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Special Units · Pearl Harbor, 1941
The 47th Pursuit Squadron
Away from Wheeler Field for gunnery practice, the squadron had armed fighters at a small north-shore strip the attackers left almost alone. Two of its lieutenants, George Welch and Kenneth Taylor, drove there under fire and took them up against the attack.
- U.S. Army Air Forces · Hawaiian Air Force
- Haleiwa and Wheeler Field, Oahu
- 7 December 1941
Fighters in rows
Wheeler Field, on the plateau in the middle of Oahu beside Schofield Barracks, was the Hawaiian Air Force’s main fighter base, and its P-40s and older P-36s were the island’s air defense. After the war warning of 27 November, Lt. Gen. Walter C. Short chose the lowest of his three alerts, the alert against sabotage. Under it, the Air Forces history explains, aircraft were grouped where they could be guarded rather than dispersed for a quick takeoff, and were on about four hours’ notice. At Wheeler the new P-40s stood in squadron lines, wingtip to wingtip, and their .50-caliber ammunition was locked away in Hangar 3 (Craven and Cate, vol. I; Arakaki and Kuborn).
Against saboteurs that made sense. Against strafing it was a disaster. Dive bombers hit Wheeler’s hangar line at about 0802 and fighters followed, raking the rows. The Army’s history records that Wheeler “lost two hangars, and more than two-thirds of its planes were destroyed or badly damaged,” and that the first attack “effectively prevented any large-scale response by Wheeler’s fighter planes.” The Army put the field’s toll at 37 enlisted men killed and 59 wounded (Chapter 5).
The strip on the north shore
Two pursuit squadrons were away from Wheeler that weekend for gunnery practice: the 44th at Bellows Field near Waimanalo and the 47th at Haleiwa on the north shore. Their aircraft were armed and needed only fuel and a warm-up. Because the squadrons had been dispersed for practice, not for defense, these were the fighters on Oahu with the best chance of getting into the air (Conn, Engelman and Fairchild, Guarding the United States and Its Outposts).
Haleiwa barely figures in the attack record. The Joint Congressional Committee said flatly that it “was not attacked”; the Army’s history says a single plane strafed it and did less damage than at Bellows. The Japanese apparently did not know about the small strip, or did not think it worth the trouble. That made it the one place on the island where American fighters could take off without being shot at on the runway.
Haleiwa was a short grass auxiliary strip, not a fighter base. It had other unexpected visitors that morning. Twelve B-17s of the 38th and 88th Reconnaissance Squadrons, flying in unarmed from Hamilton Field, California, after an overnight flight of about 2,400 miles, arrived over Oahu in the middle of the attack and came down wherever they could. Two of them, flown by Capt. Richard H. Carmichael and 1st Lt. Harold N. Chaffin, set down on the short strip at Haleiwa (Craven and Cate; Arakaki and Kuborn). For the rest of the morning the north-shore field held bombers that could not fight and fighters that could.
Ten miles by car
Second Lieutenants George S. Welch and Kenneth M. Taylor of the 47th were at Wheeler after a long Saturday night when the bombs began to fall. Welch telephoned Haleiwa to have two P-40s fueled and warmed up, and the two drove the roughly ten miles to the north shore by car. The Army history puts their takeoff “at or soon after 8:15 a.m.”; the Air Force history says about 0830 and notes that exact times are hard to establish (Conn, Engelman and Fairchild; Arakaki and Kuborn).
Ground control sent them toward Ewa, the Marine field west of Pearl Harbor, where they found a line of Japanese aircraft and each claimed two. Low on fuel and ammunition, they landed at Wheeler to rearm. Welch took off first. Taylor waited for what he thought was the last of the attackers to pass, was attacked just after takeoff and was wounded in the arm and leg. Welch shot down the plane on Taylor’s tail, his third claim of the day, then went back toward Ewa and claimed a fourth. The official Air Forces history credits Welch with four enemy planes (Craven and Cate, vol. I, p. 199).
They were not alone. Other 47th pilots also took off from Haleiwa: Lts. Harry M. Brown, Robert J. Rogers, John J. Webster and John L. Dains. Dains was shot down on a later sortie, apparently by American antiaircraft fire. Another P-36 from a later flight out of Haleiwa was brought down by machine-gun fire from Schofield Barracks, a measure of how quickly gunners on the ground began firing at everything overhead. None of these sorties would have happened without the squadron’s ground crews, who had the aircraft fueled, armed and running and then turned them around for the pilots who came back. Their names are not in the citations.
