Robert D. Shaffer, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, April 29, 2002: Saving the Legacy tape no. 448 and 449

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ROB RT D. H FFER PRIL 29 2002 BEC: Oh geez. R 0 B: This is, you can see, this is a B-25. You can see how th r n r m between the prop and the ground. He slipped when he was getting the chocks out fr m under the wheel here. But other than that, the thing went off real well and they formed up and circled around, and we held up number signs to give them the true direction. You know there are three bearings: there's true bearing, there's magnetic bearing and there's relative bearing. You know what those are? BEC: Uh-huh. ROB: So as I remember it, we held up three, two, one, which meant that the Hornet was heading about northwest, which gave them a heading so they could set their compasses for the attack on Tokyo. So then after they were off, we turned and got the dickens out of there as fast as we could go. But we had a Lieutenant Jurika aboard the Hornet, who had been a Naval attache in Tokyo. And he was conversant in Japanese. So he had the radio on-and he also had the ship's loudspeaker on-and all of a sudden, there were some transmissions from the Japanese radio, and I don't quite remember the wording, but something about "alert, alert", and so forth. Then all of a sudden, the stations went off the air. And we figured that the bombs were dropping. Now the targets were military targets and each plane carried two bombs, two 500s. So you couldn't do an awful lot of damage; it was more the morale booster for the United States and also to let the Japanese know that they weren't invulnerable. Most of the planes ran out of gas. Some of them ditched; some of the crew members jumped. There were four, as I recall, captured by the Japanese and they were executed. But I've got the details in here. But then, after that, we went back to Pearl Harbor and I've never seen such devastation in my 22