Rendezvous with History: Donald Long

Rendezvous CMDR Donald Long WITH HISTORY

Radioman 3rd Class Don Long. Throughout his Navy career he became a pilot and rose to the rank of Commander before retiring.

B y : A m a n d a T h o m p s o n , O r a l H i s t o r y C o n s u l t a n t

The attack on December 7, 1941 encompassed the entirety of the island of Oahu, not just the base at Pearl Harbor. At 7:48am, the Naval Air Station at Kaneohe Bay saw the first of the Japanese planes fly over the mountain range when bombs began to fall. NAS Kaneohe Bay was a newly constructed base and the site of a major patrol seaplane base. Along the shoreline of the bay were 33 PBYs both on the ground and floating on the water.

Don Long was born in St. Cloud, Minnesota in 1921. During the Depression, he got a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCCs) and enlisted in the Navy in March 1941 due to the growing unease in the conflict in Europe. After attending boot camp in San Diego, he became a radioman. He was sent to NAS Kaneohe Bay just a few months before December 7th. Here is an excerpt from his account of the day of infamy:

“I got up and had breakfast and along about 7:30, I ended up at the boathouse where we would be taken out to the airplane. There were, I think, 4 planes on the water, the number is disputable and the watch who were out there from the previous day was set to be relieved. Our plan for the day that day was I was going to be practicing with the tower doing blinker practice. For the blinker you can sit in the pilot’s cockpit with an aldis lamp, it’s just one of these portable blinker lamps that you can communicate with Morse Code. Now this was 7:45 in the morning, I did this for about 5 minutes. I recall getting the aldis lamp out and ready. Along about 7:50, I heard airplanes in the area. I looked out and saw planes, quite a few of them. I assumed that it was the Army Air Corps up on Sunday maneuvers and I didn’t know what they were doing working on Sunday, but minutes later there was bombing activity. Onshore, I saw some of the bombs hit and explosions and then minutes later there were fighter planes diving toward our planes. There was bombing going on the shore and then the fighters came and strafed the planes that were on the water. When I first saw this happen, I was up in the cockpit and I didn’t have a life jacket on, but when I saw that, I thought I should get a life jacket. There were little fountains of water squirting up from the bottom of the plane. I forgot about a life jacket and on the next run, the plane just burst into flames. It did not explode, but there was fire everywhere and I am in the middle of it so my thoughts were ‘get out of this thing no matter about a life jacket.’ I had to go through the fire to get out to the rear blister. So, I got to the rear blister and of course all around me for about 50 or 60 feet the water is “burning” because there was gas and oil in the water and it was all on fire. I jumped into the water. I say jumped, not dove, because we were taught in boot camp that under “combat conditions,” you don’t ever dive, you jump, because if there’s debris in the water, your feet can take it better than your head. We’d also been taught how to swim under burning water. You swim away as far as you can underwater toward the edge of {the fire} and when you do need a breath, you come up with your hands over your head on the water and break with your hands first going like this (waving arms) to break the water and the fire goes away from you. I think it took me about 3 times of doing that before I was clear of the fire. I looked around and a couple of hundred yards away, I spotted a marking buoy, so I went out there and hung onto the buoy for a while, while watching the action ashore.

If you know someone who would be interested in sharing their Pacific War or homefront story to be preserved in our Oral History Collection, please contact us at info@pacifichistoricparks.org. To see Long’s full oral history and others like it, visit our digital collection at www.pacifichistoricparks.org.