Corpsman! Pearl Harbor

Funding for this program provided by... Additional support provided by... Support for this program also made possible by... "I solemnly pledge myself before God to practice faithfully all of my duties as a member of the Hospital Corps.

I hold the care of the sick and injured to be a privilege and a sacred trust and will assist the medical officer with loyalty and honesty."

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

[ Singing in Hawaiian ] These were the fabled Sandwich Islands... and to those of us in whom the spirit of adventure still lives today, here is our other world of beauty and adventure -- here in the lovely islands of Hawaii.

It was a beautiful place.

I felt I was -- Geez, I was lucky to get there.

[ Singing in Hawaiian ] I went downtown, walked through all the streets, saw the hula girls.

Hawaii in late 1941 was utopia for American sailors stationed here.

Navy Hospital Corpsman Third Class Harry Chandler arrived on Oahu in September of 1941.

Harry skipped out on his senior year of high school in Massachusetts to enlist.

Chandler spent his first few weeks in Hawaii exploring his new home.

Harry took his prized camera with him to Hawaii.

Honolulu and Waikiki Beach certainly offered opportunities to click away.

The New Englander began documenting his time on Oahu, taking hundreds of photos of his new Navy life.

Getting caught up in a world war was far from the thoughts of those serving with the American Pacific Fleet, based at Pearl Harbor in the late fall of 1941.

Most of it was walking through Honolulu to see what it was like.

The weather was nice.

We got to see a lot of things.

We'd seen Diamond Head, we'd seen the Poly, we'd seen downtown Honolulu, the YMCA, and across the street was a big Black Cat Cafe and, uh... North Hotel Street, also known as the red-light district in downtown Honolulu, was infamous, filled with bars, brothels and dance halls.

North Hotel was a popular destination for sailors, soldiers and Marines looking to drink, fight and gamble.

Seeking female companionship, legal or otherwise, was also a popular undertaking.

The numerous opportunities available to servicemen stationed in Honolulu led to various problems.

Venereal disease was so prevalent with servicemen that the military conducted regular screenings.

Navy corpsmen like Harry Chandler were on the front lines of the struggle against widespread social diseases.

There was corpsmen assigned to a certain amount.

When any one of the sailors went in to have an activity with one of the prostitutes, he had to sign in, and we'd give him a prophylaxis and we'd write his name down.

And then if he came down with a disease, if he didn't report back to us, uh, he could lose his pay if he got a venereal disease.

Pearl Harbor was quite a sight to start with.

There were a lot of destroyers, a lot of cruisers, eight battleships that day tied up along the quays there.

It's just something you don't see every day.

Had a perfect view.

It was almost like we were right on top of it.

Could see everything.

Everything from Hickam Field, past Ford Island.

We could see it all.

Oh, Battleship Row just stuck out.

They were lined up, and the destroyers were all tied up together.

It was a sight to see.

A view that Harry Chandler would have preferred to remember and share photos of with his family in Florida decades later.

But memories of a peaceful and quiet Pearl Harbor do not exist for Chandler.

Harry only remembers the confusion, blood and death, thoughts of the men he saved, and the faces of those he could not help.

Half a world away from Europe's new battlefronts of 1940 is the capital of a warrior nation whose 100 million people are entering the fourth year of their costly and destructive war.

In late 1941, the idea of getting involved in another world war was overwhelmingly unappealing to most Americans.

Since September 1939, World War Two had played out only in headlines and newsreels in theaters.

Before Pearl Harbor, America adhered to a policy of neutrality.

In Chicago at a rally of the committee to keep America out of war, Colonel Lindbergh urging no foreign entanglements, but advocating cooperation with Germany if she wins.

In the past, we have dealt with a Europe dominated by England and France.

In the future, we may have to deal with a Europe dominated by Germany.

Adolf Hitler's Nazis had already overwhelmed Europe, and in 1941, the Germans were now engaged in combat with the Russians in the east.

Japan, meanwhile, had signed a mutual aid agreement with Germany and Italy, forming the Axis powers.

Meantime, at Nanking, the Chinese armies valiantly defended their city, which was the capital of the Chinese Republic.

[ Explosions ] But again, Japanese power was too great, and after a battle lasting but a few days, the city fell to the invaders.

[ Men cheering ] Prior to their surprise attack in Hawaii, Japanese diplomats were negotiating with representatives from the United States.

The central issue for America was Japan's invasion of China and its aggressive expansion into East Asia.

Back on Oahu, Harry Chandler was eventually assigned to a still-under-construction Navy Mobile Hospital #2.

It was situated in an area directly overlooking scenic Pearl Harbor known as Aiea Heights.

Harry was part of a new Navy concept, a rapidly deployed medical unit that could be shipped in and set up in minimal time.

Harry and his fellow medical corpsmen had just begun to move into their new quarters in late 1941.

And of course, we -- we put up Mobile Hospital #2 at Aiea Heights, and we were busy with that also.

For Navy corpsmen like Harry Chandler, the medical facilities at Pearl Harbor offered a modern-day approach to medicine.

At the main Navy base, the naval hospital at Hospital Point had around 250 beds.

On nearby Ford Island, the air base dispensary provided a clinic for emergencies.

The Army Air Corps had a hospital at Hickam Airfield.

The hospital ship USS Solace was in the harbor.

A new 1,000-bed Aiea Navy Hospital was under construction and nearing completion.

The new mobile hospital at Aiea Heights was constructed to supplement the other, more established military medical facilities on Oahu.

A curious Harry Chandler also had the opportunity to check out the medical services available aboard the big battleships in Pearl Harbor.

I went aboard the Arizona because I wanted to get onto a battleship.

I got aboard her.

Oh, the first thing I asked for was sick bay.

I wanted to see what the sick bay was like.

I was a corpsman.

Job of a corpsman is he can't be a doctor, but it can stop the bleeding, patch them up so that when they come along the beach or pick up the wounded, they can take them back to the hospital ships and facilitate maybe their care and prevent their death.

Good morning.

How are you this morning?

Yes, it was a team, the patient care team -- doctor, nurse and corpsman, each with a particular job, all three contributing to the patient's health and welfare.

To put Harry's job in the Navy into context, a Navy corpsman is similar to that of a physician's assistant today.

Army medics and Navy corpsmen perform the same job, but in different service branches.

For both, the job involves triage, quickly patching up the wounded using the medical tools in their bags.

Well, my role of a medic and in combat is first-line situation where, uh, the person has just been wounded, and I was there to do whatever I could to get them to the point where they could be transported -- if we could get out of there in the first place -- and, uh -- and survive the initial wound.

Uh, so it was a -- it was a... It was the immediacy of the situation that I was concerned with.

Not later -- later on, when he gets into operations and correctness and stuff like that.

Army medics in Europe would eventually experience vastly different combat situations than their Pacific War counterparts.

However, one thing remained consistent -- treat the patient fast and get them to a hospital, aid station, or medical ship behind the lines for more comprehensive care.

You have one medic assigned to each platoon in a line company.

Of course, my job as a medic was to take care of our casualties, and we had quite a few.

We had litters stretched out on one landing craft, I can remember.

There must have been a hundred litters side by side in the -- on the floor of the craft when they left Normandy to go back to England.

When I was in boot camp, I got a cold and I was put into the infirmary, and I watched the corpsmen working with the nurses and with the doctors, and I said, "Gee, that's what I would like to do."

And that's how I got to get to go to Corps school.

Harry Chandler quickly realized he needed more than just desire to be a corpsman.

There were many aptitude tests for new recruits entering as hospital apprentices.

New corpsmen went through about 12 weeks of training at one of four Navy Hospital Corps schools.

The United States Navy had just under 6,000 enlisted corpsmen available in mid 1941.

Went to Corps school at Portsmouth, Virginia.

We were taught how to give medications, how to read medications, how to treat patients.

We became a -- a nurse, in fact.

Medical corpsmen complete the same boot camp as sailors and Marines.

Incidentally, those men exercising in the background are not patients.

They are corpsmen going through the conditioning phase of a training course.

According to the Geneva Convention, a corpsman wasn't allowed to carry a weapon.

But in the Pacific, that didn't -- that couldn't fly because the fighting was so vicious and intense that the corpsman had to be able to defend himself, to just take care of that wounded person.

