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Never Forget.
There was a good story in todays paper about a local man.
Excerpts...
FORT WORTH -- Sixty-five years ago today, the history books record a great American loss....wars are fought by men, and from that level on Dec. 7, 1941, Ralph C. Riddle scored his own, admittedly small, victory.
Riddle had volunteered to be there, both in the Army Air Forces and on top of a two-story building at Wheeler Field, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu.
An Oklahoma-born boy who had grown up in southern New Mexico as a sharecropper's son, Riddle joined the Army in 1938 to escape a hard life. He was 18 at the time
A bomb that dropped on a hangar next to Riddle's barracks served as his wake-up call on the morning of Dec. 7. Everyone spilled out of the barracks, holding helmets and gas masks. People started running for cover, crawling under buildings.
Over the din, Riddle could hear his sergeant.
"I was more scared of the provost sergeant than I was of the Japanese," he said.
The sergeant wanted to know who could operate the .50-caliber gun on top of the building. Riddle said he could.
The only volunteer to go up on top of the building with Riddle, in plain sight of the Japanese bombers and fighters, was a soldier who had been released from the brig during the attack. His job was to crank the water cooler to keep the gun cool and to feed the ammunition.
"All you could hear was this drone of planes. You couldn't see nothing because of the smoke," he said. "I wouldn't have known a Japanese plane if I'd seen it. I was 21 years old. Fresh off the farm."
Machine-gun fire from the planes raked the building. Bombs rattled the roof.
And when the smoke cleared enough, Riddle watched a plane drop a bomb from only a few hundred feet.
"I opened up on him, probably put 15 rounds in him," he said. "He went into a pineapple field and burned up. He didn't get no further."
After about 30 minutes, the planes all seemed to move on to Pearl Harbor, where Riddle could watch the attack on the Navy shipyard through his field glasses.
He was interrupted by his lieutenant.
"Did you shoot that plane down?" he asked Riddle.
"Yes, sir."
"You shot down one of our planes!" the lieutenant yelled.
"Sir, I don't know whose it was, but it dropped a bomb, so I shot it down," Riddle answered.
The lieutenant later investigated the wreckage, apologized to Riddle and promoted him from private first class to sergeant within a few weeks.
Riddle, now 86, earned the Silver Star, the third-highest medal for valor, for his actions the morning of Dec. 7.
He stayed in the Air Force after the war, retiring in 1969 as a master sergeant. He settled in Fort Worth because he liked Carswell Air Force Base the best.
And though he occasionally forgets the simple things of an hour or a week ago, his day of combat he has not.
"I never drew a weapon on the enemy after that day," he said.
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