BUT IT WAS THE JAPANESE ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOUR!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 136, 30 January 1942, Page 6

BUT IT WAS THE JAPANESE ATTACK

ON PEARL HARBOUR!

&4§ OOK mummy, they’re shooting ducks," was the comment of a little American innocent when he saw Pacific warfare for the first time. He was looking through a porthole on a Dutch ship steaming towards Pearl Harbour after the Japanese attack had been going for one hour, and was one of the first to notice a pall of smoke, and explosions in the air, which passengers assumed to be peace-time exercises. THE story was told to The Listener ‘" by two visiting musicians — Thomas Matthews, a leading English violinist, and Eileen Ralph, Australian born pianist, his wife. As they described their arrival at Honolulu there was one word that came back again and again: Fantastic. : Fantastic it must have been. The little boy in the next cabin drew their attention to the "duck shooting" shortly before 8 a.m. They went on deck and found passengers all along the rail. The scene was peaceful-the island of Oahu ahead, the Pan American clipper overhead, arriving as usual on the tick of eight. They began to think of Waikiki Beach, sunny days, surfing. As the ship drew nearer to the island they saw puffs of smoke in the air, which Londoners on board the ship recognised as anti-aircraft fire. Then spouts of water in the sea. Bombs! Battleships outside the harbour, and shore batteries firing; aeroplanes very high above: A pall of smoke indicated burning oil dumps. Manoeuvres, everyone thought -very realistic ones; until a bomb fell aft of the vessel, quite near. " Thank goodness it isn’t the real thing, @nyway," passengers said, reminding

each other that the "talks" were still in progress between Japan and the United States. "Then the shipping agent came on board and blandly informed us that a state of war existed," Mr. Matthews said. "Tt was fantastic. The damagé had been done by then, and by about 9.30, when we were ashore, the last Japanese aeroplane had gone. We left the chip in parties of twenty, and we had to keep together and report to the ship at intervals to find out what we were to do. We went ashore for a few days, stayed at a hotel on Waikiki Beach, bathed, and wandered about." No Light, Food or Drink Mrs. Matthews remembered all the amusing side of their adventure. " At sunset it was fantastic. They had no blackout precautions so they just switched off the power at the main," she said, " You couldn’t get a bite; there were no drinks. People wandered about the place in blackness, and you weren’t allowed to use torches unless you had blue paper over them! "Then there was the team-the footballers. You see, there are two huge luxury hotels on Waikiki and we were in one of them. So were about two dozen enormous footballers." "Some crack American college team," Mr. Matthews put in. " They’d been touring South America and were having a holiday in Hawaii." " Anyway," Mrs. Matthews took ,up her tale again, "there were these men, wearing only trunks and no tops on, at the dining table. Twenty-five huge brown bodies! When we left I think they had offered themselves as Home Guards so they are probably wearing uniforms now.

"But it was a sad sight. People in playsuits everywhere, glamorous evening gowns, and barbed wire along Waikiki Beach. There was a space left, so we had one bathe, but there it was, the whole business simply knocked on the head." Scoop! An American foreign correspondent was another amusing memory. "This man was on the boat with us on his way to the Far East, and he found war quicker than he expected," said Mr. Matthews. "Typical American, the image of James Stewart, the film star. He didn’t sail again with us; they told him to stay there." "Yes, he was our Jonah, as a matter of fact,’ Mrs. Matthews explained. "Exactly the same thing happened to him in 1939. He was on his way to the Continent to do a job and he got caught in England by the outbreak of war." i