Pearl Harbor veterans appreciate life on 82nd anniversary of Day of Infamy
PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii — Eighty-two years after that Day of Infamy, the dwindling ranks of survivors of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor still solemnly cherish their good fortune.
On the morning of Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, Herbert Elfring was a 19-year-old private in the Army’s 251st Coastal Artillery assigned to a short-range radar station at Camp Malakole, about three miles from the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. He heard bombing and planes in the distance but assumed it was a drill.
Elfring, 101, originally from South Dakota, recalled his close call to Spectrum News on Thursday at the 82nd Commemoration of the attack from the shore across the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial. (Elfring’s account can be heard in the video clip above.)
“I had just finished breakfast. I was reading what was happening for the coming week. … I was a page into it,” Elfring said. “I heard this plane coming. And next thing, there was a line of bullets about 15 feet away from me – a stream of bullets. And I looked up and saw the red ball, on the airplane, and I said, ‘My god that’s the Japanese airplane!’ And then all hell broke loose from then onward. Then word got out that we were being attacked.”
