THE BOSTON EVENING POST
Japanese Attack Pearl Harbor! 2,403 Americans Dead in Attack!
"I Saw the Terror"
Eyewitness Mary Wades Has the Story of the Events that Unfolded at Pearl Harbor
December 7, 1941. It was a Sunday, my day off. I decided to sleep in because I didn't have to fill my usual position at the medical ward at 8a.m. I was in and out of my sleep when I was awoken by a loud boom. Although not unusual a most military bases, the sounds of heavy gunfire and explosions was a rather weird phenomena at Ford Island. Then, the emergency sirens went off. Men were bustling around in confusion, yelling words that I could not fully understand in my drowsiness. I snapped out of it though as soon as Martha, one of my fellow nurses, rushed into my room.
"We're being attacked. Japanese planes, we think. Come on! Quickly! We have wounded!"
I got dressed and headed out of the nurses ward into the main section of the Naval Hospital. By 8:30 a.m.,
wounded were coming in by the dozens on stretchers. At first, it was just military servicemen wounded on site at Ford Island.
Then, American Navy personnel came in, their white uniforms soaked with blood and singed after the explosions outside.
Men missing limbs and suffering from severe burns and head trauma came in hanging on to life by merely a thread. And to think,
there were still more men on the ships. They were sitting ducks! I looked out at the ocean as I helped carry a man with severe
head trauma into the hospital building, explosions going on all around me. Planes were literally falling out of the sky and crashing
into our ships! I didn't know what to think. Our navy was slowly diminishing in the thick black smoke and flames.
I couldn't look anymore. I was too shaken up after seeing our navy crumble under the continuous hits from kamikaze planes. I turned away from the scene all around me and focused only on the task ahead as I entered the hospital, now completely crowded with patients. Screams of agony filled the humid, dry air as I rushed to assist anywhere I could. The hospital was in chaos! This was the first real action we saw at Pearl Harbor, and although anticipated, now that the time had finally arrived to help our country, we were buckling under the pressure. We all knew that we had to do though, and we knew that we had to get it done fast.
The terror stopped almost as quickly as it had started though. By close to 10 a.m., the planes were gone, leaving a trail of destruction and loss under their wings. I spent the next 24 hours at the hospital, working all through the night to help these men, barely clinging on to life. The events that followed during the next couple days are now all a blur in my mind. I moved from patient to patient. When someone was gone, I covered their body with white linen and moved on to the next patient. I was like a well-greased machine, completing each task as quickly as I could and then moving on to the next one, completely unmoved by the horror that I saw. There was no time, there were to many injured to dwell on those lost: at least for the moment. I will never forget the look on some of the men that I watched die in my hands. I saw hundreds of patients during the whole ordeal, but the faces of just a few men will be forever branded in my memory. Young men, no older than 25. They joined to U.S. Navy looking for adventure and to serve their country as men. They weren't meant to die, and I could see in their eyes that they were still just boys, who wanted to go home.
