John Cruce: We had no gunnery officer, no firing pins, no powder, no first-class petty officer to install the firing pins—if we could ever find them—and no orders to fire!

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Gaddis: The officer of the deck up on the bridge, Ensign Radell, hadn’t been in the Navy more than a year and was shaking like a leaf because he was now the acting captain of a U.S. Navy ship at war. But we also had a thirty-year chief petty officer up there, and he said: “Relax, son. We’ll make it out of here just fine!” So they worked things out together and soon put out orders to set material condition “Affirm” and light off all the boilers.

McIntyre: When I got to my GQ station in number one fireroom, the only person there was Lead Fireman Schnabel. I asked, “What are we supposed to do now?” “Get the hell out of here as fast as possible!” Schnabel answered.

“Get out of this fireroom, or get out of Pearl Harbor?” I responded. “Let’s light her off, and get her out of Pearl Harbor!” he said. Luckily, we had the ready duty Saturday, and our boilers were still warm. Otherwise, we were cold iron.

But then I said, “We can’t fire the boilers because they’re full of water!” He told me, “You take care of the fire, and I’ll take care of the water.” And with that he opened the drain valves and started to drain the warm water straight into the bilges. Usually we lowered the water levels gradually by pumping the water overboard, but that morning time didn’t allow for that.

Reichert: I looked up and saw a guy climbing way up to the top of the stacks. I watched him for a moment and realized he was trying to cut loose the stack covers. Whenever the burners weren’t lit, the stacks would be covered to keep the rain out. But when the stacks were covered, there was no way to light off the burners because they couldn’t get enough air. The bosun mates that had covered the stacks were all ashore when the Japanese attacked. So someone had to climb up there and cut the stack covers free, and all he had was a small pocket knife!

Gaddis: Up on the bridge, things became pretty intense when we found ourselves looking straight down the muzzle of one of Farragut’s five-inch guns. Now the Farragut was tied up directly to our port side, and they were shooting wildly at anything that moved. Ensign Radell ran out on the flying bridge yelling, “Point that damn thing the other way!”

“Dutch” Smith: I was the pointer on the forward five-inch gun. But there was no place to point because Farragut was tied up to port, Monaghan was tied up to starboard and the Japanese torpedo bombers were flying real low.

Gaddis: We had this black mess attendant aboard named Dixon who was very popular with the crew. He came running up to the bridge and said, “Our five-inch guns can’t fire because they don’t have firing pins!” We then realized that all the firing pins were in the gunners mate’s locker, and the gunners mate was ashore somewhere. While the rest of us froze with the impossibility of the situation, Dixon ran down to the locker, broke in, grabbed up all the firing pins, and handed them out to the gun crews.

Cruce: I asked for permission from the bridge to open fire, but no one answered. Since there was nobody up there to say “No,” we went right ahead and blasted away at the next Jap plane to fly by. Our ammo was really bad, and our shots kept going off way behind the targets. I kept yelling down to the fuse cutter: “Cut the fuses! Cut the fuses!”

A.L. Rorschach, Captain’s Log: The presence of ships on either side of Dale prevented the use of all forward guns. The forward twenty-four inch searchlight made it impossible to bring the [gun] director to bear in the direction of the level bombing attacks on the battleships. The five-inch guns operated in local control with very poor results, the shots bursting well behind and short of the targets, a squadron of level bombers flying at about 10,000 feet above the battleships on alternately northerly and southerly courses. 08:15 an enemy dive-bomber attacking USS Raleigh from westward came under severe machine gun fire from all the ships in the nest, nosed down and crashed into the harbor.

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