It was 7:53 a.m. on a cloudless Sunday when the 1st Air Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy began its assault on Pearl Harbor. Cecilia Willenbrink, then 12, was singing in the choir at Blessed Sacrament Church in Pauoa, Honolulu, Hawaii.
CRISSY PASCUAL / Union-Tribune
Cecilia Willenbrink (left) and Flora Thompson looked at photos from 1941 in Thompson's Rancho Bernardo home. The two women were 12 years old and living in Hawaii when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor 65 years ago.
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CRISSY PASCUAL / Union-Tribune
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“We all heard this whistling go, peeeeeew, boom,” said the Poway resident, arching her arm to convey the launching of a torpedo or missile. “The organist told us, 'Turn around,' so we turned around and kept on singing.”
Willenbrink didn't realize what she had heard until the service was finished and she and her sisters stepped outside.
“There were all these people lined up in their front yards yelling to us over their fences – 'We're at war! We're at War!'” she recalled. “We said, 'No way,' and then we looked up and saw all the dogfighting in the sky.”
Flora Thompson was playing badminton with her father and sister at the family's beach home in Lanikai, a suburb of Honolulu located between Kaneohe Air Station and Bellows Field, both bombed that day. As Thompson swung at the birdie, a group of planes came rushing by at what seemed like an oddly low altitude.
“It was about where those trees are,” said Thompson, pointing out the window of her Rancho Bernardo condominium. “You could almost touch them. It was that close.”
At first, Thompson's sister thought they were German planes. Though she was only in sixth grade, Thompson knew better.
“You could see the rising sun (emblem) on them,” she said. “You could see the pilots.”
This Thursday, Pearl Harbor Day, marks the 65th anniversary of the defining event, which led the United States into World War II – a day Thompson and Willenbrink remember as if it were yesterday.
In recent years, Thompson and Willenbrink have been walking down a catwalk in fashion shows to raise money for military families. Ironically, the women had never taken the stroll down memory lane that would have led them back to Oahu, where both women were born in 1929. A fellow member of the Welcome Club of North County, which hosts the fashion shows, made the connection for them a year and a half ago.
CRISSY PASCUAL / Union-Tribune
Cecilia Willenbrink (left) of Poway and Flora Thompson of Rancho Bernardo met by chance two years ago. Both women were young girls and living in Hawaii when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941.
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“We were at a cocktail party sitting right next to each other, and one of my friends said, 'You know, Flora, Cecilia's from Hawaii,'” Thompson said. The women discovered they had attended schools less than a mile from each other – Willenbrink, St. Frances Convent, and Thompson, a military school at Schofield Barracks.
At the family beach house, Thompson and her family heard the explosion upon explosion as the Japanese hammered Navy vessels and military bases. The attack destroyed eight American battleships and 188 aircraft. In the end, 2,403 American servicemen and 68 civilians had died.
That night, Thompson and her family returned to their home on a sugar plantation overlooking Pearl Harbor, where Thompson's father managed a general store. U.S. Army tanks were parked in their yard. Some seven miles in the distance, the gaping wound that was Pearl Harbor came into view. Oil poured like blood from U.S. warships, creating an eerie canvas punctuated by flotsam, smoke and fire. The bodies of young servicemen bobbed on the slick, black surface, among them crew members of the USS Arizona, aboard which 1,102 men lost their lives when it exploded and sank.
“Those men floated in oil for days,” Thompson said. “Some of them were so badly burned that they couldn't rescue them. They just rescued the bodies later.”
In Thompson's condo, the women scanned several photos taken that day. In one, smoke and flames engulf the partially submerged wreckage of the USS Arizona, today a national memorial. Another photo shows a group of servicemen and women gathered around a plane at Hickam Field air base, plumes of smoke rising in the background.
“We lost so many planes at Hickam,” Thompson said. “They never got off the ground.”
The Japanese had planned their attack well, Thompson said. The Navy fleet had just returned to port, and many men had been out late celebrating the night before. Though the U.S. military had intelligence suggesting an impending Japanese attack, ammunition was locked down and aircraft parked wing to wing against sabotage.
That night, residents were advised to put black tar paper over their windows. “We thought the Japanese were going to come back that night and take over the island,” Thompson said. “We were not prepared.”
As part of the war effort, Thompson and other children visited the wounded, many of whom were barely adults themselves.
“We'd cover cigar boxes and then add special little things like playing cards, toiletries and candies,” Thompson said. “We'd help them write letters to their parents, because some of them couldn't. Their arms were blown off or some of them had head injuries.”
Though Thompson and Willenbrink said they don't dwell on the past, the events of that day have shaped who they have become. Each holiday food basket or dollar raised for the family of a soldier serving overseas is especially meaningful.
“My first husband was in the Navy, and I know what the wives are going through,” Willenbrink said. “We should not take for granted that we're safe. We should always be prepared in case something like that did happen again.”
Pat Sherman covers North County community news for Today's Local News and the Union-Tribune.
