BECOME AN ORAL HISTORIAN
Interview someone in your community who is old enough to remember the attack on Pearl Harbor. Where was (s)he when they found out? What were his/her memories? How did (s)he feel? You can also consult The History Channel's Veterans' Forum. For tips on conducting your interview click here.

Read the following accounts, given by people who were alive during the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and answer the following questions: How did these individuals respond to the attack? How are their responses different? How are they similar? What factors account for these differences and similarities?

Pharmacist's Mate Second Class Lee Soucy, crewman aboard the USS Utah

I had just had breakfast and was looking out a porthole in sick bay when someone said, "What...are all those planes doing up there on a Sunday?" Someone else said, "It must be those crazy Marines. They'd be the only ones out maneuvering on a Sunday." When I looked up in the sky I saw five or six planes starting their descent. Then when the first bombs dropped on the hangers at Ford Island, I thought, "Those guys are missing us by a mile." Inasmuch as practice bombing was a daily occurrence to us, it was not too unusual for planes to drop bombs, but the time and place were quite out of line. We could not imagine bombing practice in port. It occurred to me and to most of the others that someone had really goofed this time and put live bombs on those planes by mistake. In any event, even after I saw a huge fireball and cloud of black smoke rise from the hangers on Ford Island and heard explosions, it did not occur to me that these were enemy planes. It was too incredible! Simply beyond imagination!
(Quotation from Department of the Navy: Naval Historical Center)


Itabashi K-oshu, Student at Japan's Naval Academy

I was in the second year of middle school that day, Pearl Harbor Day. "Well, we really did it!" I thought. The sound of the announcement on the radio still reverberates in my ears. "News special, News special," high-pitched and rapid. "Beginning this morning before dawn, war has been joined with the Americans and British." I felt as if my blood boiled and my flesh quivered. The whole nation bubbled over, excited and inspired. "We really did it! Incredible! Wonderful!" That's the way it felt then.
(Excerpt from Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History, p.77-78.)


Retired Lt. Colonel, George E. Passey

"For my roommate and I, this was an ordinary Sunday. This was to be examination week and we were going to spend most of the day doing some review for our final exams. We did not buy a newspaper and depended on the radio for most of our news. Sometime late in the day we turned on the radio and expected to hear more on what the Japanese ambassador was doing in Washington. By then the attack had occurred and the news had accounts of the bombing. Pearl Harbor was a remote place and we knew little of the armed services. ... The realization that the US had been attacked was really not in our expectations, and we realized that our four years of planning [in college] was going down the drain. We began to consider our options, which we felt would put us into the armed services and we looked in the phone directory for the location of the various recruiting services and began to fit visits to them into our exam schedule. We had trouble grasping the enormity of the attack and the loss of ships and lives that were described....Although we tried to think rationally we had a sense of panic in dealing with the unknown and the unexpected."