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This morning, she woke just after eight o'clock and decided to let her husband sleep in; they'd been to a party the night before and Alex was a bit hungover. Betty switched on the radio to listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir while she waited for the coffee to percolate. Just as she was taking her first sip, a harsh buzz interrupted the mellifluous tones of the singers.

Another drill, Betty thought. Like other Oahu residents, she was long accustomed to the regular emergency alerts that were broadcast over the radio due to proximity to the naval base and Hickam Air Field at Pearl Harbor. The alerts had become so frequent that most residents tuned them out, and indeed, a couple of minutes later, the choir returned to their hymns just as Betty poured more coffee. But then the phone jangled, and she picked up after the first ring to avoid waking Alex.

"Something's happened down at Hickam," her photographer Allen "Hump" Campbell blurted out, skipping his usual pleasantries. "We need to get down to the base now."

News of the war in Europe and in the Pacific appeared regularly in the paper, but many citizens tuned it out. After all, the various battles and skirmishes were thousands of miles away. Besides, many residents of Hawaii—at the time a US territory, not a full-fledged state—had already lived through the destruction of World War I and had become isolationists as a result, against war at any cost.

But Betty had recently covered stories about troop movements in and out of Oahu on their way to other parts of the world, so she knew something was brewing. Even she, though, had no way to predict the enormity of what was to come.

She gulped her coffee past the lump in her throat, but in addition to fear, she had to admit that she felt something else: a frisson of excitement. Maybe now I'll get to cover something more than flower shows and society luncheons, she thought.

As soon as she hung up, the phone rang again. This time it was Alex's editor with the same message: Get down here 'now.'

She shook her husband awake and poured him a coffee. He threw on some clothes, and after a quick kiss, he ran out the door. As a police reporter, Alex was waved through police lines and yellow-taped crime scenes, but Betty needed a male escort to gain access to anything more than the usual ladies' social events that she covered, and women were never allowed onto the military bases, escort or not. She downed the rest of her coffee while she waited for Hump to show up, and that's when she first heard it, a low rumble coming from the west. She switched off the radio and heard it again, louder this time: a boom followed by several muffled explosions.

A bomb.

Hump pulled up to the house a few minutes later, slowing down just enough for Betty to yank open the door and hop in. As they raced toward the harbor, they passed people walking their dogs and others heading to church. Palm trees lining the roads swayed in the light breeze. Just another Sunday morning on Oahu. Betty's mind started playing tricks on her. Had she imagined the explosions?

Maybe it was a drill after all.

She relaxed slightly, but then she saw the birds. At first, a few small, feathered bodies peppered the sidewalk, mostly doves and sparrows. They looked peaceful, as if they were napping. A few short blocks later, tiny corpses covered the asphalt, their feathers ruffled and askew.

Hump's jaw clenched as he swerved to avoid the birds, mostly unsuccessfully.

The concussion of the bombing had killed them.

This was no drill.

As their car crested the hill near the Punchbowl neighborhood, the ocean came into view. Betty never tired of the sight of Pearl Harbor and the sugarcane fields sprawled out in the distance. But now she only saw thick columns of smoke billowing up into the sky from the harbor. The water looked like it was on fire.

A few small fighter planes loop-de-looped in graceful arcs overhead. Betty craned her head outside the window. The insignia on the side of the plane was a red circle, the symbol of Japan, land of the rising sun.

"Suddenly, there was a sharp whistling sound, almost over my shoulder, and I saw a rooftop fly into the air like a pasteboard movie set," she remembered years later.

She watched as the planes turned toward the harbor, where they paused momentarily in midair before plunging straight down into the ocean.

"For the first time, I felt that numb terror that all of London has known for months, of not being able to do anything but fall on your stomach and hope the bomb won't land on you," she said. "It's the terror of sudden visions of a ripping sensation in your back, shrapnel coursing through your chest, total blackness, maybe death." 

The war had finally come to America.

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