Pearl Harbor Baby

PEARL HARBOR CHILD

By Rebecca Schwab

On a beautiful, quiet Sunday morning, Mary Elizabeth Sawyer and her brand new baby daughter were resting at the Station Hospital on Schofield Barracks in Oahu, Hawaii. Sherron Dee had been born almost a week earlier, on December 1, 1941 - the first child for Mary Elizabeth and her husband, United States Army Corps fighter pilot Capt. Jerome Sawyer.

When Mary Elizabeth suddenly heard a plane fly over the hospital, she thought it might be her husband flying by to celebrate their daughter’s birth. But then she heard shooting.

“The air became filled with enemy planes, bombs, fire, smoke, and destruction,” she wrote in a 1942 article for The Standard. “Looking out my window, I watched two Japanese planes machine-gun another part of the hospital some thirty feet away. Was I frightened? I didn't believe my eyes.”

When wounded and dying servicemembers were brought into the hospital, doctors and nurses could no longer prioritize mothers and babies. Mary Elizabeth was given baby Sherron, hastily instructed on diaper changes and feedings, and told to wear street clothes and to attend to her own needs so that medical personnel could focus on incoming patients. No one yet understood the full extent of what was going on.

Later that day, Capt. Sawyer arrived to check on his wife and baby, and for the first time Mary Elizabeth was faced with the true “horror of war” as he relayed the events of that December 7 - the brutal Japanese attack on Oahu - and what it could mean for their future.

“In a few words, he told me just what had happened, then took his leave, parting with these never-to-be-forgotten words: ‘Goodbye honey, take care of yourself and the baby as I don’t know when I can come back, or if I can come back,’” Mary Elizabeth wrote.

By December 9, the women and children were evacuated from the hospital to make room for those injured in the attack. Three weeks later, Mary Elizabeth and Sherron boarded a ship bound for San Francisco, while Capt. Sawyer stayed behind.

“He was in every major battle in the South Pacific,” Sherron Dee Sandrini, now 80, said of her father. “He was awarded two Silver Stars and the Distinguished Flying Cross.”

Although her father survived the war and was hailed a war hero, Sandrini said his experiences took a terrible toll on him and, as a result, on their entire family.

“When he came home [in 1943], he was a chronic alcoholic,” she said. “Today it would be post traumatic stress syndrome, but in those days it was battle fatigue. I think it was really tough on [my parents], for their marriage.”

Following the birth of Sandrini’s younger brother, the family moved constantly from one military assignment to another, but one thing they never did was revisit the past.

“When I was a little girl, people didn’t talk about the war much,” she said. “I think they wanted to get beyond the war. It’s not like today - you know, December 7th. Remember Pearl Harbor.”

That included her father, who never spoke about his experiences. Her parents divorced when she was in the 6th grade, and after several hospitalizations, her father passed away at 53 due to cirrhosis of the liver.

Kathleen Farley works every day with Pearl Harbor survivors like Sawyer, as well as the children of survivors. She’s the first district director of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors (SDPHS), an organization whose mission is to further the legacy of those who fought and died as a result of the Pearl Harbor attack. She said the experience of Sandrini’s father was all too common.

“These guys went over as young boys and came back as old men,” Farley said. “The atrocities they saw from December 7th stayed with them for the rest of their lives … but they came home, got a job - and didn’t talk about December 7th, 1941. Thank God Sherron’s mother was very detailed and kept notes and newspaper articles about what transpired.”

Farley’s own father was a Pearl Harbor Survivor, but she said she didn’t learn of his experience until she heard him speak at a Pearl Harbor Survivors’ meeting. Although many of the service members who survived the attack have now passed away, Farley said their children - as well as child survivors of the attack - continue to speak in schools and share stories of the past.

Sandrini, who has been married to her husband Louis, a retired naval officer, for 57 years, now splits her time between Wyoming and California, where she and her husband stay actively involved with SDPHS. She said she finds great value in sharing her stories with younger generations, especially her four grandchildren.

“I think it is important to keep the memory of the things we’ve gone through, so we don’t repeat it,” she said. “They’ve all heard the stories from me. I’ve made copies of different things that I have, and I’ll give it to them when they’re old enough. My big scrapbook - I haven’t decided who’s going to inherit that! It has to be someone that will carry on the tradition of remembering Pearl Harbor, lest we forget.”

Sandrini and her husband go back to Hawaii often, she said, for Pearl Harbor commemorative events. In 2021, they visited the places where she and her mother lived through the attack.

“They took us to the quarters on Wheeler [Army Airfield], where we lived, and took us to Schofield, to the hospital where I was born,” she said. “We toured all around there. Those quarters are still in use today.”

Going back and seeing those same places 80 years later, she said, is like a two-edged sword.

“You are sorry that it happened, but you’re proud of your heritage,” she said. “I’m proud of my father and what he did there. I’m proud of my mother that she took good care of me and we got out of there, evacuated on the ship. It’s very special to me that I’m a Pearl Harbor survivor.”