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Woodrow Hunter
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Woodrow Hunter recounts the attack at Pearl Harbor: "Oh, well, the torpedo hit just one, one section over from where I was. I figured it was about sixty feet away, and it caved that whole wall in. And, I woke up, I thought we had been rammed because the destroyers had been coming around that bend, you know pretty fast. I thought that one of them had rammed us. I reached down to get my shoes and they floated away. Oil and stuff was already a foot deep in there, warm water. And I hollered out. I thought maybe somebody still down there, but there wasn’t. I was the only one down there. And having made the trip to where the stairs were so many times, it was just pitch dark. You couldn’t see anything. And that water and oil chased me all the way to the ladder. In fact, I just barely got out of there because, I went to, going up to the upper decks I had to go two decks, through the dining room and all. And they was fixing to fasten the watertight doors down already. And I had to, if I had been a minute later, I’d have got..." Interviewer: Trapped? "...bound in yeah. But anyway, I got to topside and I could see what was going on. I could see those, they were flying real low. They came in on our side and had to get down near the water to drop the torpedoes. And they came right, oh I’d say they wasn’t, they didn’t clear the masts of our ship, one hundred feet hardly. We, some of the fellows were throwing potatoes at them. Had a potato locker up there, and somebody grabbed a meat cleaver and broke the lock off of it. And all the people that had been eating, of course all their tables were turned over and everything. They was running out there, and they got them taters and started throwing them. Those Japs would look down at you and look like they was grinning. I guess they wasn’t though, but it looked like they was laughing at us for throwing potatoes at them." |
