TALES...TEXANS IN THE NEWS

TALES FROM THE WEST TEXAS DUST--3/5/2002

"TEXANS IN THE NEWS"--AN INTERVIEW WITH LEE SOUCY (PART IV)

PLAINVIEW (Special)--And now, we go back once again to resume our interview with Pearl Harbor veteran Lee Soucy...and see the aftermath of it all:

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101: In fact, this might be a good time to ask this question. Now this time comes--and as suddenly as the attack came, the attack ends. The planes of the Japanese have now done their duty and gone toward home base. After the attack of Pearl Harbor--I mean just pretty much immediately--what to you was the aftermath of it all? What were the final results of it--I mean, just right after it happened that you saw--that IMMEDIATELY came at the hands of the Japanese IMMEDIATELY after the attack? How did you and others just right off of what you saw--not only for the rest of December 7th, but for the days and the weeks that followed?

Soucy: Well, of course, being medical--you see, my duties were medical--taking care of people that were wounded or hurt ... But the other sailors--they're supposed to fight back. So they would go different places to get machine guns. Of course, we didn't know if they'd be back in another 10 or 15 minutes or what. So the regular Navy personnel--they would man guns, get ammunition--you see, a lot of the ammunition was locked up for the first hour or so. They had to break down locked rooms and everything...so they get to have a chance to set up--if you fire machine guns for so long, it can get too hot, and especially if it's a water-cooled machine gun and you don't have any water--then you can melt the gun practically.

So these men were getting prepared for another onslaught--and my job was to get prepared for more wounded. So when the hospital people and the dispensary people came over, they were taking our patients off. So we were told to go back to the Utah.

Now they were building right there at the beach where we landed--they had married officers' quarters...these little huts, you know--like [a] duplex. And they were putting in a sewer line and a water line--so there was a trench four or five feet deep--all the way across the island practically. So a lot of the men that swam ashore--they went in those trenches because it was comparatively safe, you know. From the strafers, there were some palm trees that would shade them for one thing.

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