Category:

She headed to the hospital, where she was greeted by sheer chaos, doctors yelling and blood and broken people everywhere. Gurneys with bodies—only a few hastily covered with a sheet—were stacked up on both sides of the hallway. In a room off the main lobby lay more bodies on pallets with arms and legs twisted and askew. "I had never known that blood could be so bright red," Betty would later say.

Most of the doctors had headed for Pearl Harbor as soon as the first bombs hit, so it was all hands on deck and no time for questions. Betty helped out in the emergency room, where she bore witness to some of the first American victims of the war.

"Bodies were laid on slabs in the grotesque positions in which they had died," she wrote. "Fear contorted their faces. Their clothes were blue-black from incendiary bombs."

Over in the corner, she spotted the body of a little girl around the same age as the boy she had pinched. She was barefoot and wore a red sweater, and had been jumping rope on a quiet Sunday morning when the attack hit. The rope was mostly gone, but her hands still gripped the charred wooden handles.

It was a detail that Betty never forgot.

* * *

Two hours after the initial attack, almost 2,400 American civilians and military personnel were dead, 21 ships were destroyed, and 164 planes were obliterated.

In a matter of minutes, the island of Oahu—and the United States of America—had morphed into a different world.

By nightfall on December 7, martial law had been declared throughout Hawaii and residents were essentially thrust into life in a war zone: Windows were blacked out to prevent attracting enemy gunfire at night, food and gasoline were rationed, and curfews and other restrictions immediately took effect.

The island's men flocked to sign up for military service, including Alex, who had served as an officer in the Naval Reserve for several years. Indeed, his unit was called up, and he reported for duty by the end of the week.

After helping out at the hospital, Betty headed for the newsroom and started cranking out her story. She wrote what she had witnessed: the chaos, the blood, the death, and the lingering threat in the air. But two days passed without her story in the newspaper, so Betty knocked on her editor's door.

Riley Allen had been editor of the Star-Bulletin for almost thirty years and had been instrumental in pushing for statehood for Hawaii from his first day at the post. Though the Star-Bulletin didn't publish a Sunday edition, Allen, an inveterate workaholic, was at his desk as usual on that fateful Sunday morning. The city was without a newspaper that morning since the presses at the Advertiser--Alex's paper—had broken down over the weekend. Allen saw the biggest scoop of his life and called in his reporters on their day off to hit the ground running. As a result, the 'Star-Bulletin' would publish three extra editions before nightfall, and its eyewitness accounts would be republished around the world.

While he championed the truth in his pages, he drew the line at Betty's story. "I decided not to print your story," he told her. "I think it would be too frightening for the women to read this."

She argued that it wasn't any more graphic than what thousands of women on the island had already witnessed firsthand, but Allen held firm.

He wasn't entirely to blame. Though the US government would set up the Office of Censorship twelve days after Pearl Harbor, newspaper editors were already reviewing reporters' copy with an eye toward not revealing anything that could be used by the enemy. Plus, the military had already instituted a strict censorship program hours after the attack, which covered radio broadcasts and newspapers and magazines, as well as letters and other correspondence sent through the postal service. First-person accounts in any form were particularly scrutinized.

Indeed, in the frenzied days that followed, editors operated on sheer adrenaline, still in shock, printing wire stories about the attack as well as news briefs by local reporters, though few carried bylines.

So Betty traveled the island, talking with residents and sniffing out stories that she thought would pass the acid test. When she wasn't working eighteen-hour days for the newspaper, she helped set barbed wire along Waikiki Beach to supposedly keep the Japanese from invading.

She had wanted change and excitement...but perhaps not this much this soon. She did know one thing: She wanted to serve her country and help win the war. She especially wanted to go overseas, to see the war unfold up close.

But first she had to write a column telling housewives that using cheap cuts of meat like liver and lamb neck was a matter of national security.

* * *