The Sailor Who Became WWII’s 1st Medal of Honor Recipient for Defending Pearl Harbor
History
By Matt Fratus | December 07, 2020
On Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941, aviation ordnance Chief Petty Officer John Finn was in bed, resting his head on his pillow, in a debate with his wife, Alice, about who was in charge of making coffee. Finn hadn’t a worry in his mind, as he was spending the weekend off-duty in the tropical paradise of Kaneohe Bay, a naval air station located about 15 miles east of Pearl Harbor.
Their three-bedroom quarters were so new that they didn’t even have curtains up yet. Finn saw a plane flash by where he knew a plane didn’t belong, and he went to investigate the unusual sight. When he got to the window, he looked outside and questioned why the planes in the sky only had single engines. Then came the sounds of machine guns.
“One minute I’m warm in bed with a pretty blonde and the next minute I’m down there,” John Finn later recalled in an interview for the book Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty. His neighbor, Eddie Sullivan, didn’t say a word as he opened the passenger side door of Finn’s Ford. They were only about a mile from the naval air station hangar. As they drove, the chaos grew louder. When they went around a bend in the road, Finn heard the roar of a plane behind him. Finn looked up to see a red ball on both its wings, markers indicating the planes were Japanese
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