07 December 2016

Friendly fire deaths at Pearl Harbor

"Most of the civilians who died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor were killed by American antiaircraft shells. “There was so much excitement and confusion,” harbor worker John Garcia told Studs Turkel for The Good War, his oral history of World War II. “Some of our sailors were shooting five-inch guns at the Japanese planes. You just cannot down a plane with a five-inch shell. They were landing in Honolulu, the unexploded naval shells. They have a ten-mile range. They hurt and killed a lot of people in the city.”"

1 comment:

  1. That reminds me of the movie "The Mexican", in which one of the characters gets killed by a bullet that was fired up into the air during a local celebration where the celebrants fire off their guns into the air as part of the noise making.

    ReplyDelete