Oral History Videos

Daniel Inouye
Interview Length: 2:15

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
It was a Sunday.  And as we always do on Sunday, early in the morning, the whole family is up getting ready for church.  And that was an important day, the Sabbath.  And I recall, I had already done my chores for the morning and I was combing my hair and listening to the radio.  And it was always Hawaiian music at that time in the morning.  Our version of a disc jockey.  And all of a sudden the announcer came on the air, cut off the music.  And he literally started to shout, yell, "Pearl Harbor has been bombed!"  He's screaming, and "for real - the Japanese are bombing Pearl Harbor!"  And it kept on going that way, so finally I call my father and said, “listen to that.”

And so we walked out into the street, got out of the house, looked towards Pearl Harbor, and sure enough we can see in the sky the black puffs.  Those are the anti-aircraft shells.  Anti-aircraft shells are timed so that it would explode at a certain altitude.  And then suddenly, three planes, they were the fighter bombers, flew overhead after they had made their run across Pearl Harbor.  They were coming towards us to go back, I suppose to the carrier.  You could tell the ship, the planes were pearl gray with the red dot.  I felt that my life had come to an end at that point because obviously the pilot in that plane looked like me.  And I wasn't quite certain as to what the future held for us.