located alongside the Army Air Base at Hickam Field and across the channel from the Naval Air Station on Ford Island. We had planes flying around most of the time. As we were doing some construction work in the rear of the hospital, dynamite blasts were not unusual. The explosion of three hundred to five hundred pounds of dynamite sounds about the same as the explosion of an air bomb. Then I heard more planes and more explosions. Big ones. They shook the house. Doggone it, that wasn't quite normal. Especially on a Sunday. I jumped out of the shower, threw on some clothes, and started for the window of my room. Just then my thirteen-year-old son, Billy, dashed in.
"'They're Jap planes!' he yelled.
"'Japs?'
"'Sure. Take a look at them.'
"We looked out the window just as three planes went by the second floor of my quarters, only about seventy-five feet away. I could see the features of the men in them. They were Japs, all right."
That was how the Navy's Medical Corps got its call to action at Pearl Harbor. Captain Reynolds Hayden (MC), U.S.N., was commanding officer of the Naval Hospital there. How the Navy answered that call that day and has been answering it all during the progress of the war I shall try to tell as frankly and as fully as naval regulations and circumstances permit.
It was 7:55 a.m. when the first of those black vultures with the crimson ball on their wings swooped down on the Army Air Base, Hickam Field, and on the Naval Air Station on Ford Island, where our big, long-range planes were. In that early hour of the morning a number of ambulant patients were strolling around the hospital grounds, which were one of the beauty spots of Oahu. The first Jap planes zoomed low over their heads, but the fliers were too intent on reaching military objectives, before our anti-aircraft guns could get at them, to bother with these groups.
With the sound of the planes, the explosions of the first bombs,
