(engine whirring)
- The first wave split and it went around the right side
of Hawaii, and attacked from the bottom.
Meanwhile, they hit the airfields on their way in.
- And then, after knocking out several hundred US aircraft,
they then move on to the second primary target,
which are these US battleships.
- Then, the second announcement came over the speaker.
- He says, fellows, this is a air attack,
and this is no (beep) fellows.
And boy, that brought us to our attention.
It means you're not, I'm not fooling around,
and about that time, the torpedoes started hitting us.
(explosion)
- [James] And it just felt like
the ship was jumping out of the water.
- And it would just go bang, bang, bang, you know.
Well, first thing I did is go down below decks.
- [Stuart] We were in this turret down in the pit
when the first torpedo hit.
- [James] Now, we started to go to a General Quarters,
when the Japanese planes flew
right down the port side of the ship, and I could see
the pilot and the radioman laughing like everything.
- Mr. Yoshino was an aircraft commander,
and as he entered the target zone,
it dropped to 30 feet off the water.
He shouted for his pilot to rudder left,
and then, he went after the Oklahoma.
He said he could see the faces of the sailors
looking at him, waving and running,
and he had his hand on the lever to release the torpedo.
As they got close, closer, he screamed,
(speaking Japanese), and pulled the handle.
That dropped the torpedo.
(explosion)
- We all ran to our battle stations.
Mine was in number four turret handling room
which is about three decks down.
- You're running and you're thinking about
getting to your battle station,
then you just lose track of the hits.
- I had to run up this passageway, then go down this ladder,
then another hatch that the ladder went straight down.
Probably took me five or six seconds to get down there.
I moved pretty fast in them days.
- I went down on the third deck,
and that hatch is 13 1/2 inches thick,
and they started closing that hatch.
I said to myself, I said, well I've been trained
to be a loader on an anti-aircraft gun.
Case somebody gets hit or hurt, I could replace him,
and I got out of there.
- As aerial torpedoes keep slamming into the ship,
men are frantically attempting to escape from below decks.
At the same time, the ship is being overwhelmed
by water rushing in from the damage from the torpedoes,
and the first instinct when the ship comes under attack
is to establish watertight integrity by closing hatches,
so that flooding doesn't extend to other parts of the ship.
- Every time I went through a hatch,
somebody else had dogged it down,
so I'm trying to undog one, and the other guy
on the other side is beating it down.
- When I got down in the handling room,
somebody had spilt some oil on the deck down there.
It was a steel deck, all shined up,
and there was so many people down there,
and they're all dabbering.
Most of that was panic sounds,
especially when they started slipping on that deck
and couldn't get up.
- When Jesse got to the Radio Room,
his men were all unconscious,
and he revived one man and took him up to safety,
and then, went down, revived another man and went up,
and went down a third time, brought another man up.
- [James] Then, all of a sudden,
we got hit by three torpedoes.
Boom, boom, boom, all heck go boom.
- [Stuart] I saw the planes diving everywhere,
and shoot them goes flying on over,
and everything on the starboard side started breaking loose.
Then, an armor-piercing shell
came right through the top of our turret.
- Well, there was no easy decision on Oklahoma.
No one could just make the easy, quick decision
that gets them through the day without injury.
Everyone had to make some
direct confrontation with life and death.