‘We could hear and feel the bombs as they hit’: In a rediscovered letter, a San Diego man’s mother recounts the attack on Pearl Harbor
A man sits in front of a wall covered in framed memorabilia, holding a framed black-and-white photo of a woman and a letter.
Jim Armstrong of Pacific Beach recently found the letter written by his late mother, a Red Cross nurse who was nearly killed in the raid
BY GARY ROBBINS
DEC. 7, 2023 5 AM PT
Jim Armstrong of Pacific Beach held up the sheets of stained, faded paper: “Here’s what happened when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.”
Eighty-two years ago today, when Japan made the surprise raid that plunged the U.S. into World War II, Armstrong’s father, Jack, was an Army Air Corps bombardier at Oahu’s Hickam Field, and his mother, Audrey, was a Red Cross nurse.
Months later, she would meticulously type a six-page letter to her family in Minneapolis describing in harrowing detail what happened — a letter that her son, now 71, says he discovered only a few weeks ago, thumbing through a long forgotten book.
He’d already learned a lot about the attack, which killed more than 2,400 people, from his parents. And over the past decade, Armstrong has helped repatriate some personal effects that his father had collected from a Japanese pilot who crashed on the Hawaiian island of Ni’ihau.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/military/story/2023-12-07/we-could-hear-and-feel-the-bombs-as-they-hit-in-a-rediscovered-letter-a-san-diego-mans-mother-recounts-the-attack-on-pearl-harbor
