REPORTER ELIZABETH MacDonald, on assignment in Honolulu, was in bed on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, listening to a radio broadcast of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Suddenly an announcer cut in. “The islands are under attack,” he said. “This is the real McCoy.” Elizabeth didn’t think it was the real anything; she was sure it was just another army maneuver. But a few minutes later, she received a call from her photographer at Scripps Howard News Service. He wasn’t sure which country was doing the bombing, Germany or Japan, but he did know that the US naval base at Pearl Harbor was under attack.
During the first half of their drive to Pearl Harbor, Elizabeth and the photographer didn’t notice anything unusual; it was a typically quiet Sunday morning. But when they got closer, Elizabeth saw something shocking. Reporting later, she described it as “a formation of black planes diving straight into the ocean off Pearl Harbor. The blue sky was punctured with anti-aircraft smoke puffs.” It was the second wave of Japanese bombers. Looking over her shoulder, Elizabeth suddenly saw “a rooftop fly into the air.”
She wrote that she now understood “that numb terror that all of London has known for months. It is the terror of not being able to do anything but fall on your stomach and hope the bomb won’t land on you.”
The Japanese had targeted the battleships in Pearl Harbor and the nearby airfields, not civilians. But because the Japanese destroyed most of the US planes before they could get airborne and do battle, frantic US military personnel on the ground tried to shoot the Japanese down with anti-aircraft guns. Some of their misfired ammunition destroyed buildings, killed 68 civilians, and wounded 35.
Elizabeth was not allowed near Pearl Harbor—the US military did not want female journalists on the front lines of military action—so she focused instead on the civilian casualties in the area and the desperate attempts to save them.
“The blood-soaked drivers returned with stories of streets ripped up, houses burned, twisted shrapnel and charred bodies of children,” she wrote. In the morgue, Elizabeth saw bodies “laid on slabs in the grotesque positions in which they had died. Fear contorted their faces.”
As Elizabeth watched firefighters bring victims inside—some of them with the acronym DOA (dead on arrival) marked on their foreheads—she wrote that life had suddenly become “blood and the fear of death—and death itself. . . . In the emergency room . . . doctors calmly continued to treat the victims of this new war. Interns were taping up windows to prevent them from crashing into the emergency area as bombs fell and the dead and wounded continued to arrive.”
When Elizabeth left the emergency room and returned to Honolulu, she saw that many familiar shops had burned down. After dusk, she described “the all-night horror of attack in the dark. Sirens shrieking, sharp, crackling police reports and the tension of a city wrapped in fear.”
Excerpts from "Elizabeth MacDonald: Pearl Harbor Reporter and OSS Agent" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater
