Pearl Harbor News-Broadcast
Directions: You are a news reporter in Oahu on Dec 7th, 1941. Create a written newspaper
clipping OR a podcast video using first person accounts on the Pearl Harbor attack, so your
fellow Americans are accurately informed as to this "day of infamy." Be sure to include specific
details of the event. Eyewitness accounts are available below to take quotes from.
-Newspaper clippings must be 2-3 paragraphs in length and have at least 3 quotes.
-Podcast videos should be 6-10min long (with a script just like a reporter) and have 3 quotes.
Link to make newspaper clipping: https://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp
Oral History of The Pearl Harbor Attack, 7 December 1941
LT Warden
Excerpt from Oral History of LT Horace D. Warden, MC (Medical Corps), USN, Medical
Officer Aboard USS Breese (DM-18) on 7 December 1941.
[Courtesy of Historian, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery]
You hadn't been trained as a surgeon previously?
I was actually assigned to Mine Division Two. The USS Breese (DM-18) was one of four
destroyers in that division. The doctor I relieved had died so I became the medical officer of
Mine Division Two, part of what they called the old "Pineapple Navy." We would go and
practice laying mines for 2 weeks and then be in port for 2 weeks. I was riding on the Breese
because that was the ship that had a stateroom for the doctor. During the 2 weeks we would be in
port I would go to the Naval Hospital to get some more surgical experience.
What kind of sick bay did you have on the Breese?
We had a small sick bay on those old four-pipers, not much space, just enough for one hospital
corpsmen to work in. It was very cramped but adequate.
Were you on the Breese that Sunday morning when the Japanese attacked?
Yes sir. On that Sunday morning we were moored to a buoy near Pearl City. I happened to be
aboard the previous night because in those days they used to divide Pearl Harbor into three areas.
There was supposed to be a doctor assigned to each area all night for medical coverage. It was
my night to be aboard in Pearl City. I was due to go off duty at 8:00 on Sunday morning. I had
changed into civilian clothes and was sitting on the deck for a whaleboat to take me to my car so
I could get to breakfast at home on the far side of Honolulu. The Japanese hit at five minutes to
eight and I never got off the ship.
Did you see them coming?
No. The first thing I remember was the sound of firing and then they called general quarters. We
were not a large ship so we were not immediately threatened. After the Japanese delivered their
bombs on the large ships they had to come up over us. That's when we got one of them with what
I think was a 3-inch gun.
Did you see that happen?
No. I didn't see the plane get hit.
When you went to general quarters, your station was in the sick bay below decks?
Yes. But I didn't have time to get there. I remember one of our food handlers was milling around
very upset and crying, a real basket case. We went to where we had the firearms stashed away
and we got a rifle and gave it to him. Once he started shooting he was alright. The plane we had
shot down landed right near us in the water. The pilot was still alive so they got a whaleboat to
go rescue him. Apparently he made a move, put his hand under his vest or something, and so
they killed him and then didn't have a live pilot to question. The sailor who shot him was told
that he was going to get court-martialed. But later that all was quashed and there was no court
martial.
We then tried to get underway and out of the harbor. Our ship was ready because we had the
duty the night before, but we were tied to three other ships and they didn't have many people
aboard on Sunday morning. So we had to wait until enough crew members arrived on these ships
to get them out of the harbor.
Did you have any casualties to treat at this point?
None. After about an hour or an hour and a half we were out to sea and started to patrol looking
for miniature subs and dropped depth charges. We stayed out about a week and then came back.
I can't remember whether we ran out of food or fuel.
Anyway, we came back in to Pearl Harbor. Then we could see all the damage that had been
done. Going out we couldn't see it because of where we were. While we were out we kept
wondering why the big ships hadn't come out.
What did you think of all that damage?
It was just terrible. It was one of those things when you think, what's the world coming to?
What's going to happen to us now? Everyone was all set to try to get even if we could, but my
family was on the other end of Oahu so the first thing I wanted to do was get ashore and let them
know that I was okay and find out that they were okay. That was probably the worst week of the
war for me.
What did you do once you got back to Pearl?
We stayed there waiting for further orders. There was nothing really to do. I then got permission
to go to the Naval Hospital to help out over there.
Did you still have a lot of casualties to deal with from the attack?
Yes. We still had surgery to do. One of the Japanese planes had crashed in the Naval Hospital
yard and I have a piece of it.
Did you still go patrolling with the Breese?
Yes. We would go out for a few days patrolling looking for submarines and then come back to
Pearl. I remember that on Christmas Day in 1941 we were tied right at Hospital Point,
Meanwhile, my family came out to the Naval Hospital to have Christmas dinner with me. That
was a wonderful occasion.
