telecom@bu-cs.BU.EDU (TELECOM Moderator) (12/08/88)
Plenty of stories of interest to telecommunications people originated that Sunday in December, 1941. My neighbor for several years was an older lady who retired from government civil service in the late 1960's. At the time in question, she was a civilian employee of the Army, stationed at Pearl Harbor as a telephone operator. Her 'exchange' took in several hundred military phones including Hickham Air Force Base. She had that particular Sunday off, and told me she decided to work on her flower garden for an hour or so early that morning before waking her husband up. They were going to drive into Honolulu for lunch with some friends later in the morning. She said the attack began around 7:30 that morning, and she heard it coming and looked up to see the first bomb fall about a mile away. Bear in mind of course bomb technology in the early 1940's was not like today: they fell out of the sky, they exploded, they made *loud* noises and set things on fire. They killed whoever was nearby, but they were a far cry from the nuclear monsters that scare the bejeezus out of us these days. Within a minute or so, the Pearl City Fire Department and the base firefighters could be heard on the way to the scene with their sirens going and she said she thought she would walk over and see what it was all about. She said she had started to walk that way and two more bombs came down, and figuring that something strange was going on, she decided to go wake up her husband and have him come along. When she got back in the house, her phone was ringing. She said it was one of the guys at her office calling asking her if she could come in right away and help out. The telephone exchange had some civilian women who worked the board during the day, but overnight a couple of enlisted men were there. Doris (my neighbor) said '....the poor kid who had been there all night was frantic. Neither of the two women who were supposed to work that day had come in yet, and suddenly he was getting dozens of calls all at once from all over that side of the island asking what in the hell was going on. He did not know any more than I did at that point, and one of the missles had apparently knocked over a pole somewhere and knocked several of the phones out of service. 'I drove over in the car never figuring I would wind up being there for the next 36 hours straight. As soon as I got in, I called a couple of women who worked in the accounting office who I knew would know how to work the boards and and told them to please get there and help out as soon as they could. By the time I got there, we had already received calls from the (Honolulu) Advertiser asking what was up. We had a tie-line from Honolulu at the office of RCA Cable, which fed the telegraph machine and it must have gone open for some reason because one minute we were getting non-stop messages and the next dead silence. It came back on about an hour later, and I almost wish it had stayed dead.' 'The CBS and NBC Radio Networks were on the phone constantly asking questions and there was almost nothing I could tell them. The air raid went on for several hours until sometime that afternoon; I can't tell you when it was that we quit hearing those bombs and guns firing; it was probably around 2 or 3 in the afternoon our time. They told me later one had fallen about two blocks from the telephone exchange; lucky for us we all came out alive, but all of us knew at least one or two of the ones who had died. I know it left our wires and (telephone) poles in a mess all over the area. About seventy percent of the service was knocked out at Hickham. Some fellows from the repair office in Honolulu came out sometime in the afternoon to figure out what to do, and they started uprighting the poles the next morning. I would say we had most of the lines back up by Wednesday, but we could not convince the people stateside why it was they could not get through to their sons and husbands.' 'I don't blame the people really, I'd have been worried sick myself, but some of them were just plain rude to us. We had three or four wire pairs on the San Fransisco cable which bypassed the exchange in Honolulu and were wired through to us. By noon the people at CBS had pretty much gotten off those lines and were on the RCA cable instead so they could 'chat' with the Advertiser people. By this time it was about 6 PM in the states and everyone was worked up to a high intensity by the news they were getting on the radio and every one of them with a family member at Pearl was trying to call at once; and this with all our wires laying melted in the street at that. The San Fransisco operators were so nice to us...they protected us from the most abusive callers. Around 9 PM Sunday evening, the fellow came in who worked nights. I guess despite all the ruckus all day long he had somehow managed to get a couple hours sleep before coming back to work. First thing he did was get on the cable to San Fransisco and put in a call to his parents. All I remember was hearing him say, 'mom, don't cry, I'm okay and I'm calling from work. It will be a crazy night...ah don't worry mom..' 'I finally went home Monday afternoon around 3 or so, and slept until Tuesday morning. When I went in Tuesday it was obvious we were in a whole new era. I stayed at Pearl until 1950, five years after the war ended, and we decided to move to Chicago to be with our son when my husband retired.' (As told to the moderator by Doris Solomon.)