,” she said.
When Dorothy returned to her own house the next day, she saw the army had been there and encircled the yard with barbed wire because they expected ground landings. She had to cut the barbed wire before she could get back in. All the civilians were issued gas masks, and the military implemented a curfew. She ended up staying with a friend for a while afterward, and the woman was scared Dorothy would go into labor in the middle of the night. All the roads were blocked. There was no way through.
Even though Dorothy had everything packed up and was pushing to leave, she wasn’t able to leave until February. This was a concern because she was getting closer to delivery, and there were no baby supplies available.
“The stores had nothing,” she said. “Everything that came into Hawaii was shipped in. I didn’t have anything for a baby, and the stores didn’t have a single diaper. They weren’t shipping any of that stuff to Hawaii.”
Finally she went to the chaplain, and told him her cousin was the commandant of the Marine Corps.
“He was a distant cousin,” she said, “but it was enough to get me out of there,” she said.
She told him she was due to have a baby and needed off the island. He put her on the next ship.
The chaplain was Howell Forgy, the man who first said, “Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition.”
Dorothy said that the military issued orders before she left that they were to tell no one the extent of the damage the Japanese had done.
“They didn’t want it to get back to Japan how vulnerable America was,” she said.
In 2001, film director Michael Bay invited Dorothy to watch the premier of the movie Pearl Harbor. Bay asked Dorothy to tell him her story.
“He was the only one who really showed how low those planes came in,” she said.
She said Bay gave her “VIP treatment.” She was invited to the reception at his penthouse, and met Faith Hill and other big stars.
“We were aboard a big aircraft carrier, and Ben Affleck gave me a kiss on the cheek. It was really nice that he did that,” she said.
Today I pay tribute to Dorothy Chenchick and her baby boy, who was born in April 1942, small, but healthy, as well as her husband and the other brave soldiers who lived and died that Sunday in 1941.
God bless America