You're talking about somebody that, in the Pacific, is going in with the Marines or going in with the Army, and they're under fire.

Additionally, most Navy corpsmen in the Pacific didn't wear any insignia like a red cross on their uniforms or helmets.

Particularly ugly was that the Japanese targeted corpsmen in the Pacific.

They didn't want these, uh, soldiers or Marines to be revived and back into battle.

So if you take out the people that will give them the kind of aid that would save a soldier's life or a Marine's life, they'd be pretty satisfied that that soldier or that Marine was going to die.

Only their medical bags identified them as corpsmen.

Harry Chandler's medical kit included morphine for pain relief and sulfa powder to disinfect wounds.

Harry's bag also carried bandages, scissors and tourniquets.

The primary responsibility of corpsmen and medics in World War Two was to stop blood loss, prevent shock and reduce the risk of infections.

Finally, they needed to rapidly transport the wounded to a hospital setting where doctors and nurses would take over their care.

[ Speaking in Japanese ] In the spring of 1941, Japan continued its quest for dominance in the Western and South Pacific.

The strategy included seizing more territory to provide the necessary natural resources for building Japanese warships, planes, and tanks.

Japan had little natural resources of its own.

According to Japanese war historian Akio Inagawa, an attack plan against America was formulated by Japanese Navy Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.

Japan's Emperor Hirohito then approved the plan, as did Japan's other military leaders.

A surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was put into motion.

[ Speaking in Japanese ] There was a drill in the spring for the Combined Fleet.

During that drill, they simulated attacking battleships by using airplanes and torpedoes.

At that time, Admiral Yamamoto talked with Chief of Staff Shigeru Fukudome.

They discussed whether such tactics could be used in future battles.

[ Speaking in Japanese ] That drill took place in April 1940, and that's when they started thinking about utilizing aircraft to carry out military missions.

I believe this was the very beginning of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Japanese Admiral Yamamoto believed that crippling the U.S.

Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor would buy Japan six months of freedom to acquire oil and other resources from around the Pacific without American interference, but only if the Japanese attack force followed Yamamoto's plan to the letter.

Admiral Yamamoto's grandson Gentaro claims his grandfather's opinion about war with America is often misunderstood.

[ Speaking in Japanese ] Well, whenever people talk about my grandfather, they always mention how he was against the war.

However, it's not that my grandfather was the only one who was hesitating to go to war.

He wasn't just being idealistic when he said that Japan shouldn't go to war.

He was a warrior.

He was from a Japanese samurai family.

A samurai must willingly risk his own life in order to protect his country.

[ Speaking in Japanese ] In the late fall of 1941, negotiations between Japan's diplomats and American leaders continued in Washington, D.C.

Japanese ambassadors were intentionally kept unaware of Admiral Yamamoto's secret plans to attack Pearl Harbor.

Gentlemen, you all know how difficult my mission is, but I'll do all I can to make it a successful one for the sake of two countries, Japan and the United States.

American President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanded that Japanese occupation forces withdraw from China and end all hostilities in French Indochina.

Sanctions imposed by the United States included cutting off oil and steel exports to Japan.

Exports were curtailed to the limit which those responsible for our defense were willing to risk.

It was a fearful responsibility.

On one side was the possibility -- in fact, the probability -- that one day these materials might be used against us.

American military leadership issued a war warning to commanders regarding Japan's increasingly aggressive actions across the Pacific.

On Oahu, the commander of the U.S.

Pacific Fleet, Admiral Husband Kimmel, and Army Air Corps Major General Frederick Martin, took the threats of enemy sabotage very seriously.

Army General Walter Short ordered planes at Hickam Field, near Pearl Harbor, and the seaplane base on Ford Island to be clustered together for easier guarding.

All ammunition was locked up in the armories to prevent deliberate sabotage by potential Japanese spies.

Meanwhile, outside of Pearl Harbor, the battleship USS Arizona was on patrol in the waters off Oahu in late November of 1941.

And we were operating at sea 10 days out and 10 days in, five days, eight days in, up and down the 108th meridian all the time.

As a Quartermaster Third Class, Lou Conter was eagerly counting down the days until he could return to the mainland to complete his seaplane pilot training.