How long were you with Mine Division Two?
I was with that outfit for another year. We got to work laying mines throughout the South
Pacific.
Oral History of The Pearl Harbor Attack, 7 December 1941
Captain Lacouture, USN
Interviewer: Okay. You mentioned you're Assistant Engineer on the USS Blue. You're dealing
with a chief and enlisted. How did your leadership skills come into play here?
Lacouture: Well, I found that you had to really trust your chief petty officers to tell you and
advise you on all the intricacies of equipment and everything you're working on. And you
supported them in any problems they had. I tried to get involved at the level down there with the
chiefs and find out what their problems were, and so forth.
Communications Officer was mainly the question of getting the word on what was happening to
the captain and responding to his wishes getting whatever he wanted out.
First Lieutenant was mainly keeping the topside cleaned up, and so forth and so on. And
Gunnery Officer was making sure your directors and your equipment and everything worked
from the gunnery point of view.
And of course, in addition to those deals, you had to stand the deck watch, usually four hours
every day, and if you had the midwatch, you'd have been up working until the watch started and
then you'd go from then until four o'clock, and fortunately got good coffee to keep yourself
awake.
So things progressed well on the Blue, and with my social life, since I met Bam Sperry, I met
several other gals. Come the evening before Pearl Harbor, we would moor usually in a joint
mooring with three or four other destroyers. We would be on the east side of Ford Island and the
battleships would line up on the south side of Ford Island, and then they only had one carrier
based at the time there and that wasI think the [USS] Enterprise [CV-6] was the main carrier out
there at the time.
The night before Pearl Harbor, I was invited to a party with all the top admirals at the Royal
Hawaiian, and Hilo Hattie put on her act and did her dancing and sang her songs, and we had a
great time.
The mother of a gal that I was with said, "Well, now no need your going back to the ship tonight.
Come back and stay at my place. We've got plenty of extra rooms."
So I went out there and about seven o'clock in the morning, she came in and started shaking me.
"Wake up, wake up! The Japanese are attacking Pearl Harbor!"
I said, "Are you crazy? Go away, I'm sleepy." She finally convinced me, so I jumped in my car
and headed towards Pearl, and the roads were almost vacant. There were almost no cars on the
road, and I go down to the landing, the officers' landing there, and the gig was waiting there for a
captain of one of the other destroyers, which was just going out.
I couldn't believe itall the battleships are overturned and all smoking, and all I could think of was
all my [Naval Academy] classmates and everything, and what had happened to them. The
commander who was captain of one of the other destroyers waiting there, his gig was ready. He
said, "Jump in," as the ship came by. It had just gotten underway, and as they went down the
channel, the Japanese second attack came in so we started shooting at them and they tried to sink
the [USS] Nevada [BB-36], the battleship that had gotten underway.
Interviewer: Nevada had, yes.
Lacouture: And they were trying to sink it in the channel. I guess one of the young ensigns ran
it aground to keep it from sinking in the channel. And at the time they were bombingI think it
was the [USS] Pennsylvania [BB-38] that was in dry dock there.
And we shot down, oh, at least one of the airplanes, and as we went by, all the planes, the
seaplanes and the hangers and everything on Ford Island were burning. Just as we got out to the
entrance of the harbor there, we did manage to sink a little Japanese miniature submarine.
So we cruised around out there and I had the watch at about four or four-thirty in the morning,
five o'clock just as dawn was breaking, and all of a sudden I see a big shape of a carrier through
my goggles, sort of off Barbers Point, and I immediately go to general quarters, man the guns,
man the torpedo tubes, get ready to fire torpedoes, and about that time the carrier puts a
searchlight up and shows the American flag flying. That was the Enterprise just as I was about to
launch torpedoes. It had been delivering planes to Wake Island and on its way home the cruiser
with it had had propeller problems. They had to send a diving team down to sort of fix the
propeller; otherwise the Enterprise would have been at its dock there and would have been sunk
by the Japanese. Because they came in and I think they had, was it the [USS] Utah [AG-16] or
some training ship was there and they splintered it to smithereens, just because they were diving
at a target location without wondering just what it was.
And then, of course, the Enterprise launched her planes and about a third of them got shot down,
because by then our gunners were shooting at anything that moved in the air without identifying
it. Nobody knew how to identify airplanes, especially not people who just were bombed
unexpectedly.
