Thunder of bombs, hiding in dark, her father’s fears. Modestan remembers Pearl Harbor
Lillian Karlotski had no idea what she was seeing the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when she stepped outside her home at the naval radio facility in Lualualei on the Hawaiian island of Oahu.
It was about 8 a.m. when the 11-year-old and her mother, Anne, thought they had heard thunder, which made no sense that clear, bright day. They spotted smoke rising over the low hills that separated them from the Pearl Harbor naval station, less than two dozen miles away.
Then two planes flew over their house, one of them so low that Lillian could see the pilot’s face. She saw red circles on the underside of the wings, which she later learned identified them as part of the 350-plus Japanese strike force launched in a surprise attack that killed more than 2,400 Americans, including civilians.
Lillian and her mom heard gunfire. “Our neighbor across the street — there were no fences — she yelled at us, ‘Go back in the house. They’re shooting at you,’ or that they were going to be, because they were shooting at the barracks.”
Lualualei was a small base: just six houses, like theirs, for officers and their families, then the barracks for the enlisted men, she said. Her father, William, was a communications officer.
Mother and daughter ran back inside and gathered with the family’s two younger children, 9-year-old Bill and 8-year-old Loraine.
Lillian, whose surname became Allen when she married her husband, Bill, in 1954, doesn’t remember being particularly scared at that point. Not even when the base immediately went into blackout, meaning all the light bulbs were removed from her house and a bulb painted blue was installed in the bathroom, which then had its window painted black.
Adults kept fears to selves
“I’m sure every adult was scared to death when they heard we were going to be invaded,” she said, sitting at the kitchen table in her Modesto home early this week. “Because that was what everybody was so afraid of — that we were going to be invaded that night. We were about a half mile off the beach.”
The dozen or so children at the Lualualei station were sheltered from that news, though they literally were sheltered in the crawl space beneath one of the homes, as adults stood guard outside. “That was what terrified me more than the Japanese,” she said, thinking back to being hunkered down with spiders and scorpions and centipedes for about a week.
The morning of the attack, her father already was gone from the house when she and her mom went outside. That was unusual for a Sunday morning, but it shortly was clear that the attack created an immediate need for communications personnel. Her dad didn’t return to the house until sometime the next day, and when he did, it was the first time she ever saw him with a gun on his hip.
And just as the crawl-space bugs initially scared her more than the thought of the Japanese, what her father soon asked of her made the creepy crawlies seem like nothing.
As he prepared to be shipped out now that the attack on the fleet at Pearl Harbor had drawn the U.S. into World War II, “My dad took me out to a small firing range,” Allen recalled. “And he handed me his gun. ... He said, ‘I want you to see if you can fire it and hit that target over there.’ So I lifted it up, shot one shot off, and that’s all I could do.” That was all her “skinny little arms” could manage, she said.
“But the scary thing was he told me, ‘If the Japanese invade, if we know there’s an invasion ... I have this gun at home, and I want you to shoot your mother and your brother and your sister.” That he then would have expected Lillian to take her own life went unspoken.
“He never spoke of it again,” she said, “because of course we were never invaded and of course I would not have done that. But it shows how terrified they were of the Japanese, though, because the Japanese already had a horrible reputation from the other countries they invaded — that they just slaughtered people and tortured them and stuff. That’s what he was afraid of.”
No school, barely a Christmas
The rest of December passed relatively uneventfully for Lillian and her siblings. The good news, as she viewed it then, was there would be no more school. The building at Schofield Barracks, another base where they were bused to take classes, had become a military hospital.
The bad news was there would be no Christmas tree and no lights. Anne had done some shopping for presents, so the children did receive those. Even when they were allowed to leave the base two weeks later to visit Honolulu, the stores were empty, Lillian said. The only freight coming to Hawaii was military.
In spring of ’42, with Easter nearing, all families were evacuated to the mainland. Saying goodbye to his wife and children again filled William Karlotski with dread, his daughter said.
“He was so worried about us when we were put on a ship to come to San Francisco,” Allen recalled. “... He knew how dangerous the waters were because there were torpedoes and things going on already with the ships. There were two destroyers out in front of us as escorts.”
Her father could get no word on his family until its safe arrival in California. And later he shared with her his nightmares about the U.S.S. Lurline being attacked and his wife and kids drowning and him being unable to save them.
There was no term for it at the time, but looking back on her dad’s health problems, including being hospitalized at the Navy hospital in Bremerton, Washington, Allen figures he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Karlotski finished out his career as a chief warrant officer working on communications on the island of Okinawa. When he left the service, his family settled in the Bay Area. Perhaps around 1948, Allen said, he opened up a radio repair shop in Castro Valley, which gave him a pleasant relief from the memories of war.
As for her, she and Bill moved to Modesto in 1963. Both were longtime teachers — he at Roosevelt Junior High, she at Sherwood and Woodrow elementary schools. For more than 40 years, the Allens and then their sons, Jeff and Terry, also owned and operated Bonanza Books & Comics in various locations in town.
Though just one day after the Pearl Harbor attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared Dec. 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy,” Lillian Allen said it was a long time before the historic significance of what she’d experienced struck her.
“It was just part of my history, or part of what we did,” she said. “When I started teaching at Sherwood (in 1967) and Dec. 7 would come along ... we’d study it and I’d talk to the kids about it and I would show them things I had from Hawaii.”
Until then, perhaps, when it was right there in the history textbooks, “I did not ever really realize what a momentous thing it was.”
This story was originally published December 6, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