That November, Conter hoped to be on the ocean liner SS Lurline, heading back to San Francisco.

And Captain Van Valkenburgh called us down and said, "I'm not going to waste Navy money and send you back to the Lurline."

And we said -- In those days you just said, "Yes, sir, captain."

So we went back to work and we went out to sea on the 26th of November, and we came back in on the 5th of December.

We were ordered back in port on Friday.

On December 3rd, U.S.

Army codebreakers in Washington, D.C., intercepted secret Japanese communications directing their diplomatic envoys to end negotiations with the White House.

They were also told to start destroying any important documents and code machines.

In the early hours of December 7th, sailor Ray Chavez was just outside Pearl Harbor, patrolling on his minesweeper, the USS Condor.

That's when a lookout spotted something in the water.

And I was on the helm when all of a sudden, he -- he called, "Mr.

McCloy, we got company here."

He went over to the port side and looked out, and sure enough, there was a submarine.

And so he gave the order to inform the USS Ward.

At 6:35 a.m., the American destroyer USS Ward found the Japanese midget submarine and opened fire, ultimately sinking the two-person vessel with depth charges.

These were the first shots fired in the Pacific War for the United States.

However, it took too long for word of the attack to go up the chain of command, a mistake that would prove costly for the American Pacific Fleet.

We're up and around, and it was Sunday morning and chow bell sounded for breakfast, and went in the casemate and had breakfast.

Woke up.

Beautiful day, gorgeous day.

Shipmates, today is the third Sunday of Advent, the 7th of December, which means that Christmas is not far ahead.

The sailors were going in to shop, make their last time shopping to get gifts to send home.

Some of them were going to the post offices, which are open because they need to be able to get these packages to the mainland.

It was going to be a typical Sunday in Hawaii, maybe going to the Royal Hawaiian and have some drinks, see some girls, um, go downtown Honolulu, their favorite bar.

We were raising the flag in the morning, and we saw all these planes coming in... and we didn't give it any thought until we start seeing what was happening in the harbor.

And we could tell.

The planes would turn, and you'd see the orange sun on their wings, and we knew we were in trouble.

On the morning of December 7th, Harry Chandler would have seen behind us here Pearl Harbor under attack.

The Japanese planes were coming in from all angles, attacking not only the Naval Air Station, but Battleship Row, the Pacific Fleet.

Next to them is Hickam Field that's now under attack as well.

The island is erupting.

The first wave of Japanese planes struck first at the Kaneohe Naval Air Station, east of Pearl Harbor.

27 of the 33 available Catalina flying boats were destroyed.

By destroying these reconnaissance planes first, the Japanese prevented any search for their aircraft carriers north of Oahu.

Some sailors were on the bow of the ship, kind of yelling and hollering and pointed toward Ford Island.

I went to have a look and I thought, well, I'd seen the bombs dropped on Ford Island, and I thought I'd seen the water tower go over.

And about that time when the planes made a swoop like it was going to gain some altitude, the Japanese insignia on the wings, and I -- "Uh-oh, what's going on here?"

And I started for my battle station.

General quarters sounded, and this is no drill.

Just minutes later at Navy housing near Pearl Harbor, six-year-old Barbara Kotinek was awakened from her sleep.

We got up and put on our robes and slippers and just looked out the windows and, um... then we went outside to see some of the neighbors were gathering, and one of the neighbors had a shortwave radio and said the Japanese were bombing us and attacking us, and everyone kind of laughed and thought that they didn't believe it.

It was tough to believe.

I, of course, did not understand.

At six years old, I did not understand what war was, and I kept asking, "What's war?"

More than 300 airplanes from six Japanese aircraft carriers situated 200 miles north of Oahu had descended on the island in the initial wave of attack.

We told everybody to take cover because the first thing they did is they run out of their barracks to -- to look at what was going on.

And I started yelling at them, "Take cover, take cover!"

Because I was afraid that some planes would strafe us.

And then we got in trucks and we headed for the harbor.

We bring you a special bulletin -- Washington, The War Department, gave the White House a preliminary estimate of 104 dead and more than 300 wounded tonight in the Army forces alone as a result Japan's bombing of the island of Oahu.

