The world took a terrible turn for the worse 75 years ago this morning on that beautiful island in the Pacific.
Rolla Edward Malan remembers it very well.
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I first met him at the Enon Apple Butter Festival. Last week in his comfortable living room in Fairborn, 75 years after the attack, Ed Malan recalled the attack, relating details as clearly as if it were yesterday.
Ed had grown up in a small town in Illinois, graduated from high school and joined the Navy after the passing of his parents. He had the misfortune of going through basic training at Great Lakes Naval Station north of Chicago on the shores of Lake Michigan during a bitter cold winter. After suffering in the cold, he was pleased to get orders to the USS Preble DM 20, an older destroyer that was stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
“I went from ice and snow to palms and sun,” said Ed, who thoroughly appreciated the tropical paradise.
Since Ed quickly tired of working on the deck, polishing brass, and chipping paint and barnacles off the hull, he became a machinist mate and worked way below decks in the Fire Room and then the Engine Room.
When the Preble needed repairs and upgrades in the dry dock at Pearl Harbor, most of the crew was temporarily billeted in the old submarine barracks. Ed was happy to leave the cramped crew quarters behind him. The simple cot in the big open rooms of the barracks was a luxury compared to the cramped berths in the crew quarters of his destroyer where bunks were stacked so close together that a sailor barely had room to roll over.
One peaceful Sunday he got to sleep in because it was his day off. But around 8 a.m. he was awakened by loud noises. At first the sleepy sailors thought it was the Marines practicing an assault, but one of the sailors looked out the window and declared that the airplanes were Japanese.
It didn’t seem possible. Quickly they climbed onto the roof of the two-story wooden building to view unbelievable chaos.
It turned out Ed’s day off was Dec. 7, 1941, and the barracks he was housed in was right in the middle of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
“Everyone was looking to see, but didn’t believe it.” he said. “They really caught us off guard.”
Most of the action was across the water from them at Ford Island. The huge gray battleships neatly lined up along the shore were taking a beating from dozens of Japanese airplanes with the red rising sun painted on them. The airfield on the island behind battleship row was also under an intense attack. Gun emplacements on the ships and shore were trying to return fire.
“It gave you a start to see all those planes up there,” he said.
Once a Japanese fighter turned steeply and banked low next to them. He was lower than their perch on the roof and Ed could look into the cockpit to see the pilot’s helmet and face clearly. Another fighter approached them across the water, but as machine gun fire hit it suddenly disappeared into the water. For years he wondered if he really saw it or imagined it. It happened so quickly.
Between the barracks along the sides of the dry docks, Ed could see a hundred sailors standing in shock. Dumbfounded, he said. The guns had been removed from their ships during the repairs and all they could do was watch.
One part of the horror was seared into his memory. He saw a plane higher up than the others above the battleships and something that reflected the sunlight was falling from it.
“I watched the bombs come down. It looked like three or four. It seemed like before they hit there was a big explosion,” said Ed, who remembers the concussion hitting him even from that distance. “I think I saw bodies flying. I don’t know. I don’t know how anyone could have survived. We saw more stuff flying up in the air and it caught fire.”
The size of the huge black cloud from the U.S.S. Arizona rising above them made the sailors leave the roof to seek shelter, but they couldn’t find one. They spent the rest of the attack inside, hoping that a bomb wouldn’t land on their building or the fuel tanks behind them.
Ed doesn’t remember it as two attacks. The chaos, explosions, anti-aircraft machine guns, airplanes overhead and yelling all runs together as one event in his memory.
When the planes left, the sailors felt it was finally safe to run down to their destroyer. Amazingly it had been undamaged, but it could not put to sea since all of its guns had been removed for the repairs.
One of the officers handed out rifles and ordered the men to protect the ship from the Japanese forces when they came ashore. All of the island waited for the landing, but the Japanese army didn’t come.
“I carried that rifle around for two weeks,” he said, and was happy to head back to sea when the ship repairs were done and be a machinist mate again.
I asked Ed if he had ever seen a movie about the attack and he said that he had seen a few. I asked if they did a good job telling the story of the attack.
“There was no romancing,” he said with reference to the most recent “Pearl Harbor” and some other movies. “We were too busy.”
He felt that “Tora Tora Tora” did the best job telling the story, but none of the movies, in his opinion, has been able to capture what he saw.
On this 75th anniversary of that attack Ed would like to give the newer generations a message to remember from someone who was there.
“Freedom isn’t free,” he said. “Someone has to pay for it.”
This story will continue next week with the rest of Ed’s WWII experience, Honor Flight and his return to Pearl Harbor in September.
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