‘We thought it would come sometime’

Cindy Trane Christeson

Ted Hubert lived through the attack on Pearl Harbor 60 years ago, but

he is planning to relive the experience again by seeing the movie “Pearl

Harbor,” which hit the screens this weekend. Hubert, an executive officer

on board the minesweeper Reed Bird at the time, recalls the morning as if

it just happened.

“We thought it would come sometime, everybody was aware of the threat

of war,” the Newport Beach resident explained. “There were plenty of

fears. For about six months before that, we thought every day we’d be

bombed. But not on a Sunday morning.

“It was a sneak move, and they got away with it. We had patrols, but

they didn’t see anything. It’s a mighty big ocean out there.”

Hubert, an independent real estate broker, shared his memories and

photographs from his days in Pearl Harbor.

“Here’s where we tied up, at the end of Hickam field,” Hubert

explained, pointing to a well-worn map. “The entrance to Pearl Harbor had

a gate across it, and our job every morning was to open the gate, go out

and sweep. Actually two ships did.

“We’d go up and down, up and down to about a mile out. This was our

sweeping duty, and it took about three hours.”

When the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, Hubert was having a day

off.

“Four of us were at a friend’s house on the beach about 10 miles away

when the blitz hit the fan,” Hubert said. “It was Sunday morning, a

little before eight o’clock when we heard yelling that we’d been

attacked. We looked out and saw planes dropping bombs nearby.

“Several planes with big red balls on their wings flew right over us.

I remember picking up a handful of sand and throwing it at them. That was

my first gesture towards them, but certainly not my last.”

Hubert remembers getting in the car and racing down the hill toward

the harbor at around 80 mph.

“All we could see was one big mass of smoke and fire gushing, just

gushing,” he said, his voice trailing off for a moment. “We couldn’t

believe it, even when we saw it. They strafed Hickam Field. They even

strafed the barracks and the hospital. We saw smoke and fire coming out

of the barracks, and you know there were people sleeping in there.”

At first, even experienced military personnel thought the attack was

just maneuvers that were getting rough, Hubert said. But then they took a

closer look.

“We finally started believing it when we realized what we were looking

at. There were guys screaming, trying to get out, and some of the ships

did make it out,” Hubert said. “When you see explosions, ships burning

up, turning over and sinking, you finally believe it.”

Hubert’s journal of those days is clearly written in his memory, and

he paused occasionally to flip through the pages.

“We got to our ship as quickly as we could and started shooting at

them. Three or four of them flew over us,” Hubert said. “I was too busy

to be scared. We never actually got shot at because they were finished.

They didn’t pay any attention to a little old mine sweeper.”

The battleships were the worst hit. The Arizona, Oklahoma, California

and West Virginia were sunk or destroyed.

“It was the worst massacre of service people, of the Army and Navy. We

lost about 2,300 people in about an hour that day,” Hubert said. “It was

a dastardly thing.”

Hubert, originally from Glendale, stayed in Hawaii for a year after

the attack.

“I loved the islands,” he said.

A year earlier he had graduated as an ensign in the United States

Naval Reserve, and was working at Columbia Studios, where he’d worked

during vacations. Among his pictures is one of Cary Grant shaking his

hand.

“He was a great guy,” Hubert said. “It was just a few days before

Christmas in December that year [1940] that I was told to report to San

Diego, which I did. I got my minesweeper, and took it to Hawaii. It took

13 days to get there.”

Hubert went on to get his wings in Pensacola, after going through dive

bombing training. Then, he became a military instructor in Daytona, Fla.,

before getting a call to go to Japan, where he served as the executive

officer of the fighting squadron aboard the carrier Shangri-La. Hubert

flew Corsairs.

“It was the best plane in the world,” he said, pointing to a picture

of one that hangs proudly behind his office desk. “We attacked all the

airfields up and down Japan. There can’t be many people in the world who

were in Pearl Harbor the day it was attacked and who were also in Japan

the day the warended.”