Some early news reports underestimated the scope of the attack.

It was much worse.

There was a good -- good amount of corpsmen.

They took us down to the harbor, and then we started getting in boats.

Jim Downing was stationed on the battleship West Virginia.

Downing was away from the battleship that Sunday morning when he overheard a radio news bulletin.

And then they gave orders for all military people to return to their posts as quick as possible.

[ Artillery firing ] We couldn't fire toward Ford Island on account of our superstructure, so we were firing at the high-altitude bombers, and we could see our bursts that were short.

We were being dive bombed and strafed by planes going -- flying right up by my battle station there, and you could see the pilots and everything.

And we had 50 rounds of ammunition behind every anti-aircraft gun and on the boat deck.

And, uh, they had to break some of the locks to get some of the ammo to the guns, and... they ran out of ammo, and our gunnery officer in the sky control platform, he went to get some more, and we never did see him again.

More than two dozen Japanese planes were eventually shot down by American anti-aircraft fire.

One Japanese plane crashed into the naval hospital at Hospital Point, narrowly missing the now-overcrowded surgical and ward rooms.

Above Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a Japanese high-altitude bomber released a 1,700-pound armor-piercing bomb.

The bomb's armor piercing component penetrated Arizona's steel deck.

It descended through six lower levels, reaching the battleship's forward ammunition magazine loaded with one million pounds of explosives.

There...it detonated.

[ Explosion ] That's what went up.

The battleship came out of the water about 30 feet.

I knew I could look under the bow of the ship, it was up that high.

And it settled straight back down in the water.

It blowed 110 foot of the ship clear off and the number one turret blew up into the air and blew -- settled right back down, and it's still there today.

It was all aflame from the mainmast forward.

The massive explosion killed over 900 Arizona sailors and Marines instantly.

1,177 sailors and Marines from the battleship would be dead by the end of the day.

Only 335 of Arizona's crew survived.

Sailors and Marines had been blown overboard into the waters of Pearl Harbor, now on fire from burning oil.

Lou Conter and other Arizona survivors ran to help their shipmates.

Many were wounded or severely burned.

Put -- Laid the guys down.

We were on the ship about 30 minutes.

The water was up about two or three feet on the quarter deck underneath, and we had to get the guys off from the boat, and it was burning forward.

Everything was... And everything in the water was burning forward.

Boy, when that Arizona blew up, that will never, ever, ever leave my mind.

It was an unexpected attack, so therefore it wasn't... where you've been training to do the -- to go there, do these things.

Everything was so confused.

We got busy... pulling people out of the water.

It just -- You hunkered down.

You moved here.

You moved there.

You moved around someplace else just to keep from the flames from getting to you.

And there wasn't nothing you could do about it.

We had five men, I think, up in the fire control, which is above the bridge, and the vessels threw a line across.

And we proceeded to go hand over hand across that line to the vessel.

When the three of them got across, the line burned in two, and they fell into the water, and that's why Don Stratton got burned over about 75% of his body.

We immediately -- After 30 minutes in there after it blew up, Commander Fuqua said, "Abandon ship."

We took the guys we could and got them in the motor launches, took them to the hospital ship, and we picked up people out of the water and parts and got them over there to the docks and to the hospital ship.

As the blazing USS Arizona continued to sink in Pearl Harbor, many of the sailors and Marines remained trapped below deck.

Top side on the battleship, exploding bombs nearby caused additional flash burns.

Following the initial wave of attacks, hundreds of sailors and Marines were recovered from the waters of Pearl Harbor and taken to the nearby hospital ship, the USS Solace, for treatment.

But among the docks, they were literally lifting stretchers and placing people that are badly wounded and getting them to medical aid.

The initial group of wounded coming from Battleship Row that were jumping off the ships and swimming to Ford Island were now like a long, straggling parade of wounded men making their way to dispensary.

The dispensary was there to handle, you know, small wounds that might occur and to -- to mitigate that.

In the center of this courtyard, a Japanese bomb that was falling to hit the battleship California went long and landed in the center of this courtyard and blew a big hole, and all the people that were along the walls were untouched.

Nobody died.

From the dispensary, they moved them to the dock area.

