Naval Historical Center Photo NH 50928
Oily smoke from the burning Arizona (BB-39) boils up in the background beyond the Navy Yard water towers, one of them, in center, signal-flag bedecked. Note several Marines attempting to deploy a 3-inch antiaircraft gun in the foreground.
The Japanese eventually put Major Roberts’ ingenious fire control methods—the field musics—to the test. After hearing four hearty blasts from the bandsmen, the .50-calibers began hammering out cones of tracer that caught two low-flying dive bombers as they pulled out of their runs over Pearl, prompting Roberts’ fear that the ships would fire at them, too, and hit the barracks. One Val slanted earthward near what appeared to be either the west end of the lower tank farm or the south end of the Naval Hospital reservation, while the other, emitting great quantities of smoke, crashed west-southwest of the parade ground.
Although the Marines success against their tormentors must have seemed sweet indeed, a skeptical Captain Taxis thought it more likely that the crews of the two Vals bagged by the machine gunners had just run out of luck. Most of the firing, in his opinion, had been quite ineffectual, mostly “directed at enemy planes far beyond range of the weapons and merely fired into the air at no target at all.” Gunners on board the fleet’s warships were faring little better!
Almost simultaneously with the dive-bombing attacks, horizontal bombing attacks began. Major Roberts noted that the 18 bombers “flew in two Vees of nine planes each in column of Vees and [that] they kept a good formation.” At least some of those planes appeared to have bombed the battleship Pennsylvania and the destroyers Cassin and Downes in Dry Dock No. 1. In the confusion, however, Roberts probably saw two divisions of Kates from Zuikaku preparing for their attack runs on Hickam Field. A single division of such planes from Shokaku, meanwhile, attacked the Navy Yard and the Naval Air Station.
Well removed from the barracks, Marines assigned to the Navy Yards Fire Department rendered invaluable assistance in leading critical firefighting efforts. Heading the department, Sergeant Harold F. Abbott supervised the distribution of the various units, and coordinated the flood of volunteers who stepped forward to help.
One of Abbott’s men, Private First Class Marion M. Milbrandt, with his 1,000-gallon pumper, summoned to the Naval Hospital grounds, found that one of Kaga’s Kates—struck by machine gun fire from the ships moored in the Repair Basin—had crashed near there. The resulting fire, fed by the crashed plane’s gasoline, threatened the facility, but Milbrandt and his crew controlled the blaze.
Other Marine firefighters were hard at work alongside Dry Dock No. 1. Pennsylvania had not been the only ship not fully ready for war, since she lay immobile at one end of the drydock. Downes lay in the dock, undergoing various items of work, while Cassin had been having ordnance alterations at the Yard and thus had none of her 5-inch/38s ready for firing. Both destroyers soon came in for some unwanted attention.
As bombs turned the two destroyers into cauldrons of flames and their crews abandoned ship, two sailors from Downes, meanwhile, sprinted over to the Marine Barracks: Gunner’s Mate First Class Michael G. Odietus and Gunner’s Mate Second Class Curtis P. Schulze. After the order to abandon ship had been given, both had, on their own initiative, gone to the Marine Barracks to assist in the distribution of arms and ammunition. They soon returned, however, each gunner’s mate with a Browning Automatic Rifle in hand, to do his part in fighting back.