I think, you know it was strange, for a couple of days before Pearl Harbor we'd been getting
submarine contacts out there when we were out there cruising around. Reported them, but
nobody paid much attention. And one of the first things we did after, well, as I say we went back
in after the attack was over on this ship, and when I was out there, why they transferred me to the
Blue, and the Blue had been taken out by four ensigns. A guy out of '39 [Naval Academy class of
1939] was the senior ensign on board and they transferred me over and they'd been up all day
and all night. So I brought the ship back in. I was the second senior guy on board then.
Oral History of The Pearl Harbor Attack, 7 December 1941
Pharmacist's Mate Second Class Lee Soucy
Related Resources:
The Pearl Harbor Attack, 7 December 1941
Oral History of the Pearl Harbor Attack
Excerpt from Oral History of Pharmacist's Mate Second Class Lee Soucy, crewman
aboard USS Utah (AG-16) on 7 December 1941.
[Source:Oral history provided courtesy of the Historian, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery
I had just had breakfast and was looking out a porthole in sick bay when someone said, "What
the hell are all those planes doing up there on a Sunday? " Someone else said, "It must be those
crazy Marines. They'd be the only ones out maneuvering on a Sunday." When I looked up in the
sky I saw five or six planes starting their descent. Then when the first bombs dropped on the
hangers at Ford Island, I thought, "Those guys are missing us by a mile." Inasmuch as practice
bombing was a daily occurrence to us, it was not too unusual for planes to drop bombs, but the
time and place were quite out of line. We could not imagine bombing practice in port. It occurred
to me and to most of the others that someone had really goofed this time and put live bombs on
those planes by mistake.
In any event, even after I saw a huge fireball and cloud of black smoke rise from the hangers on
Ford Island and heard explosions, it did not occur to me that these were enemy planes. It was too
incredible! Simply beyond imagination! "What a SNAFU," I moaned.
As I watched the explosions on Ford Island in amazement and disbelief, I felt the ship lurch. We
didn't know it then, but we were being bombed and torpedoed by planes approaching from the
opposite (port) side.
The bugler and bosun's mate were on the fantail ready to raise the colors at 8 o'clock. In a matter
of seconds, the bugler sounded "General Quarters." I grabbed my first aid bag and headed for my
battle station amidship.
A number of the ship's tremors are vaguely imprinted in my mind, but I remember one jolt quite
vividly. As I was running down the passageway toward my battle station, another torpedo or
bomb hit and shook the ship severely. I was knocked off balance and through the log room door.
I got up a little dazed and immediately darted down the ladder below the armored deck. I forgot
my first aid kit.
By then the ship was already listing. There were a few men down below who looked
dumbfounded and wondered out loud, "What's going on?" I felt around my shoulder in great
alarm. No first aid kit! Being out of uniform is one thing, but being at a battle station without
proper equipment is more than embarrassing.
After a minute or two below the armored deck, we heard another bugle call, then the bosun's
whistle followed by the boatswain's chant, "Abandon ship...Abandon ship."
We scampered up the ladder. As I raced toward the open side of the deck, an officer stood by a
stack of life preservers and tossed the jackets at us as we ran by. When I reached the open deck,
the ship was listing precipitously. I thought about the huge amount of ammunition we had on
board and that it would surely blow up soon. I wanted to get away from the ship fast, so I
discarded my life jacket. I didn't want a Mae West slowing me down.
Another thing that jolted my memory was how rough the beach on Ford Island was. The day
previous, I had been part of a fire and rescue party dispatched to fight a small fire on Ford Island.
The fire was out by the time we got there but I remember distinctly the rugged beach, so I tied
double knots in my shoes whereas just about everyone else kicked their's off.
I was tensely poised for a running dive off the partially exposed hull when the ship lunged again
and threw me off balance. I ended up with my bottom sliding across and down the barnacle
encrusted bottom of the ship.
When the ship had jolted, I thought we had been hit by another bomb or torpedo, but later it was
determined that the mooring lines snapped which caused the 21,000-ton ship to jerk so violently
as she keeled over.
Nevertheless, after I bobbed up to the surface of the water to get my bearings, I spotted a motor
launch with a coxswain fishing men out of the water with his boot hook. I started to swim toward
the launch. After a few strokes, a hail of bullets hit the water a few feet in front of me in line with
the launch. As the strafer banked, I noticed the big red insignias on his wing tips. Until then, I
really had not known who attacked us. At some point, I had heard someone shout, "Where did
those Germans come from?" I quickly decided that a boat full of men would be a more likely
strafing target than a lone swimmer, so I changed course and hightailed it for Ford Island.