Really a preoccupation with getting people out and then getting them to aid.

The other thing that really got in the way of all of this was the fires from the Arizona.

The oil coming from there drifted down with the tide.

You can only imagine all of these men in variety of conditions, with oil all over them, with wounds, straggling down to get some kind of assistance and help, and, in some cases, dying.

Some 900 wounded also arrived at the Navy Hospital at Hospital Point.

The small facility was soon overwhelmed.

The naval base was now receiving those casualties faster than they could give them aid.

Men are dying right in the courtyards of the dispensary and at the Naval Hospital.

The only thing we thought about was, "Get these guys take, care of them."

It was chaos.

And then your training began to set in, and you were able to do what you were supposed to do.

Well, corpsmen, had, you know, necessary skills to aid someone that had been injured or had an accident, but what they were seeing is dismemberment of people.

They were seeing wounds that they had never seen in their careers.

And now they were trying to get to these people and aid them as best as possible, give them comfort.

The stress on the naval station, especially medically, was probably every bit as stressful as the battleship sailors were trying to fight back the Japanese planes.

As explosions and fires raged around Pearl Harbor, Jim Downing made his way past the capsized battleship USS Oklahoma and back to the damaged USS West Virginia.

So when I got to my ship, it was already on the bottom, leaning over about a six-degree angle.

So I had a fire hose in one hand trying to put the fire out, and with my other arm, I was checking the name tags of the people I saw lying around to see whether they were dead or alive, because we had the fire proof name tags so we could identify each one of them.

My thought was that their parents will never know what happened to them.

So I did that with a view of memorizing the names and then writing the parents of the ones that were killed.

Some 540 sailors combined were killed on the USS West Virginia, Oklahoma, and nearby Tennessee.

Navy Corpsman Harry Chandler provided critical medical aid to hundreds of survivors that morning.

Harry's first task was to assess which sailors and Marines had the most serious injuries.

He also had to determine who could not be saved.

We started pulling them out, bringing them to the hospital at Hospital Point, and then we started trucking them up to Mobile Hospital #2.

Chandler's Mobile Hospital in Aiea Heights had not yet been fully assembled.

That didn't matter.

Corpsmen took the wounded to their crew quarters at the mobile hospital and busted open containers to access additional medical supplies.

Well, if they were wounded or had another type of injury, that's where we put them in a vehicle to get them up to Aiea Heights.

For the Navy corpsmen working desperately to save hundreds of lives, the sound of more incoming planes at 8:54 a.m.

only added to the bloody chaos.

The Japanese attack wasn't over.

The second wave of Japanese planes struck the clustered aircraft at Hickam Field.

One bomb dropped on the mess hall at the air base, killing over 100 and wounding 274.

The killing was far from over at Pearl Harbor.

We didn't go out into the harbor while they were still coming in and hitting the battleships.

They were strafing Ford Island.

We were afraid, and we weren't afraid.

And then we got busy pulling people out of the harbor.

President Roosevelt and the White House first learned of the Japanese attack just before 2:00 p.m.

Eastern Time in Washington, D.C.

The White House is now giving out a statement.

The attack apparently was made on all naval and on naval and military activities on the principal island of Oahu.

A Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, naturally, would mean war.

The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The news shocked the American public.

But it was over in 45 minutes.

Not over, but it was over for us.

We were in the motor launches and out in the bay and everything else then.

It happened, and everybody knew exactly what was going on as soon as that first plane came over and dropped the first torpedoes.

We never did take a torpedo.

One came under the Vestal and over, and some hit the West Virginia forward of us and some bombs hit, and then Nevada started out the channel.

Every plane tried to hit her.

They wanted to sink that battleship in the channel there.

And that's when the chief quartermaster swung the ship and said, "Ground her."

And he pulled her in there, and they were going to court martial him.

And then after a year or two, they decided to go ahead and give him a Navy Cross or something, because that's what he deserved.

Navy corpsmen at the medical aid stations around Pearl Harbor, including Harry Chandler's unit, were utilizing a new innovation in medicine at the time called blood plasma.

Unlike whole blood, this plasma did not require blood type matching.

It could be dried, frozen, and reconstituted.

