WORK
BY TOM BEARD
WORK
BY TOM BEARD
Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941
The tropical Sunday morning was peaceful. A few sailors and Marines, in addition to those preparing to raise American flags, stirred about the island and among the moored ships. Lt. Frank A. Erickson US Coast Guard watched through the window as the Marine color guard marched to the flagpole in front of the Ford Island administration building. In a few moments the record player would start to sound colors. Erickson was the offgoing naval air station duty officer and soon would be home with his wife and two infant daughters in their tiny Waikiki apartment, sharing a rare quiet day together. He watched the Marines at the ready with the flag -- Frank Dudovick, James D. Young, and Paul 0. Zeller -- then glanced at the clock.
Waiting.
The sounds of the first bombs exploding came about 0753. Erickson looked up to see a plane passing over the Ten-Ten dock in the navy yard release a torpedo. The deadly fish struck the bow of the battleship California (BB-44), the ship closest to the administration building moored along battleship row.
The Marines didn't wait for the traditional bugle call. The flag went up and a quickly substituted General Quarters blared from speakers across the island. The commanding officer phoned demanding, "What the hell kind of drills are you pulling down there?"
Pearl Harbor was under attack. Ten days would pass before Erickson returned to his family.
Moments after he was relieved as duty officer, Erickson ran through showers of shrapnel to the airplane control tower, his General Quarters station. Ships' guns returned fire. From his aerie in the tower at the epicenter of attack, Erickson "had a grand view of the battle." Beneath him lay all of Ford Island, surrounded by the ships of the Pacific Fleet moored in Pearl Harbor. He saw nearby Hickam Field to the south erupt in billowing smoke and flames. On the horizon, he saw plumes of black smoke climbing from the Army base at Wheeler, up the hill to the north, and from the Marine air base at Eva, across the sugarcane fields to the west.
An attacking Japanese plane, ablaze, flashed across his view. Erickson saw it crash into the seaplane tender USS Curtiss less than half a mile away -- just to the north, off the entrance to Middle Loch -- setting the ship afire. Looking at the eastern edge of Pearl Harbor toward Aiea, he watched in helpless wonder as a "huge flaming oil slick" began drifting along battleship row. Paint on the behemoths flashed as the fiery oil reached the ships rafted alongside Ford Island. Men swarmed overboard from the blazing cauldrons into the oil-coated burning waters of the harbor.
In August 1941 Coast Guard units in the Hawaii area were absorbed from the Treasury Department into the U.S. Navy. At the time of the Navy's takeover, Erickson was an aviator assigned to the Coast Guard cutter Taney, then in port in Honolulu. With the new assignment in the Navy, he moved to Ford Island as assistant operations officer. At that same time, Erickson read in the magazine Aero Digest an article describing a small helicopter developed by Dr. Igor Sikorsky. It was this helicopter, in Erickson's mind, that was unquestionably the ideal tool for Coast Guard aviators.
As Erickson witnessed the deaths of more than two thousand men within a radius of a mile and a half, and watched thousands more oilcovered and wounded men straggling onto the shoreline of Ford Island, he was greatly frustrated, swelled with emotions beyond the ignominy of the assault. He thought of the helicopter he had read about months earlier and realized that, at present, he had no methods to rapidly recover those hundreds of sailors; he could only watch.
During the ten days following the Japanese attack, Erickson flew patrols searching for the enemy carrier task force with the only planes that survived the raid. Ironically, among those few flyable aircraft were "Grumman J2F and Sikorsky JRS amphibians," armed merely with rifles and shotguns. But Erickson's greatest fear was not the war itself, it was that its duration would keep him in the Pacific unable to pursue his dream to effect a way to rescue victims at sea, using the Sikorsky helicopter.
The feeling of total ineffectiveness that Erickson experienced in the few hours following the attack on Pearl Harbor constantly reignited the fuel of his dedication throughout the following decade. He was not to relinquish this dream nor the quest to fulfill it despite many obstacles to his career and life. Erickson's memory of that morning -- that day of infamy -- and of all its terrors became the catalyst that eventually forced the rescue helicopter into actuality.