Friday, December 07, 2007 - Bangor Daily News
SOUTHWEST HARBOR, Maine — Sixty-six years ago and more than 5,000 miles from where he now lives, Francis Soares Jr. witnessed an event that may have affected recent world history more than any other.
He was 20 years old in December 1941, serving on a Coast Guard vessel in his native Honolulu. He had joined up after graduating from high school two years before because jobs were hard to find.
He didn’t know he would have a front row seat to America’s sudden entry into World War II at the hands of Japanese forces.
It was a few minutes before 8 a.m. on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, and the Coast Guard ship Taney was moored at Pier 6 in Honolulu Harbor. Soares recalled that he and his crewmates were below deck getting ready to raise the colors, or signal flags, of the day. It was not a time when the ship’s officers would have held a surprise drill, he said.
But the ship’s general alarm sounded, and the command came from the bridge for the crew to man their battle stations. Soares ran up to the deck to a 5-inch gun mounted on the ship’s bow, ready to fire at any threat that might show up on land or on water. In the stern, other sailors manned 3-inch guns that were meant to fire at airborne targets.
He heard the other guns fire and then saw a bomber flying overhead.
"I knew it wasn’t [an American airplane]," he said Wednesday, seated at the kitchen table of his modest home near Seawall Point. "I said, ‘What the heck is going on?’ Then I looked and saw they were firing on the bombers."
Pearl Harbor, where the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet was stationed, was eight miles away over a flat peninsula that separates the large inlet from downtown Honolulu. At the time, the Coast Guard had been absorbed into the Navy, which is why guns had been mounted on the Taney and the vessel’s color had been changed from white to gray.
Soares and his fellow sailors on the ship had seen smoke coming from Pearl Harbor and thought some ship’s ammunition magazine might have accidentally exploded. But soon he also saw fire and smoke rising from closer-by Hickam Field.
"You saw explosions but didn’t know what kind of explosions," he said. "It was all smoke. You couldn’t distinguish anything."
After destroying planes on the ground at the airbase, Japanese bombers turned their attention toward a smokestack rising from a power plant near where the Taney was tied up, Soares said. The ship was partially obscured by a warehouse, however.
"They didn’t know we were there," he said. "The minute we opened fire, they changed their minds. They wanted to go back to Japan."
The attacking bombers disappeared, but fears persisted about what was coming next. Soares was ordered to guard with a machine gun squad a nearby building, Aloha Tower, where the Coast Guard’s district offices were located.
"We heard rumors paratroopers were landing," he said. "Then we knew we were at war."
Soares soon was back on the Taney as the ship headed toward Pearl Harbor to patrol for Japanese submarines. It was then that he and his shipmates realized the extent of the devastation the surprise attack had wrought.
"Everything was destroyed, as far as the eye could see," he said. "You couldn’t comprehend so much damage. You couldn’t believe anyone survived after what happened."
Eight battleships were severely damaged or destroyed, including the Arizona, on which more than 1,000 men died when a Japanese bomb penetrated one of the ship’s magazines. Overall, more than 2,000 Americans lost their lives, most of them military personnel. Several other warships and dozens of American planes, many of which never made it off the ground, also were damaged or destroyed.
Before the attack, the country had been reluctant to get involved in the growing global conflict, but the attack at Pearl Harbor quickly swung public sentiment in the opposite direction.
Less than four years later, World War II would end with the United States dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, one each on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Things could have been worse at Pearl Harbor, according to Soares. He said Japanese leaders called off another planned wave of attack because they thought they had inflicted enough damage.
But the Japanese were so focused on destroying battleships that they left other potential targets unscathed, he said. Aircraft carriers, submarines, oil storage tanks, and Navy repair depots at Pearl Harbor all survived intact. This allowed the Pacific Fleet to recover relatively quickly.
"I keep looking at mistakes the Japanese made," Soares said. "If they had destroyed the oil tanks, the fleet would have been strapped. They could have taken us hook, line and sinker."
Having joined the Coast Guard for the pay of $21 a month, Soares stayed in the service for the next 29 years, retiring as commander from the local station in Southwest Harbor in 1970.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was the most combat he ever saw. During the Vietnam and Korean wars, Soares served in Asia on Coast Guard aids-to-navigation teams, but he never again was exposed to battle the way he had been in his native Hawaii.
After an even longer career, the Taney was decommissioned in 1986, but it still floats. It is part of the permanent exhibit of the Baltimore Maritime Museum, where Soares has visited in past years for Pearl Harbor commemorations.
The museum asked him to visit again this year, but Soares said he decided to spend the day in a more quiet way.
"I didn’t want to go this time," he said. "I’m going to stay at home."
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