Thousands of units of plasma were administered to burn victims at Pearl Harbor to prevent shock and save lives.

Upwards of 70% of the sailors and Marines caught up in the Pearl Harbor attack had suffered burns.

Those men wearing long pants and shirts were somewhat protected from severe burns compared to those wearing skivvy shorts or t-shirts, who suffered greatly.

Good afternoon, everybody.

Japan has made war upon the United States without declaring it.

As the second and final wave of Japanese planes left Pearl Harbor on that Sunday morning, fears of a forthcoming ground invasion by the Japanese took center stage.

Civilians were being evacuated all around Oahu.

Barbara Kotinek's father had not yet returned from his work at Pearl Harbor.

My mother was very upset because we had only been there three weeks and she didn't know anyone.

She didn't -- We didn't know any place to go.

She hadn't even been into Honolulu yet.

She didn't know what to do.

The next door neighbor, who she kind of knew a little bit, told her, "Come with me, because I have a friend in the Waimea Valley, and we'll go there."

And so we left.

Off the northern coast of Oahu, the Japanese carrier strike force turned and headed for Japan.

Japan's Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who led the attack force, was convinced he had delivered a decisive blow to the United States Pacific Fleet and ordered his airplanes back.

There was no third attack, and no ground invasion had ever been planned.

Nippon now commands the vast waters of the Pacific.

Her mighty warship plow the waves majestically.

The greatest victory in Hawaii facilitates Nippon to carry out her operations over the wide area of the Philippines, Malaya, and Dutch East Indies.

The retreat of America and Britain from East Asia is imminent.

A new chapter in history of Asia begins.

Japanese propaganda following Pearl Harbor celebrated what Japan termed "a stunning victory."

Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of the December 7th attack, wasn't as confident.

That's because Japanese Vice Admiral Nagumo had failed to launch a third wave targeting critical infrastructure -- fuel and equipment around Pearl Harbor.

[ Speaking in Japanese ] He was feeling that it was a failure.

The reason is that the supply bases for the U.S., namely Honolulu, or the military base as a whole, they were not destroyed.

They succeeded in destroying battleships, but they couldn't destroy any aircraft carriers nor oil tankers.

Yamamoto must not have been able to think of that as anything but a failure.

The secondary attacks weren't carried out properly.

That was his mistake.

And they knew that if they were to win this war, they needed to take out the Pacific Fleet at the outset and overwhelm them in such a manner that they would sue for peace.

They didn't understand the American character.

There couldn't be anything more unlikely than the revenge of Pearl Harbor.

In the days following the Pearl Harbor attack, Harry Chandler and his fellow corpsmen, along with medical personnel, continued to treat the wounded and bury the dead.

They also dodged the fires that continued to burn in the harbor while searching for any missing sailors and Marines.

Meanwhile, Barbara Kotinek's father had returned from the horrors of Pearl Harbor.

Sometime within that week, he took me down to the harbor and drove me all through the shipyard, showing me the devastation, and there were patrol boats out in the water.

I asked him -- They were small little boats, and I asked him what they were doing, and they had -- the guys in the boats had long poles, and he said they were pulling bodies out of the water.

And he said to me, "Don't ever, ever forget this."

He talked a lot about them hearing... people, the men in the ships that were trapped and tapping.

They were tapping S.O.S.

and everything to them.

And he... They couldn't get 'em out.

They tried everything they could to get 'em out, but they couldn't get them out.

When we left the ship, we kept busy... 12, 14 hours a day, 15, 16 hours a day for the next three months.

And it was the best thing for you.

You didn't get a chance to think too much about yourself or what happened.

You were taking care of other people and helping.

And the ones we took to the hospital, a lot of us tried to get over there to see them.

Like Lightfoot.

He was hurt bad, and he was a good friend of mine.

And I went over on December 23rd.

Just had time for about five minutes was all, but the five minutes was great for him to shake hands.

He died two days later.

Well, we were working all night long and everything and we didn't have time, and it was the best thing for us because it got everything out.

And then we had to fight the war for four years too.

The old Aiea Point Naval Hospital looks much like it did in 1941.

Today, the hospital buildings house a Marine Corps base called Camp Smith.

