By Clyde Noel
Town Crier Correspondent
The Los Altos History Museum dedicated its Nov. 18 “Music & Memories” program to the 60th anniversary of the Dec. 7 attack on Pearl Harbor. The program offered little-known details from veterans and historians surrounding the “date that will live in infamy.”
Dressed in his U.S. Army uniform and sporting major’s bars, Paul Foerster provided military facts to an interested audience while Randall Hull spoke about the home front.
Scattered around the hall was World War II memorabilia supplied by Los Altos residents. Newspaper clippings and family photos were evident on numerous table settings.
The highlight of the battlefield segment was Bill Henderson’s eyewitness account of the Japanese attack on his ship, the USS Helena, on Dec. 7, 1941. By chance, the Helena was in the berth normally assigned to the battleship Pennsylvania and so became a prime target for Japanese planes.
“Within three minutes of the time the first bomb of the attack fell on Ford Island, a lone torpedo plane launched a torpedo that passed under the ship Oglala and hit Helena on the starboard side almost amidships. One engine room and one boiler room were flooded,” Henderson recalled. “I can remember it as if it happened yesterday.”
The Helena was repaired at Mare Island and returned to the Pacific theater. The ship headed up the slot from Guadalcanal to the northern Solomon Islands to battle a Japanese naval force of 10 destroyers.
“My battle station was in the after diesel engine room, where my job was to generate electricity used for the guns. When going into battle, all ship hatches are closed and every compartment is watertight,” Henderson said.
“The battle opened at 0200 hours on the morning of July 6, 1943. We were a very visible and tempting target for the Japanese gunners. Within minutes, Japanese destroyers fired 16 long-range torpedoes and three slammed into the hull of the Helena.
“The force of a torpedo explosion is so great it seems to pick up the ship and shake it much like the action in riding a bucking stallion,” Henderson said. “Pipes break, machinery is knocked off foundations, electrical circuits trip, ammunition hoists fail and guns fall silent. Men unlucky enough to be in the spaces hit by the torpedo die a quick death from the force of the explosion or the flooding of their compartment. Others are killed by flying shrapnel, blown overboard or severely burned by the flash.
“We had difficulty opening the escape hatch and thought we were doomed, but we kept knocking on the hatch. Men on the other side of the hatch heard the banging and took time from their escape to turn the wheel open. When I got to the main deck, it was awash and there was no time to lose. I saluted the colors still flying from the mast and stepped into the shark-infested waters of Kula Gulf.”
On the home front, Los Altos had 3,500 citizens in 1941. By the end of the war, some 400 residents were drafted. Twenty-eight servicemen were killed during World War II. At last month’s event a bugler played taps for the Los Altos residents who lost their lives.
Many Los Altos Japanese nursery workers and truck farm workers were relocated but returned to Los Altos after the war was over.
Carole Pavlina remembered her father. “He was an air raid warden and went to neighbors and told them to put blinds on their windows. There was a tower at Lydia’s on First Street, where volunteer plane spotters observed the skyways.”
“Young men went off to war and the daughters rode the tractors and sprayed the trees during the war,” Hull said. “A lot of the older women worked at the Hendry Iron Works while schoolchildren worked in their victory gardens.”
Al Galedrige, who lived in Hawaii, sat on Diamond Head on Dec. 7 and watched the entire bombing of Pearl Harbor. “I saw the first Japanese plane shot down,” he said.
The program closed with everyone singing “America,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “God Bless America.”
