Pearl Harbor survivor recalls ‘the day I do not forget’ 75 years later
WESTFIELD — When Robert Greenleaf closes his eyes, he still sees the red circles of the Rising Sun painted on the wings of Japanese warplanes headed toward nearby Pearl Harbor.
He was a gunner’s mate third class in the US Navy then, a 19-year-old making 70 cents a day while assigned to machine-gun school on a beach in Hawaii. Suddenly, he was at war, loading ammunition on Browning .50-caliber machine guns as fast as his Marine instructors could fire them.
“We heard the first bombs go off at 7:55, and a whole squad of Japanese torpedo planes flew over our heads,” he said of the morning attack. “When we saw the red meatballs on the wings, we realized who they were.”
Greenleaf, now 94, is among a sharply dwindling number of veterans who were on the Hawaiian island of Oahu on Dec. 7, 1941, when a Japanese surprise attack killed more than 2,400 people, wounded nearly 1,200 more, and propelled the United States into World War II.
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