Few Americans would forget where they were or how they felt when they first learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The following documents describe the experiences of two women: Monica Conter, a U.S. army nurse on duty at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack, and Monica Sone, a Nisei who was a student at the University of Washington in December 1941. Sone and her family were eventually placed in an internment camp in Idaho.
| 23.1 | Monica Conter | Letter to Her Parents, December 22,1941 |
The wounded started coming in 10 minutes after the 1st attack. We called Tripler [Hospital] for more ambulances—they wanted to know if we were having “Maneuvers.” Imagine! Well, the sight in our hospital I’ll never forget. No arms, no legs, intestines hanging out etc. . . . In the meantime, the hangars all around us were burning—and that awful “noise.” Then comes the second attack—We all fell face down on the wounded in the halls, O.R., and everywhere and heard the bombers directly over us. We (the nurses and the doctors) had no helmets nor gas masks—and it really was a “helpless” feeling. One of the soldiers who works for my ward saw me and so we shared helmets together. In the meantime, the bombs were dropping all around us and when a 500 lb. bomb dropped about CENSORED from the CENSORED, we waited for the plane to come in as it felt like it had hit us—then they were gone. CENSORED.
All our electric clocks stopped on the dot. The dead were placed in back of the hospital, the walking wounded went in trucks to Tripler, and the seriously injured in the ambulances. We used our place as an “Evacuation Hospital.” . . . The mayor sent out 20 cases of whiskey so that helped some—that is, the uninjured who were going around in a daze. Of course, it was used medicinally too. We worked, and worked, and worked—and when night came on “Blackout” (I’m used to it now). . . . For a week the nurses slept in uniform on the ward in one of the officer’s rooms.
Source: Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler, eds., Women’s Letters: America from the Revolutionary War to the Present (New York: Dial Press, 2005), 548.
| 23.2 | Monica Sone | Memories of Pearl Harbor |
On a peaceful Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, Henry, Sumi, and I were at choir rehearsal singing ourselves hoarse in preparation for the annual Christmas recital of Handel’s “Messiah.” Suddenly Chuck Mizuno, a young University of Washington student, burst into the chapel, gasping as if he had sprinted all the way up the stairs.
“Listen, everybody!” he shouted. “Japan just bombed Pearl Harbor . . . in Hawaii. It’s war!”
The terrible words hit like a blockbuster, paralyzing us. Then we smiled feebly at each other, hoping this was one of Chuck’s practical jokes. Miss Hara, our music director, rapped her baton impatiently on the music stand and chided him, “Now Chuck, fun’s fun, but we have work to do. Please take your place. You’re already half an hour late.”
But Chuck strode vehemently back to the door. “I mean it, folks, honest! I just heard the news over my car radio. Reporters are talking a blue streak. Come on down and hear it for yourselves.”
. . . I felt as if a fist had smashed my pleasant little existence, breaking it into jigsaw puzzle pieces. An old wound opened up again, and I found myself shrinking inwardly from my Japanese blood, the blood of an enemy. I knew instinctively that the fact that I was an American by birthright was not going to help me escape the consequences of this unhappy war.
One girl mumbled over and over again, “It can’t be, God, it can’t be!” Someone else was saying, “What a spot to be in! Do you think we’ll be considered Japanese or Americans?”
A boy replied quietly, “We’ll be Japs, same as always. But our parents are enemy aliens now, you know.”
A shocked silence followed.
Source: Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter (Boston: Little Brown, 1953), 145–46.
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