Alan T - A Regular Day
Interviewer: Start on the morning of December 7. Tell us what you were doing.
Alan: We were in the barracks getting ready to go down to breakfast at the mess hall. It was just a new station. I think they opened it up in 1939 or ‘40. This was ‘41. Yeah, I got out there about September 1941, I think. I was in the squadron AP 12. I wasn’t in the squadron but I was assigned to it by Bill Rayburn. He later became an admiral and he was the one that developed the undersea rocket that they could launch from a submarine and it’ll still go, an intercontinental missile.
Alan T - Pearl Harbor
Interviewer: Where were you on December 7?
Alan: I was in the first place they hit. We thought it was an Army Air Corps maneuver. About that time, there was a first class ranger. I remember him... Cox. He came running in the barracks and he said, “Hey this is no drill, that’s live, those are Japs, they’re firing! They’re shooting at us!” Well of course by that time we could hear the machine guns going “brrrrrrr.” So then I ran over to the admin building where I took a BAR (browning automatic rifle) and a bunch of 20 round clips that go in there and went back out in the field there and started shooting. It was easy to shoot at them because they were so low.
Transcription and Audio Edit by Ileana Chavez and Samantha Alcaraz.