I reached the beach exhausted and as I tried to catch my breath, another pharmacist's mate,
Gordon Sumner, from the Utah, stumbled out of the water. I remember how elated I was to see
him. There is no doubt in my mind that bewilderment, if not misery, loves company. I remember
I felt guilty that I had not made any effort to recover my first aid kit. Sumner had his wrapped
around his shoulders.
While we both tried to get our wind back, a jeep came speeding by and came to a screeching
halt. One of the two officers in the vehicle had spotted our Red Cross brassards and hailed us
aboard. They took us to a two- or three-story concrete BOQ (bachelor officer's quarters) facing
Battleship Row to set up an emergency treatment station for several oil-covered casualties strewn
across the concrete floor. Most of them were from the capsized or flaming battleships. It did not
take long to exhaust the supplies in Sumner's bag.
A line officer came by to inquire how we were getting along. We told him that we had run out of
everything and were in urgent need of bandages and some kind of solvent or alcohol to cleanse
wounds. He ordered some one to strip the beds and make rolls of bandages with the sheets. Then
he turned to us and said, "Alcohol? Alcohol?," he repeated. "Will whiskey do?"
Before we could mull it over, he took off and in a few minutes he returned and plunked a case of
scotch at our feet. Another person who accompanied him had an armful of bottles of a variety of
liquors. I am sure denatured alcohol could not have served our purpose better for washing off the
sticky oil, as well as providing some antiseptic effect for a variety of wounds and burns.
Despite the confusion, pain, and suffering, there was some gusty humor amidst the pathos and
chaos. At one point, an exhausted swimmer, covered with a gooey film of black oil, saw me
walking around with a washcloth in one hand and a bottle of booze in the other. He hollered,
"Hey Doc, could I have a shot of that medicine?" I handed him the bottle of whichever medicine
I had at the time. He took a hefty swig. He had no sooner swallowed the "medicine" then he
spewed it out along with black mucoidal globs of oil. He lay back a minute after he stopped
vomiting, then said, "Doc, I lost that medicine. How about another dose?"
Perhaps my internal as well as external application of booze was not accepted medical practice,
but it sure made me popular with the old salts. Actually, it probably was a good medical
procedure if it induced vomiting. Retaining contaminated water and oil in one's stomach was not
good for one's health.
I remember another incident. A low flying enemy pilot was strafing toward our concrete haven
while I was on my knees trying to determine what to do for a prostrate casualty. Although the
sailor, or marine, was in bad shape, he raised his head feebly when he saw the plane approach
and shouted, "Open the doors and let the sonafabitch in."
Events which occurred in seconds take minutes to recount. During the lull, regular medical
personnel from Ford Island Dispensary arrived with proper supplies and equipment and released
Sumner and me so we could rejoin other Utah survivors for reassignment.
When the supplies ran out at our first aid station, I suggested to Sumner that he volunteer to go to
the Naval Dispensary for some more. When he returned, he mentioned that he had a close call. A
bomb landed in the patio while he was at the dispensary. He didn't mention any injury so I
shrugged it off. After all, under the circumstances, what was one bomb more or less. That
afternoon, while we were both walking along a lanai (screened porch) at the dispensary, he
pointed to a crater in the patio. "That's where the bomb hit I told you about." "Where were you?",
I asked. He pointed to a spot not far away. I said, "Come on, if you had been that close, you'd
have been killed." To which he replied, "Oh, it didn't go off. I fled the area in a hurry."
Sometime after dark, a squadron of scout planes from the carrier Enterprise (two hundred or so
miles out at sea), their fuel nearly depleted, came in for a landing on Ford Island. All hell broke
loose and the sky lit up from tracer bullets from numerous antiaircraft guns. As the Enterprise
planes approached some understandably trigger-happy gunners opened fire; then all gunners
followed suit and shot down all but one of our planes. At least, that's what I was told. Earlier that
evening, many of the Utah survivors had been taken to the USS Argonne (AP-4), a transport.
Gunners manning .50 caliber machine guns on the partially submerged USS California directly
across from the Argonne hit the ship while shooting at the planes. A stray, armor-piercing bullet
penetrated Argonne's thin bulkhead, went through a Utah survivor's arm, and spent itself in
another sailor's heart. He died instantly.
The name Price has been stored in my memory bank for a long time as this fatality but, at a
recent reunion of Utah survivors, another ex-shipmate, Gilbert Meyer, insisted that Price was not
the one killed. I didn't argue too long because I recalled meeting two men at the Pearl Harbor
Naval Hospital several weeks after the raid who walked around with their own obituaries in their
wallets--clippings from hometown newspapers.