Sturgill: Back aft on gun five, we had enough clearance from the other ships in the nest to aim and shoot, but our ammunition was locked up tight, and no one could find a key. So I took a hammer and broke open the locker. The gun captain said, “You’re going to be court-martialed for this!” I just shrugged him off and started shooting just as a big torpedo bomber came lumbering by. We blasted him, and he went down in flames.

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Harris: In the radio shack we were up on the air raid, harbor, and channel frequencies. Orders and information came in fast and furious like, “All ships get underway immediately” and “DesDiv Two, establish offshore patrol. Enemy submarines sighted inside and outside Pearl Harbor!” I was running messages back and forth to the bridge and got to see a lot of the action. I saw Utah, Raleigh, and Detroit being bombed, torpedoed, and machine-gunned. I saw Raleigh settle down on the bottom and Utah turn upside down. The sky was a mass of exploding AA, with Japanese bombers flying in and out of them.

Miller: The next time I dashed up to the bridge I saw a horrible sight. USS Utah had turned over and was lying with only her bottom showing. I could see the big bomber hangar over on Ford Island alive with flames. USS Arizona was afire and sinking fast. West Virginia was hit with six or seven torpedoes and was afire. USS Nevada was hit by a torpedo and was heading for the beach so she wouldn’t get sunk.

McIntyre: While tied up in the nest with the other tin cans, we got all of our steam and power from Monaghan’s boilers. So when she cast off, we were cold iron. Under normal conditions, it took us about a hundred and fifty minutes to fire up our boilers. But there was nothing normal about that Sunday morning! After Schnabel flushed the water, I lit off all four boilers and began pumping the crude oil. Since our boilers were still warm, we were able to get up enough steam to get underway in nineteen minutes.

Schneider: When I got up to gun one, things were moving real fast. Someone handed me a fire ax and told me to chop the line to Monaghan, which was tied up to starboard. When I finished chopping, they sent me to the ammunition handling room. Someone was down below in the magazine and they were sending up powder and five-inch rounds as fast as they could. Trouble was, we weren’t shooting at anything yet, so the ammunition was piling up and crowding us out of the handling room, and whoever was down there wouldn’t stop. I started stacking some of the rounds out on the deck, but someone running by bumped into my stack and sent a couple of the five-inch rounds rolling across the deck and over the side.

Reichert: Monaghan had the ready duty that Sunday morning and so was ready to go first. I was happy to help throw off her lines, because it meant that gun two would finally have a clear field of fire to the east.

Miller: Monaghan backed away from the nest and headed for the channel entrance. A Jap submarine periscope was sticking up out of the water, and USS Curtis was firing into the water with her guns, trying her best to sink the sub. Monaghan let out a blast on her horn to signal she was making a depth-charge attack. She had to have a lot of speed on to clear the area of the explosion or be damaged from her own depth charges, and this caused her to run aground.

“Dutch” Smith: Immediately after Monaghan cast off, it made a high-speed run on a midget Japanese submarine it had spotted and dropped two six-hundred pound depth charges. The explosions lifted the rear end of Monaghan clean out of the water. If I close my eyes, I can still see her screws spinning wildly in the air.

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