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- PEARL HARBOR, Page 34REMEMBRANCE"As If We Were in a Tornado"
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- By BURT AMGWERT
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- [Now 75, he was a pharmacist mate at the Naval Hospital.]
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- I saw a gray plane with a large red dot on the fuselage
- fly past, and a corpsman shouted, "The Japs are bombing us!" A
- bomb hit the destroyer Shaw in dry dock, and the concussion
- broke windowpanes in the hospital and blew our clothes and hair
- as if we were in a tornado.
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- At about dusk we saw four planes flying low, coming up the
- channel toward the harbor. Almost every antiaircraft gun in the
- Navy Yard started firing at them. The sad part is, they turned
- out to be U.S. Navy planes from the carrier Enterprise. Three
- were shot down, and the fourth pilot was brought into the
- hospital, wounded.
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- We had a bed capacity of about 300 people. At midnight
- that night we had 960 patients. And we had 313 dead, stacked
- outside like cordwood.
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