Remembrance "As If We Were in a Tornado"

By BURT AMGWERT

Now 75, he was a pharmacist mate at the Naval Hospital.

I saw a gray plane with a large red dot on the fuselage fly past, and a corpsman shouted, "The Japs are bombing us!" A bomb hit the destroyer Shaw in dry dock, and the concussion broke windowpanes in the hospital and blew our clothes and hair as if we were in a tornado.

At about dusk we saw four planes flying low, coming up the channel toward the harbor. Almost every antiaircraft gun in the Navy Yard started firing at them. The sad part is, they turned out to be U.S. Navy planes from the carrier Enterprise. Three were shot down, and the fourth pilot was brought into the hospital, wounded.

We had a bed capacity of about 300 people. At midnight that night we had 960 patients. And we had 313 dead, stacked outside like cordwood.