December 7, 2001

Pearl Harbor in Twilight Zone

Through A Glass Darkly, by John Myers, Internet Photojournalist

The observance of Pearl Harbor Day reminds me of one of the stranger incidents during my four years in Uncle Sam's Navy.

It was the first week of December in 1968 when we pulled into Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on the way to Vietnam on the USS Mullinnix, DD-944, a destroyer.

Battleship row was long gone, of course, with the exception of the USS Arizona memorial, which sits astride the sunken hulk of the battleship which was one of many sunk that day 60 years ago by the Japanese.

We pulled into port past the Arizona and rendered honors. It is still treated as an active ship in the Navy, though it hasn't moved an inch since Dec. 7, 1941.

If the Japanese did nothing else on the fateful day, they settled once and for all the Navy argument among the brass about which was more important, battleships or carriers. When we had no battleships left, our few carriers were left to carry on the war by themselves.

They refloated most of the battleships sunk that day, but Pearl Harbor was the end of the battleship Navy.

By my day in the Navy, we had only two battleships remaining in service, both of which had been brought out of retirement for Vietnam, the Missouri and the New Jersey. I saw the Jersey fire, and it was awesome.

But the 16-inch guns of a battleship are no match for an aircraft carrier's planes, which World War II proved.

I was a fire control technician, which had nothing whatever to do with controlling the kind of fires that burn. The fire I learned to control was gun fire, in particular the 5-inch main guns of the Mullinnix.

I got up early on the first day after we arrived in Pearl, stuck with the duty while most of the rest of the crew was ashore on liberty that bright Sunday morning.

I made my way up to the director deck, which was my workstation. The director is located one deck above the main guns, and is used to guide the guns to their targets with radar and optical sights.

I was enjoying the morning sun when suddenly the quiet was disturbed by a propeller airplane buzzing low over the ship. Then another one, and another one buzzed past, and one swooped low and dropped what looked like a torpedo into the water, aimed at a ship.

Then I noticed the propeller planes had big red round balls, like a rising sun, painted on each side.

"Those are Jap Zeroes!" I said to myself, and ran down the quarterdeck to report we were under attack.

The petty officer on watch informed me they were filming a movie, "Tora! Tora! Tora!" about the attack on Pearl Harbor, using real Japanese Zero aircraft.

So I went back up to the director, climbed in and fired up the drive and the gun-control radar and practiced tracking Japanese Zeroes, imagining I was shooting them down. I would have gotten a few too, with radar help, which the WWII gunners at Pearl Harbor didn't have. It made me appreciate their amazing accomplishments of shooting down several Jap planes that day with nothing more than small arms, machine guns and ship guns without radar.

I watched actors on a nearby WWII-era destroyer firing machine guns at the Zeroes amid billowing clouds of black smoke as explosions went off around them.

It was a Twilight Zone kind of experience that got even weirder years later when I learned the Mullinnix actually was in an early 1960s episode of the TV show.