Pearl Harbor Survivor and Pilot Cass Phillips - Naval Air Station Kaneohe Bay

Cass Phillips awoke on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, in his barracks at Naval Air Station Kaneohe Bay on Oahu and headed for the base’s exchange for food with a friend.
As they walked, they noticed one plane and then another with what Phillips called “meatballs” - or the Japanese red circle. The Navy radioman second class thought these were drill planes painted to look like a realistic enemy.
But once Phillips and his friend got to the exchange, a worker there pointed to smoke coming from a hanger. They then realized it was a real attack: the Japanese hitting Oahu’s airfields to maintain air superiority on their way to strike Pearl Harbor.
Phillips went to work helping transport wounded by vehicle and moving less damaged planes away from burning ones.
During the second wave, without a clear way to defend himself and the base, Phillips took cover in a concrete compartment within the damaged hanger. Then a bomb came into it, and Phillips recalled seeing a man sit down from the blast and remain motionless. A tiny piece of shrapnel, he later found out, went directly into his heart and killed him.
In total, 20 were killed at Kaneohe and 2,403 Americans overall. Of Kaneohe’s 36 PBY Catalina flying boat, only three - which had been out on patrol - were flyable by the attack’s end.
Phillips and the others anticipated and prepared for follow-up attacks, including by dipping their white clothes in tea to darken them.
A few days after the attack, Phillips flew over the harbor and saw the terrible carnage there. “The damage and seeing those ships on their side and on their top - it was really a sorry sight to see and something that made you feel terrible.”
Soon after the attack, in February 1942, Phillips was accepted to pilot school and headed to the mainland for training. This likely saved his life, for on April 5, the PBY he’d been a radioman for crashed amid bad weather into a hillside at Makapu’u Point at Oahu’s southeastern tip.
In the war, he piloted PBY sea missions, including around Alaska, the Philippines, and New Guinea: strafing, bombing and dropping depth charges on enemy vessels; carrying out reconnaissance; and performing water landings to rescue downed airmen. Additionally, at least once, his plane dropped propaganda leaflets over eastern Asia meant to demoralize the Japanese forces.
The most visibly gory mission was his plane strafing three wide-open and essentially defenseless rafts of Japanese in Philippine waters.
“That was our job then,” Phillips said. “You can’t afford to worry about them. That’s your job. War is killing people.”
He remained in the Navy as a career officer, retiring in 1960 as a lieutenant commander. Despite all that time of service, he doesn’t consider himself a hero.
“They call you one, and they say they think you are,” he said. “But, of course, we who just happened to be there when [Pearl Harbor] happened, we did what we could and what our job was and that was about it.
“That doesn’t make you a hero.”

[@BonnieDragonKat]

Thank you for your service and sharing. You likely knew my cousin Lee Fox Jr.