“Have you got a pencil handy?” asked the voice on the other end of the phone line. It was Sunday afternoon, shortly after 2 o’clock. Prior to the telephone’s ring, Steve Early, a native son of Crozet, was relaxing with the newspaper at his home in northeast Washington, D.C., enjoying the intentionally slow pace of his day off from work. Early replied, “Do I need it?”
“Yes, I have a very important statement. It ought to go out verbatim.” The caller was the boss, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As press secretary for the president, Early sensed urgency in FDR’s tone. “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor from the air and all naval and military activities on the island of Oahu, the principal American base in the Hawaiian Islands.”
“A light snow was falling on Sunday afternoon at my grandfather’s house at Spring Valley Farm, near Heards,” wrote Crozet native Grant Tomlin, a son of Virgil S. and Lola Kent Tomlin. “It was December 7, 1941. Some of my cousins were playing football in the huge backyard. I was ten years old and enjoying our every-Sunday visit to Granddaddy Kent’s. Uncle Lenzy came out and told us someplace called Pearl Harbor had been bombed. He heard this on his battery-powered radio—electricity had not made it to their home yet.
“The younger cousins, including me, mostly ignored this as not important. We had no idea what bombing someplace we never heard of meant. Then the adults, including my parents, gathered in the yard and were speaking in hushed tones while looking very unhappy. None of us knew that most of my grown male cousins would soon find themselves in the armed forces.
“The world and our lives were never the same.”
Thomas Petso (1921–2017), of Colorado, was one of the WWII veterans gathered at Wheeler Field, Oahu, Hawaii, in 2016, for a Ceremony of Remembrance. Seventy-five years earlier, the then 19-year-old infantry sergeant was among a group of servicemen playing an early Sunday morning game of football at that same base on the fateful morning of December 7 when 25 Japanese dive bombers screamed down toward the airfield.
“When I looked up in the sky,” recalled Petso, “I couldn’t believe what those strange planes were doing coming towards us. They scared the hell out of us. We ran for our lives because they opened fire, and we knew we were in trouble.”
As the enemy’s bombs struck airplane hangars and gunners strafed the unmanned aircraft sitting in tidy rows on the tarmac, the frantic soldiers raced for Schofield Barracks to grab their weapons and ammo in a futile attempt to return fire.
When the overwhelming Japanese attacks upon Wheeler Field ended, casualties included 33 killed and 73 wounded. Similar strikes occurred at nearby Hickam Field and Bellows Field. The enemy’s objective, to neutralize first any airborne resistance prior to their attack on ships in Pearl Harbor, was an unimpeded, resounding success.
The first U.S. casualties from the enemy’s well-orchestrated attacks on Pearl Harbor occurred at Wheeler Army Airfield. Counted among the servicemen killed-in-action that Sunday morning was Staff Sergeant James Merritt Barksdale (1909–1941) of Crozet, who had served in the Army Air Corps since 1936. Born at Greenwood, he was a son of James W. and Rosa Black Barksdale. His father was the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway telegraph operator at Crozet depot. His brother Sidney held a similar position with the C&O at Clifton Forge. The tragic news of James Merritt’s death at Pearl Harbor was transmitted through the telegraph lines monitored by both his father and brother.
The book Pursuits of War: The People of Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia, in the Second World War, published in 1948, offered a tally of the losses suffered by “We the People of the United States” during the approximately 90-minute attack at Pearl Harbor—ten ships sunk, six damaged; most Army and Navy planes destroyed; 2,117 men killed; 1,272 wounded; 960 missing. (Those numbers have since been updated.)
Albemarle County and Charlottesville, VA, suffered the loss of three kinsmen during the attacks at Pearl Harbor. Staff Sergeant Barksdale of Crozet is buried at Hillsboro Baptist Cemetery, near Crozet.
Corporal Emmett Edloe Morris (1914–1941) of Charlottesville, son of Charles Edloe and Myra Portch Morris, served in the Army for six years. He was killed in action at Hickam Field and is buried at National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, at Honolulu, HI.
Chief Petty Officer Alwyn Berry Norvell of Covesville (1909–1941), son of Agustus Wyan and Irena Berry Norvell McCormick, served in the Navy thirteen years. He was killed in action aboard the USS Nevada in Pearl Harbor, and is buried at Monticello Memorial Park, Charlottesville.
As it was at Crozet, Charlottesville, Covesville and Spring Valley Farm, so it was in large cities and rural communities throughout the United States. The American people rose up from a sucker punch and rallied to the cause. For the aggressors, it ultimately would not end well.
“Remember Pearl Harbor.”
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