“Row after row of parked P-40s … are ablaze from the incendiary bullets. I feel like they have been awaiting a terrible and known doom.”
“The sky is full of planes, diving and zooming over the hangar line,” wrote Army pilot Lawrence M. Kirsch, describing his view of the shocking attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.Words so full of emotion and terror paint a picture of the attack with a writer’s eye. Kirsch had worked as a reporter for the Pomona Progress-Bulletin and the Brawley News prior to joining the Army Air Corps in 1940.
Earlier, Kirsch, who grew up in Altadena and attended USC, came close to being a casualty of the attack. He and two other pilots had jumped into a car and were headed for their hangar when they saw a Japanese fighter plane diving right at them. “Running down the last fifty yards … is like descending into some noisy black and red pit,” he wrote. “Row after row of parked P-40s, standing like patient blind men, are ablaze from the incendiary bullets. I feel like they have been awaiting a terrible and known doom.”
“They were the planes we had learned to fly, to stunt and to shoot,” he wrote. “We had cussed them, mistreated them – but somehow there was a bond between us. They were defenseless friends, butchered without warning.” Early on, the men hear some of the confusing and mostly wrong information from local radio. “Alarming reports are coming in from the Honolulu radio station: Jap troop ships flying the American flag; a major first engagement southwest of the island; parachutists landing at Barbers Point. We don’t relish the thought of being prisoners for some years to come!”
After landing from his patrol, Kirsch was resting when a mysterious light was reported on the end of the runway. As they feared a Japanese ground attack, everyone grabbed weapons and hid behind sand dunes – “like boys playing cops and robbers” – prepared to meet the enemy. It turned out the object of their concern was merely a crouching military guard – “almost too scared by the ruckus to talk.”
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