Ewa Mooring Mast Field, later a Japanese target, is seen hazily through the windshield of a Battleship Row-bound Kate shortly before 0800 on 7 December 1941.
In the officers’ mess at Ewa, the officer-of-the-day, Captain Leonard W. Ashwell of VMJ-252, noticed two formations of aircraft at 0755. The first looked like 18 “torpedo planes” flying at 1,000 feet toward Pearl Harbor from Barbers Point, but the second, to the northwest, comprised about 21 planes, just coming over the hills from the direction of Nanakuli, also at an altitude of about 1,000 feet. Ashwell, intrigued by the sight, stepped outside for a better look. The second formation, of single-seat fighters (the two divisions from Akagi and Kaga), flew just to the north of Ewa and wheeled to the right. Then, flying in a “string” formation, they commenced firing. Recognizing the planes as Japanese, Ashwell burst back into the mess, shouting: “Air Raid ... Air Raid! Pass the word!” He then sprinted for the guard house, to have “call to arms” sounded.
Browning Machine Gun Drill On Board Ship
Marines man a water-cooled, .50-caliber Browning M2 machine gun during a drill on board the gunnery training ship Wyoming (AG-17) in late 1941. The M2 Browning weighed (without water) 100 pounds, 8 ounces, and measured five feet, six inches in length. It fired between 550 and 700 rounds per minute to a maximum horizontal range of 7,400 yards. The two hoses carry coolant water to the gun barrel. The gun could be fired without the prescribed two and a half gallons of cooling water—as Gunnery Sergeant Douglas’s men did on board Nevada (BB-36) on 7 December 1941—but accuracy diminished as the barrel heated and the pattern of shots became more widely dispersed. Experience would reveal that a large number of .50-caliber hits were necessary to disable a plane, and that only a small number of hits could be attained by any single ship-mounted gun against a dive bomber.
That Sunday morning, Technical Sergeant Henry H. Anglin, the noncommissioned-officer-in-charge of the photographic section at Ewa, had driven from his Pearl City home with his three-year-old son, Hank, to take the boy’s picture at the station. The senior Anglin had just positioned the lad in front of the camera and was about to take the photo—the picture was to be a gift to the boy’s grandparents—when they heard the “mingled noise of airplanes and machine guns.” Roaring down to within 25 feet of the ground, Itaya’s group most likely carried out only one pass at their targets before moving on to Hickam, the headquarters of the Hawaiian Air Forces 18th Bombardment Wing.
Prange
LCdr Shigeru Itaya, commander of Akagi’s first-wave fighters, which carried out the initial strafing attacks at Ewa Field.
Thinking that Army pilots were showing off, Sergeant Anglin stepped outside the photographic section tent and, along with some other enlisted men, watched planes bearing Japanese markings strafing the edge of the field. Then, the planes began roaring down toward the field itself and the bullets from their cowl and wing-mounted guns began kicking up puffs of dirt. “Look, live ammunition,” somebody said or thought, “Somebody’ll go to prison for this.”