The Associated Press
Smoke and flames are seen as the magazine explodes on the destroyer USS Shaw during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

Harmon

'Our acclaimed Wake Island raid'

Maurice A. "Buck" Harmon

I am a native of Ohio. Born and raised in a small city roughly the size of Olympia, near Cincinnati (a life-long fan of the Reds). My family was upper middle class until the depression caused my father to lose his business and face bankruptcy.

What a blow that was. After high school I joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and was sent to Califor-nia, where our camp was in the high hills east of Los Angeles.

I spent the required six months, a superb experience for a teen-ager. I saved a bit of money and entered Ohio State University, working odd jobs for all four years. I was a member of Ohio State's football team and began to gain recognition until a severely fractured left leg ended that career.

After graduation, I spent a year coaching in Cleveland. I then entered Western Reserve University, now Case Western Reserve, to study psychology.

I was in graduate school there, when in 1941 my draft card number was pulled out of the barrel. Students were angry to be pulled out of graduate work because, as the screaming went, "the war was in Europe, and the U.S. was not involved or not going to be!" We had little faith in President Franklin D. Roosevelt to keep us out of it. So, I was a private in the Army for several months. I still recall one day in the mess hall kitchen, peeling potatoes from early a.m. to late night with two other privates, one from graduate school at Harvard and the other after his doctorate at Princeton.

I was commissioned in early 1942. I was then sent to an Army Air Corps organization in process of being formed in, of all places, Ephrata, Wash. I became a charter member of the 307th Bomb group, Heavy a B-24 bomber group. I became armament/ordnance officer of the 372nd Bomber Squadron. After brief train-ing. we were sent to Hamilton Field, Calif.. from which we flew to Hickam Field in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Hawaii was still very jittery from the Pearl Harbor attack a few months before, so our bomb group was assigned to fly search every day to make sure there were no invasion fleets coming across the high seas.

Suddenly we were assigned our first combat mission, Wake Island, an island captured by the Japanese soon after Pearl Harbor.

The raid by the 307th Bomb Group became headline news throughout the world, the first offensive attack by allied forces anywhere in the war.

After our acclaimed Wake Island raid, we were shipped to the famous island of Guadalcanal. I was wounded during a Japanese attack on the small island of Funa Futi.

What followed for me was three years in the South Pacific combat area, first under the command of Admi-ral Halsey and then under General MacArthur after he was rescued from the Philippines and taken to Aus-tralia.

As the war progressed westward, we moved our bomb group and its four squadrons from one island base to another.

From Guadalcanal in the eastern sector to Marotai, south of the Philippines, in the western sector, we moved 3,000 miles. I learned a hell of a lot about the geography of the South Pacific as well as I did about the war fought there.

The Olympian Copyright 2001

back to main Pearl Harbor + 60 index