Dec 7, 2016 5 min read

Editor’s note: This article originally published Friday, December 7, 2001.

McDONALD – When Floyd Laughlin was growing up in Uhrichsville, Ohio, he’d often hear stories about the Civil War from his grandfather, Union veteran Andrew Jackson Laughlin.

Young Floyd, who was 14 when his grandfather died, never imagined he’d witness the beginning of another war even more horrific than the war between the states.

But by 1941, the Japanese had invaded China and the Nazis dominated Europe. Tensions between the United States and the powers known as the Axis were rising.

On June 10, 1941, Floyd Laughlin was drafted into the U.S. Army and shipped out to a quiet U.S. territory that was a Pacific outpost, arriving Sept. 26.

The word “pacific” described more than the ocean. Laughlin was stationed in the Hawaiian island of Oahu at Fort Kamehameha, near fields of pineapple and sugarcane; a sleepy little place where the roads were lined with coconut palms. There was a $50 fine for illegally plucking a pineapple.

The calm ended abruptly on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941.

Laughlin talked about the attack on Pearl Harbor while sitting at the kitchen table of his Cecil Township home just days before the 60th anniversary of the event is observed today.

At “Fort Kam,” as it was dubbed, the sound of planes overhead didn’t cause too much concern because Laughlin and his fellow members of A Battery, 97th Coast Artillery, eating breakfast in a mess hall, assumed their fellow Americans were flying in.

At 7:55 a.m. the explosions started. Instead of diving for cover, the men ran outside to try to figure out what was going on. Hundreds of soldiers clustered under porch roofs and witnessed a massive air assault.

“We could watch the harbor,” Laughlin said. “We were only 200 feet from the entrance. We knew right away it was Japanese. It wasn’t safe to move because they were firing all around. A bullet hit beside my head.”

Shrapnel flattened the tire of his truck.

“They set a machine gun up in the alley and they were shooting at planes,” Laughlin said.

“A Japanese plane hit the ordnance building across from our barracks. It knocked a coconut tree over. Six Americans in the ordnance building were killed. There was so much going on, you couldn’t watch what was happening.”

Laughlin retrieved a steel gear from the wreckage of the plane and later had it engraved, “Rising Sun that Set on Oahu, Dec. 7, 1941.”

Like the soldiers, American aircraft were also clustered on the ground. The military had anticipated sabotage, not an air attack, and having planes in the same place made it easier to guard them. It also made them easier targets.

“Hickam Field was above us. They had 16-inch guns between us and the ocean,” Laughlin recalled.

“After the first attack, there was a lull. There were all kinds of rumors.”

Once night fell, American commanders feared the Japanese would launch an amphibious assault, so they sent the soldiers to the beaches to dig foxholes. The tide came in and filled the foxholes with water. Laughlin found himself filling sandbags so the radar detail could protect its equipment.

Chaos ensued. “Everybody was shootin’ at anything that night,” Laughlin said. Six American planes were downed by friendly fire.

Balloons on cables were floated each night over Pearl Harbor to trip low-flying enemy planes, but the Japanese fighters did not return to Hawaii.

Once the United States had declared war, Laughlin’s Army skills as a truck driver were needed to haul meals to troops stationed on various parts of the island.

“I very seldom got a whole meal myself,” said Laughlin, who, to this day, is spare of frame.

Laughlin was drafted at age 23, just 10 days after he and his wife, Dorothy, were married. In early December, just before the attack, he had sent his wife a map showing her where he was stationed.

When news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reached the United States, Dorothy Laughlin knew her husband was there. For three months, she had no idea if he was dead, alive or missing in action. Then, he managed to send word to her that he had survived.

“I’m a Pearl Harbor survivor, too,” she said. “I waited for him to come home.”

His unit’s name was changed to B Battery, 295th Anti-Aircraft Searchlight Battalion, and Laughlin was deployed to Baker Island in the Pacific for 11 months.

He then returned to Hawaii, serving for the rest of the war until his discharge in September 1945.

“Not too many guys were in Hawaii for the first day of the war and the last day of the war,” Laughlin said.

Laughlin retired in 1981 from American Cyanamid in Bridgeville with 40 years’ service. He and his wife are the parents of two sons, Brian and Ronald.

The last thing Laughlin expected about the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor was that it would be observed during wartime.

“I never thought we’d get in that kind of war again. I always figured everything was safe,” he said.

The difference between Dec. 7, 1941, and Sept. 11, 2001, he said, is that during the Pearl Harbor attack, “You knew who you were fighting. They knew right away it was the Japanese. But this way, you wonder if they’re bombing the right people.”

Floyd Laughlin died Saturday, January 26, 2013.