The view of Pearl Harbor is still a sight to see -- the same viewpoint Harry Chandler had of Battleship Row on the morning of December 7, 1941.

Harry returned to Pearl Harbor for the final time in 2023, marking the 82nd anniversary of that day of infamy.

When I got back to Pearl... I could look out there, I could see it all happening.

It was so vivid in my memory.

But look at the Arizona.

It's a monument now.

I was so surprised to see how they had built a monument around it.

We couldn't see the harbor as clear as I did that day, because there's all houses and trees and things, but we got into a spot where I could look down and -- and I could see it as clear as day.

I could see it all over again -- that Arizona going up, the Oklahoma capsizing... the best West Virginia going down.

Then I was angry at our government for permitting the Japanese.

We knew what they were doing, what they were up to, but nobody took action.

We had some warnings.

And then I was proud.

Here were these hundreds of military people without leadership that instinctively did the right thing.

So I was just proud of the response of all our people, well trained, highly motivated.

And they performed magnificently in that situation.

That I saw what happened and very proud that I was serving the country and sympathizing with all the men that were killed and all the men that were wounded, but I felt real proud and sad that all this happened.

My message coming out of Pearl Harbor was weakness invites aggression.

Keep America strong.

Well, I want to see America so strong that no aggressive person or government will even think about attacking us, knowing our strength.

[ Speaking in Japanese ] In April 1943, Allied codebreakers intercepted a radio message that Japanese Navy Admiral Yamamoto, the mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack, would be flying to a remote jungle base in the South Pacific.

The plane Yamamoto was on was intercepted and shot down by Allied P-38 fighters over the jungles of Bougainville in the South Pacific.

[ Whirring, explosion ] Yamamoto was killed in the crash.

Gentaro Yamamoto, the admiral's grandson, visited Pearl Harbor himself long after the end of World War Two.

[ Speaking in Japanese ] So I felt sincerely sorry that such a beautiful island had to be turned into a battlefield.

That was the first thing I felt strongly upon visiting Hawaii.

But as a Japanese person, I believe that every one of us has to think about what the war was truly about.

We have to become open to seeing what we'd rather not see and hearing what we'd rather not hear.

If you don't know anything about what happened in the past, I don't think that you can truly understand each other.

[ Speaking in Japanese ] The number of dead and wounded during the attack on Oahu and Pearl Harbor was horrific.

Over 2,400 were killed and 1,178 wounded.

Some 60 civilians were also killed by flying bullets and shell fragments.

More than 1,000 wounded were treated in the first 48 hours after the attack around Pearl Harbor.

A frantic network of Navy doctors, corpsmen, nurses and civilian medical personnel had worked tirelessly.

At Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the name America will always remember, the Navy honors fighting heroes of war in the Pacific.

Medals for gallantry in action.

Here, two brothers proud of their decorations.

For Navy corpsmen at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, numerous citations, commendations, and medals were awarded for their life-saving actions.

The same applied to the doctors, nurses, and orderlies who were present on that once-quiet Sunday morning in paradise.

Thousands of volunteers, including police, firefighters, Red Cross workers and even Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, had also stepped forward to help.

The Navy Medical Corps, made up of men and women like corpsman Harry Chandler, certainly earned recognition on that infamous Sunday morning in Hawaii -- a day for those who witnessed it that would often return in their thoughts and nightmares.

In 1939, just months before graduating, he decided to leave in order to get a head start on entering the United States Navy and acquiring that beloved sailor suit.

Harry Chandler, a survivor and then a healing savior of the attack on Pearl Harbor, passed away in late 2024.

Harry was 103 years old.

Over a year later, the Navy finally came a-calling, and on July 31, 1940, 5'4", 118 pounds -- it's on his enlistment papers -- was sworn into the Navy.

Graduation from boot camp was followed by attendance and graduation from the Naval Corps School.

He was now prepared to be of service to his country and his shipmates.

Harry had chosen the perfect path -- he loved to care for and help people -- and a corpsman he would remain for the rest of his life.

He made everybody feel special.

Pap left me a voicemail in December... ...a couple weeks before he passed, and it was only five sentences... ...and there were four "I love yous" in five sentences.

I love the United States of America.

I love everybody that's in it.

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