When Gerry Hamill rolls over in bed just before 8 o'clock this morning, his thoughts will flash back 54 years to that warm Hawaiian morning when he lay in his bunk contemplating a big breakfast of bacon and eggs, pancakes and fruit.
But the young Army Air Corps aircraft mechanic didn't get breakfast that day, or lunch or dinner -- he was battling the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field, Dec. 7, 1941.
Mr. Hamill, 75, said that all these years later, "I still can't believe it happened to us. We thought that if war broke out we were in the safest place, thousands of miles from anywhere.
"We heard the roar of dive bombers, but we thought it was just the Navy. We were constantly harassing each other; they dive-bombed Hickam, and we buzzed their carriers and any other ship we could sneak up on," he said.
"I came out of the door just as a Zero banked over the barracks on a strafing run, and I saw the red balls, the Rising Sun, on the wings. We were dumbfounded, we couldn't believe it," he said.
A veteran buck sergeant got the ground crewmen together and ran them the quarter-mile from the barracks area to the flight line where the twin-engine bombers were parked.
By 10 a.m., the Rodgers Forge resident said, he and his mates in the 58th Bomb Squadron at Hickam Field managed to get four of their A20-A light bombers fueled, armed and into the air to search -- fruitlessly -- for the enemy aircraft carriers that had launched the devastating attack.
"They each flew two or three sorties that day, but they never found anything," said Mr. Hamill, a semiretired insurance broker.
David Aiken of Irving, Texas, a director of Pearl Harbor Associates Inc., a historic research group, said the 58th's planes were the first in the air after the attack.
For a history called "Above Pearl, A Tactical History," Mr. Aiken is trying to compile a roster of every man who flew that day and to obtain the recollections of anyone who assisted in getting the planes airborne.
"Our planes were parked away from the others at the main part of Hickam, otherwise we would have lost them all," Mr. Hamill said.
Mr. Hamill said the American propaganda that the Japanese were poor pilots and poor soldiers was dead wrong.
"We found out different," he said. "If they had had troop transports with them, they could have taken the islands. But maybe then we would have spotted them coming."
The toll at Pearl Harbor was high: 2,403 people killed and another 1,178 wounded. Much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet was lost, damaged or sunk, including eight battleships, three cruisers, five destroyers and an assortment of auxiliary vessels. The Navy and the Army Air Corps saw 169 planes destroyed and 159 damaged.
After Pearl Harbor, Mr. Hamill was transferred to the 531st Fighter-Bomber Squadron, which was equipped with Navy Dauntless dive bombers, and trained in dive-bombing tactics.
The squadron flew patrols from the Phoenix Islands in the central Pacific. Mr. Hamill said he flew as a rear gunner in the dive bombers, and he and other gunners also volunteered to fly as gunners in B-24 bombers. "I guess I flew about 100 hours of combat," he said.
In 1943, the war ended for Mr. Hamill when he was transferred back "to the good old USA" as an aerial engineer instructor, first at Keesler Field in Biloxi, Miss., then at Langley Field, Va., where he was stationed when the war ended in 1945.
For anyone with information for Mr. Aiken's book, the address of Pearl Harbor History Associates Inc. is P.O. Box 205, Sperryville, Va. 22740-0205.
Memorial Service
The Maryland chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association will hold its annual memorial service at 11 a.m. today at Pier 1, Inner Harbor, aboard the Coast Guard cutter Roger B. Taney -- believed to be one of two ships surviving from the day of the attack.
Edward T. Robertson, who fought that day at nearby Hickam Field as a member of the 64th Anti-Aircraft Regiment and is arranging today's program, said the association will present a plaque naming the Taney -- now part of the Baltimore Maritime Museum -- as an honorary member.
