Oral History Archive
LIVING HISTORY: "We were exposed to gas all the time. We always had to have our gas masks on, and when you first got a whiff of it, you put it on. And we were trained that it took six seconds to allow us to get the mask on. And after a while, you didn't worry about the six seconds. You took the gas as long as you could, and put the mask on." Jesse Moffitt, World War I Infantryman, 26th Yankee Division, Western Front. Born in 1897, Mr. Moffitt was interviewed in 2001.
SHARING WISDOM: "I was living in a little house in Aiea Heights which is about a mile above Pearl Harbor, and I heard these explosions and I thought: 'Holy smoke the army's running some really loud exercises'. I got out on the lawn, and there was some smoke from the ships going up, and a Japanese plane apparently had a jammed machine gun because as it went by my house it spewed a few bullets out. I saw the red balls, and then I knew I better get down to the harbor right away. So I did; I got down into the middle of it at that time, but it was hard for me to believe that they would have been that foolish. But that's why I think today, as a matter of fact, we've got to be awfully careful about countries like North Korea and Iraq and countries that we used to call the rogue nations because some of them are trying hard and meeting with some success in getting mass destruction weapons and the means of delivering them. And some of them could be foolish enough to attack the U.S. Pearl Harbor convinces me of
that. Because they might think, well, they can attack the U.S. and get away with it because the U.S. might not know which country it came from." RADML John Harllee, World War II PT Boat Squadron Commander, Pearl Harbor Survivor. This interview was conducted on July 15, 2000, just over a year before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.
