Posted on 12/05/2004 1:33:31 PM PST by Jackknife
Holocaust Sunday
by JD Wetterling
7:53 a.m., December 7, 1941. Mitsuo Fuchida, flying high over Pearl Harbor , Hawaii , radioed back to his aircraft carrier, “Tora! Tora! Tora!” It was the codeword for “complete surprise.” Ninety-six unsuspecting US warships were docked or moored dead in the water of Pearl Harbor , all plump dozing ducks on a sunny Sunday morning. Battleship row, consisting of the largest warships afloat—7 of the nine battleships in the Pacific Fleet—were rafted up in pairs nearly touching one another bow-to-stern in a straight line in the harbor. They were a broadside target impossible to miss by 350 Japanese dive-bombers, torpedo planes and fighters.
Just south of battleship row, the cruiser San Francisco floated at the dock, stripped of ammo and defenseless in preparation for dry dock the next day. In the bottom bunk of a junior officer’s stateroom just below the deck slept Ensign John E. “Jack” Bennett, just graduated from Annapolis the previous February.
The sound of deep thuds woke Jack and he felt his ship quaking. Bombs and torpedoes were exploding in the Harbor. He leaped to the porthole and looked out to see a Japanese plane strafing sailors running down the dock. Just then an electrical gong sounded on the ship’s intercom system, followed by, “General Quarters. General Quarters. All hands man your battle stations. This is not a drill.” Jack jumped into his white service uniform and grabbed his helmet, a WW I relic with a broken chin strap, and double-timed to his battle station, an anti-aircraft gun battery aft.
Topside chaos reigned. With no ammo aboard, Jack and a number of his antiaircraft gun crew members ran across the dock to a similar ship, the New Orleans. She did have ammo for her guns but a number of the crew were on leave. Jack took command of the New Orleans’ 5-inch anti-aircraft gun number seven and began to fire at the airplanes. With no radar he looked for his gun’s flak burst to judge the correct lead for the speeding planes, but there was so much flak in the sky he could not tell which was his own.
The sound of aircraft engines accelerating in dives, cannon fire both incoming and outgoing, and explosions was deafening. The sky was a mad hornets’ nest of diving Japanese Zeros and Vals with Kate torpedo bombers skimming just above the surface of the Harbor to release their torpedoes. Jack reached up to adjust his ancient helmet just as a piece of white hot shrapnel ricocheted around his gun tub, clipping his thumb right in front of his eyes. Whipping out his handkerchief, he wrapped it around his bloody thumb with hardly a thought. America’s Navy was getting the worst pummeling it had ever gotten in its history and it would take more than this to stop Jack.
Then the ship’s electrical power went out and there was no power for the hoists bringing ammo up to the guns. Jack ordered one of his crewmembers to organize a line of men to pass the shells, each 5 inches in diameter and about 5 feet long, weighing over 75 pounds, one at a time from the forward magazine, through the mess hall and up the ladder to the gun deck. As they passed the ammo the New Orleans chaplain, Lt. (j.g.) Howell Forgy, a husky former college football tackle, went down the line of men slapping each on the back and encouraging them with, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.” Within months those words inspired the most popular song of WW II, written by renowned composer Frank Loesser and recorded by the Kay Kayser band. But pop music was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind amid the carnage of that holocaust Sunday. Within an hour the enemy planes were gone, but after a one-hour nerve-wracking hiatus a second wave hit, a repeat performance of the first. When the sky grew quiet a second time, Pearl Harbor was a raging inferno with billowing black smoke obscuring vision. All 7 battleships were put out of action, with three resting on the bottom of the Harbor. In all 18 ships were sunk or seriously damaged with 2,403 servicemen dead and 1,178 wounded. Dead sailors and debris floated all about the harbor. For days Jack watched, with a combat veteran’s detachment, the grisly reminders of the horrors of war that Advent Sunday, while crews in small boats retrieved floating bloated bodies from flooded compartments in the sunken battleships that were being opened by divers. The sorrow over lost friends was absorbed in his anger over the attack and overpowered by his eagerness to exact revenge. The bloodiest, costliest war in American history had begun with Japan’s sneak attack wresting absolute superiority in the Pacific. For the next three years and eight months Jack Bennett and his arch-enemy, Mitsuo Fuchida, would have many other harrowing near-death experiences without a clue as to why they survived and their friends did not. And here is the rest of this story of God’s providence: Jack Bennett and Mitsuo Fuchida will be together in heaven. After the war Fuchida became a Christian through the witness of a former American POW who came to Christ while a captive and returned post-war as a missionary. Fuchida visited America and traveled with the Billy Graham crusade. Nearly 56 years after Pearl Harbor, in 1997, my friend Jack Bennett became my brother in Christ in a Las Vegas casino hotel at a submariner’s reunion at the age of 79. Our Lord works in mysterious ways.
Brother Jack is having a little trouble getting around these days, but he is among a dwindling crowd of WW II giants still with us. You may express your appreciation for his service on this 63rd anniversary of Pearl Harbor, if you feel so inclined, at deepsub@lcglen.com. He'll appreciate it much more than flowers on his grave one day. Please don’t tell him I sent you—he’s a humble hero who knows well he’s been saved by grace. Adapted from Brother Jack, a story of God’s grace, a work in progress by JD Wetterling . Read other excerpts from Brother Jack by clicking the link to the article.
I'm still of the school of thought that the holocaust was a fabrication by the jew media to create isreal which would cause us years of hostility with the oil rich middle east. /sarcasm
You are absolutely correct----and the Pearl Harbor attack was just a bunch of kids playing with firecrackers.(Someone will come up wth that someday)
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