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A scout bomber pilot’s memories of Pearl Harbor

NEW ORLEANS — Sixty-six years after FDR’s Day of Infamy, 91-year-old Norman “Dusty” Kleiss remembers the “wild, wild day.”

He spent Dec. 7, 1941, flying west of Hawaii, searching for Japanese midget submarines, their mother ship and the aircraft carriers that laid waste to the heart of the U.S. battleship fleet in an early-morning attack. His own carrier, the Enterprise, arrived at a devastated Pearl Harbor the following day.

“You can’t imagine how horrible it looked,” Kleiss, now a retired Navy captain living in San Antonio, Texas, said Thursday. “Those people just never had a chance.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt forever immortalized the horror when, in his call for a declaration of war against Japan, he called Dec. 7 “a date which will live in infamy.”

“Remember Pearl Harbor” became an angry nation’s rallying cry.

Discuss: Pearl harbored recalled, 66 years later

On the morning of the attack, Kleiss was a 25-year-old Navy lieutenant, flying Douglas Dauntless scout bombers. While thousands of U.S. personnel were fighting and dying in Hawaii, Kleiss and the Enterprise were returning from Wake Island, where they delivered Marine Corps fighter planes to reinforce the U.S. outpost there.

He and his squadron mates took off about 6:15 a.m. to search for Japanese midget submarines, and later that day for the mother ship of five subs that had tried to penetrate the harbor.

They failed to find either, but the Japanese failed to find the Enterprise.

The previous week, a Japanese midget submarine had confirmed the U.S. carriers Lexington and Enterprise were ripe targets at Pearl Harbor, Martin Morgan, historian in residence at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, told about 100 people at a lunchtime lecture Friday.

But when the attack came, the prized carriers — key to the success of Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto’s attack plan — were gone.

Seven months later, the Enterprise and Kleiss blasted the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Midway, sinking some of the carriers that struck Pearl Harbor. Kleiss was credited with two bomb hits on aircraft carriers and another on a heavy cruiser, winning the Navy Cross. The Japanese lost four aircraft carriers at Midway, and their expansion in the Pacific was halted.

Kleiss flew three less successful missions Dec. 7, starting the first about dawn and returning from the last after 10 p.m. “It was a wild, wild day,” he said.

He had expected war for a decade, joining the Kansas National Guard when he was 15. Growing world tension, fed by Japan’s invasion of China and the aggressiveness of Nazi Germany, only reinforced his gut feeling.

The Enterprise had been due at Pearl Harbor the day before the Pearl Harbor attack. But bad weather hampered its progress. When the Japanese attacked at about 7:55 a.m. local time, the carrier and its escorts were about 215 miles west of Oahu.

The day began early. Kleiss, scheduled for the first morning flight, was up at 4 a.m.

Lt. Cmdr. H.L. Young, commander of the Enterprise air group, also flew that morning. In addition to scouting, he had a passenger: a tactical officer who had been ordered to report immediately to the Pacific Fleet’s commander in chief. He found himself under fire twice: first from Japanese planes and, as they tried to land, from American anti-aircraft guns.

U.S. ships had sunk four of the five midget submarines that were supposed to infiltrate the harbor. The fifth ran aground, its captain becoming the first prisoner of war in U.S. hands, Morgan said. Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki “just came up on the beach where it ran aground, and was found sitting there in the afternoon,” Morgan said.

Morgan’s stories about the submarines fascinated 17-year-old Matt Cranor of Fort Collins, Colo., who was at the museum with his father, Dave Cranor. “I had no idea they had midget sumbarines there,” Matt Cranor said. They were in New Orleans for a wedding; Cranor’s wife, a teacher who had wedding-related doings Friday, had suggested they visit the museum.

Kleiss returned from his first flight to news of the sinking of the midget submarines. He and several other pilots were sent out to hunt the mother ship. Kleiss said he didn’t know if it was a drill or not: “It sounded too crazy.”

After lunch, “I really heard about what was really happening.”

Later, they turned their attention to finding the Japanese carriers.

“We went out through the dark and fog and everything else, and couldn’t find them any place. They’d already left for home,” Kleiss said.

Some of the torpedo and scout bomber pilots hadn’t made a night landing, adding to the tension on the Enterprise.

One new pilot “dropped a little hard, and the torpedo dropped off and fell on the deck. The propeller was turning, showing that the torpedo was armed. If it had hit anything, it would have exploded,” Kleiss said.

He said the crewman directing the landings “jumped on it like a bucking bronco and used his heels to slow down and guide it. Two ordnance men came out and disarmed it.”

After the war, Kleiss worked as an aeronautical engineer and surveyor; his wife of 64 years died about a year ago.

A veteran who was at the museum on Friday was working at the Wright Aeronautical Corp., making engines for B-17 Flying Fortress bombers, on the day of the attack.

Emil Hofman, who enlisted in the Army Air Force on his 21st birthday in 1942 and ended up flying the bombers, said he and a co-worker were eating when someone said the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

“My friend said, ‘Where’s Pearl Harbor?’ ”

It was a common question. Hofman’s wife, Joan Sherron Hofman, was living on a farm near Louisville, Ky. Her family learned about the attack over Sunday dinner at the home of an aunt who had a radio.

“Nobody knew where Pearl Harbor was,” she said. “We had to get out the atlas.”