Remembering the “Day of Infamy”

Danette Goulet

Frank Weitzel was 19 years old and fresh out of high school when he

enlisted in the Navy. His first assignment on Oct. 19 1940 was aboard the

USS San Francisco headed to Pearl Harbor.

The heavy cruiser was in the Naval yard the morning of Dec. 7, 1941

getting a complete overhaul. That meant she was stripped of everything

from oil to ammunition.

“I had just come out from eating breakfast,” Weitzel, 79, recalled. “I

don’t remember who I was with, but I said let’s go up and watch planes

dive on Ford Island -- that’s where our planes practiced.

“At about the second one I seen two bombs drop out and I saw the

insignia and I said I don’t think they were ours, and they weren’t. Then

all hell broke loose. The Oklahoma was first to go over. There were men

trapped underneath. They worked all day and night trying to get ‘em out.”

Weitzel recalls the mayhem that followed: Japanese fighters diving and

firing and sailors scrambling to man guns and fight back with whatever

they could.

“The Arizona blew up across from us and the Oklahoma sank. Our gun

crews manned their guns on the opposite side of the dock.

“Down there the Honolulu got hit and the Saint Louis chopped line

around Ford Island just firing away like mad,” Weitzel said. “I was a

19-year-old kid -- you really didn’t know what to do.”

Weitzel had just returned to the ship that morning for breakfast after

being in the hospital, where he had his tonsils out.

He returned to the hospital, a quarter mile away, that same morning

for his belongings and stayed for four days helping with the sick and

wounded and manning Marine machine guns right outside the hospital.

“It was chaos and confusion,” he said.

Weitzel said he reacted the best way he knew how.

“I had a rifle just shooting at ‘em, just hoping I hit ‘em,” he said.

“[American soldiers] were firing pistols ‘cause they were coming so close

you thought you could hit ‘em, but you couldn’t.”

Weitzel was in the Navy for another six years. The USS San Francisco

he was on went on to be the second most decorated ship in World War II,

earning 17 battle stars.

“We spent a lot of miles out there, went all the way up to Tokyo,” he

said. “We were in every battle up there.”

Pearl Harbor, on the Island of Oahu, Hawaii was attacked by the

Japanese Imperial Navy at 7:55 a.m., Sun. Dec. 7, 1941. The surprise

attack, which consisted of a force of 353 Japanese aircraft, was

conceived by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. There had been no formal

declaration of war.

There were about 100 U.S. Navy ships present that morning, including

battleships, destroyers, cruisers and various support ships.

Simultaneously, there was an attack on Hickam Field where 18 Army Air

corps aircraft including bombers and fighters and attack bombers were

destroyed or damaged on the ground. A few US fighters managed to struggle

into the air against the invaders and fight back.

A total of 29 Japanese aircraft were shot down by ground fire and

pilots from various military installations.

Huntington Beach resident Donald Weir, 83, contends there was an

inkling of what was to come that morning.

“I was a supply Sargent and I had been issued live ammo and that’s a

nono,” he said. “In peace times you don’t have that. When the attack come

we broke it out, put it in our clips and fired on ‘em. We didn’t have big

guns, we had 30.06 machine guns.”

Weir served in the California National Guard, mobilized in 1940.

Unlike Weitzel, Weir never made it to breakfast that day.

“We was getting ready to go to breakfast, it was a normal day. Sunday

is a laid-back day, there was no duties to be pulled outside -- there was

guard duty, but nobody was drilling or having to do any of the chores,”

he said. “We could see the fire and the smoke and all that. A guy that I

knew real well, he said there’s something going wrong, but we didn’t

know.”

Stationed in camp Malkakole, Weir and his battery didn’t suffer loses

like those of the Navy or Air corps, but his group does have the

distinction of suffering the first American casualties of the war.

“The first casualty of World War II by U.S. forces was out of our

camp. There was four guys that got shot down, four guys wanted to learn

to fly. They were taking lessons in little bitty planes. They were up

taking there lessons, so they were shot down,” Weir said.

It was 60 years ago Friday that Weitzel, Weir and thousands of other

men and women came under attack and fought back.