Sneak Attack: Small Arms at Pearl Harbor - The Ayoob Files

American Handgunner, Jan-Feb, 2002 by Massad Ayoob

This is not to say that the pistols fired by U.S. military personnel that day were entirely without effect. At least one may have actually brought down an enemy fighter. "One of the fellows had a .45-caliber pistol," remembered Yeoman First Class Kenton Nash, who was at Kaneohe Naval Air Station that morning, "and I think he pierced the oil tank on a fighter plane, which I saw going away smoking. So I feel that he got one. But there was no antiaircraft batteries, and the only thing available was the .45-caliber pistols that they checked out of the armory."

For the most part, however, the pistols fired from the ground did little more than vent the sort of righteous fury which Col. Jeff Cooper, who would fight in the Pacific Theater, later called "The red haze of battle."

Even shots that don't send an enemy plane away trailing smoke cannot be said to be futile. If nothing else, they remind the enemy of the defender's unshakable resolve. At least one enemy pilot was suitably impressed.

Historian Walter Lord's powerful Day of Infamy notes, "Up above, Lt. Yoshio Shiga raked Ewa (the Marine Corps Naval Air Station) with his Zero fighter. He noticed a Marine standing beside a disabled plane and charged down, all guns blazing. The man refused to budge... kept firing back with a pistol. Shiga still considers him the bravest American he has ever met."

Some of the defenders were even more weakly equipped. They had only shotguns.

Scatterguns Respond

A review of the literature shows that shotguns were indeed fired at the enemy. At Pearl Harbor, however, they appear to have had no effect, though a shotgun would come into play during the drama of the last enemy pilot captured from the raid.

Private Leslie Le Fan, who was at the Marine barracks, remembered, "There was a Marine officer and a naval officer who walked out of the barracks. They were undoubtedly going skeet shooting that morning. They both had automatic 12-gauge shotguns, and I'm going to say that each one was carrying a satchel filled with four boxes of ammo. They stopped right in the middle of the parade grounds in front of the barracks, loaded their shotguns, and began to fire. The thought went through my head: 'What do they expect to do to an airplane with a shotgun?' But a man had to do something."

As with the brave Marine with the 1911 who hammered a lesson in American resolve into the heart of the invading pilot, the men with the shotguns had at least made a statement. One is reminded of a T-shirt popular in the U.S. in the 1980s. It depicted a mouse raising its middle finger toward a giant eagle that was swooping in upon it with extended claws and rapaciously open beak. The caption was, "The Last Great Act of Defiance."

Service Rifles

While privately owned sporting and target rifles were apparently deployed against the invaders, the overwhelming majority of effective small-arms fire by Americans on December 7, 1941, came from .30-'06 military rifles. Photos taken that day show a preponderance of Springfield 1903 bolt-actions, but some of the new semiautomatic M-1 Garands had made their way to Hawaii by then. The Army had some, but the Marine Corps came later to the M-1 and was not yet using it as a primary weapon, according to historian Mike Wright.