What the claims mean
The Air Forces history counts about 25 Army pursuit sorties between 0830 and 0930, from Haleiwa, Wheeler and Bellows. Four P-36s of the 46th Pursuit Squadron fought nine Japanese aircraft over the windward side and lost 2nd Lt. Gordon H. Sterling Jr.; 2nd Lt. Philip M. Rasmussen was credited with one. The Pacific Air Forces history totals the Army pilots’ claims at 10 destroyed, or 11 if a victory claimed by Dains before he was lost is added, against four Army fighters lost in air combat. The Army as a whole claimed 11 Japanese aircraft and the Navy 28, more than the 29 aircraft the Japanese actually lost to every cause, and some fighter claims were also claimed by gunners on the ground (Arakaki and Kuborn; Conn, Engelman and Fairchild). The claims were made in confusion, often against aircraft that others were already firing on, and could not be checked against Japanese records until after the war.
None of that diminishes what Welch and Taylor did. It places it. They were among the American pilots who fought back that morning, not the only ones, and whatever the true count, the Army’s fighters were too few and got up too late to protect anything on Oahu. Gen. Henry H. Arnold is reported to have recommended both lieutenants for the Medal of Honor. Both received the Distinguished Service Cross instead; Taylor’s was announced in War Department General Orders No. 2 of 5 January 1942.
surprised at Wheeler Field … shot down two enemy planes
Afterward
Welch, born in 1918 in Wilmington, Delaware, went on to fly combat in the Pacific and is generally credited with sixteen Japanese aircraft in all. He left the service as a major in 1944 to become a test pilot for North American Aviation and was killed on 12 October 1954 when an F-100A Super Sabre broke up in a test dive near Rosamond Dry Lake, California. Taylor, born in Enid, Oklahoma, in 1919, retired from active duty as a colonel in 1967 and from the Alaska Air National Guard as a brigadier general in 1971. He was a technical adviser on the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora! and publicly criticized the 2001 film Pearl Harbor, which drew loosely on his story. He died in 2006.
The insignia, rendered
Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem. The wings borrow the general look of Air Corps insignia of the period; the drawings are not based on the squadron’s own emblem.
Timeline
- A war warning reaches Hawaii; Short orders the alert against sabotage, and Wheeler’s fighters are lined up to be guarded.
- The 47th is at Haleiwa and the 44th at Bellows for gunnery practice.
- About 25 dive bombers hit Wheeler’s hangar line; strafers follow.
- Welch telephones Haleiwa to have two P-40s readied; he and Taylor drive about ten miles from Wheeler.
- Welch and Taylor take off from Haleiwa and are sent toward Ewa; each claims two.
- Rearming at Wheeler, Taylor is wounded on takeoff; Welch shoots down his attacker and claims a fourth near Ewa.
- Lt. John L. Dains is shot down, apparently by American antiaircraft fire.
- War Department General Orders No. 2 announces Taylor’s Distinguished Service Cross.
- Welch is killed testing an F-100A near Rosamond Dry Lake, California.
People of the unit
Read the full story
- Chapter 5: The Airfields: Wheeler, Hickam, Kaneohe, Ewa, Bellows and Ford Island
- Chapter 3: The Warnings That Did Not Land
- The 47th Pursuit Squadron in the Pearl Harbor collection
- The Pearl Harbor collection and harbor atlas
By the numbers
The 47th Pursuit Squadron by the numbers
Claims against losses, 7 December 1941
American claims of Japanese aircraft destroyed, set against what the Japanese actually lost to every cause. Many claims overlapped, and some were made by pilots and gunners for the same aircraft
Source: Leatrice R. Arakaki and John R. Kuborn, 7 December 1941: The Air Force Story; Conn, Engelman and Fairchild, Guarding the United States and Its Outposts (1964); Chapter 5
The Army fighters’ hour
Army pursuit effort over Oahu, about 0830–0930, and the 47th’s two best-known pilots. Claims as credited at the time, not checked against Japanese records
Source: W. F. Craven and J. L. Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. I (1948), pp. 198–200; Arakaki and Kuborn; Chapter 5
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
Sources
- Stetson Conn, Rose C. Engelman and Byron Fairchild, Guarding the United States and Its Outposts, United States Army in World War II (1964), ch. VII.
- W. F. Craven and J. L. Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. I (1948), pp. 198–200.
- Leatrice R. Arakaki and John R. Kuborn, 7 December 1941: The Air Force Story (Pacific Air Forces Office of History).
- Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Report (1946).
- Military Times Hall of Valor, Distinguished Service Cross citation for Kenneth M. Taylor; U.S. Department of Defense, “Pilots Fought Back Heroically Against Pearl Harbor Attack”; U.S. Air Force, “Historian revisits Dec. 7, 1941.”
- U.S. Army, “70th anniversary: Wheeler attacked” (2011).