and the crackle of our own anti-aircraft batteries sounding all around him, Captain Hayden gave orders to his family to keep inside the house unless it caught fire, and started on the run across the lawn to the hospital.
Waves of enemy bombers, escorted by fighter planes, were swinging in from the southeast to concentrate their attack on the heavy ships in the West, East, and Middle Lochs. It took only a few minutes after the first bomb dropped on the Fleet for the machine guns mounted on the battleships to open fire. Inside another five minutes the anti-aircraft batteries had swung into action. The air was full of the crash of exploding bombs and torpedoes, the roar of ack-ack guns, and the twisted, flaming skeletons of wrecked planes. The harbor was a sea of oil, ablaze in many places, in which terribly charred bodies floated and men made desperate attempts to swim.
Back in the Medical C.O.'s quarters, Billy Hayden flattened his nose against the window and let out an awed, solemn whistle: "Whew! And they call this the Paradise of the Pacific."
On that Sunday morning there were some 500 patients in the Naval Hospital. These were men from the station and sick and injured from the ships of the Fleet then in harbor. The official rating of the institution was 506 patients. Fortunately, the Medical Department was acutely aware of the ultimate significance of the events transpiring in the Pacific. We were keeping a big fleet in the Pacific, and it looked as if we would have to continue to keep it there, and to add to it for some time to come. Pearl Harbor provided the only hospital facilities for this fleet away from the mainland, except for small naval hospitals at Guam, Samoa, and Cavite.
There was no arguing against the fact that we needed enlarged hospital facilities and an abundant supply of drugs and surgical dressings. Although certain powers in authority and the public at large may have objected to appropriations requested for purely military naval expansion, there was always a ready and en-
