I have an infallible wish to change the course of history. I want to tell Custer, not that he’d listen, “Don’t go down there.” I want to tell Captain Smith of Titanic: “Slow down, sir. Pack ice, bergs and growlers ahead.” I want to tell President Lincoln not to go to the theater. I want to tell Amelia Earhart to double-check her radio equipment.

All of it, for sure, for naught.

The biggest challenge would be to give Pearl Harbor some kind of advance notice of what was coming to them five days after today’s date. The Imperial task force–six fleet carriers and a cluster of support ships—had just received the message “Climb Mt. Niitaka,” the code ordering Adm. Nagumo’s fleet to complete its mission. Radio silence followed.

My warning, obviously, never worked but neither did warnings from Naval Intelligence that the Japanese fleet had suddenly disappeared. That morning, the destroyer Ward’s sinking of a midget sub at the Pearl Harbor entrance didn’t cause enough nerves to jangle. The radar report from Point Opana, about heavy incoming air traffic, was dismissed because a flight of B-17 bombers from the States was due in that morning. The telegram from Washington warning that war was imminent arrived long after the attack had.

And, having no means to travel back in time, I wasn’t there, hopping up and down on Waikiki to warn servicemen and tourists alike about what was coming. They would’ve put me in the looney bin, anyway.

Rod Serling’s Twilight Zones loved to play with the time-travel warning from the future idea. In another vintage TV broadcast, the wonderful actor Dana Andrews (Best Years of Our Lives) tries the same trick, in an episode written by Serling. This Wikipedia summation is excellent:

Paul (Andrews) first travels to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and attempts to warn a Hiroshima police captain about the atomic bomb, but the captain dismisses him as insane. Paul then travels to a Berlin hotel room to assassinate Adolf Hitler in August 1939 (immediately before the outbreak of World War II the following month), but is interrupted when a housekeeper knocks on his door and later calls two SS guards to his room. On his third stop, Paul tries to change the course of the Lusitania on May 6, 1915, to avoid being torpedoed by a German U-boat, but the ship’s captain questions his credibility.

Paul accepts the hypothesis that the past cannot be changed. He then uses the time machine to go to the town of Homeville, Indiana in 1881, resolving not to make any changes, but just to live out his life free of the problems of the modern age. Upon his arrival, he realizes that President James A. Garfield will be shot the next day, but resists the temptation to intervene.

Even Kirk Douglas, for crying out loud, failed to change history, and his chance, sure enough, came at Pearl Harbor. In the slightly cheesy but somehow engrossing film The Final Countdown, his aircraft carrier—the VERY appropriately-named Nimitz, after the American commander in the Pacific in World War II-—is transported back in time, to Kido Butai’s time. All hell ensues.

From the lofty heights of 1980, it was comforting to imagine we had the airpower sufficient to prevent the tragedy at Pearl Harbor. We didn’t, of course, lacking the time-travel storm, and we didn’t have the right, either.

That’s a shame, for the impact of Pearl Harbor was devastating on my hometown, Arroyo Grande, California. Two sailors who grew up here were killed on battleship Arizona, as was a second cousin of mine. One of the Arizona sailors, Jack Scruggs, was about to play his trombone as the ship’s band assembled for the morning Colors Ceremony when concussions from falling bombs killed him, blowing his body into the harbor. His second-grade Arroyo Grande Grammar School classmate, Wayne Morgan, died moments later when the great ship blew up. I used many sources to put together the ship’s story.

Since retribution seems to be a big theme in today’s America, Americans got theirs six months after Pearl Harbor. Four of Kido Butai’s carriers, Shokaku, Zuikaku, Shoyu and Hiryu, were sunk at Midway. 2200 sailors died with the four ships.

By then, my hometown’s Japanese American residents—-farmers, merchants, athletes, honor roll students— were at the assembly enter at the Tulare County Fairgrounds. In August, they would be moved to the Rivers Camp in Arizona, where the temperature hovered at 108 degrees for most of that month.

At war’s end, only about half came home. By then, two of them, soldiers, had died in combat. One was a 442nd Regimental Combat Team rifleman who died in the relief of the “Lost Battalion.” These were 240 terrified 19-year-old Texans surrounded by the Germans in France in October 1944. The 240 Texans were rescued, at the cost of at least 800 killed or wounded Nisei soldiers, including ours, who was trying to bring up more ammunition under withering German fire. The other G.I., an 83rd Infantry Division medic, was felled by a German sniper’s shot as he knelt over a wounded brother-soldier.

That’s too much history to change, and, in truth, given those two local sailors and those two local soldiers, we are honored—and, hopefully, humbled— by the gifts that were their lives.

Alan Magee was a ball-turret gunner on a B-17 based at RAF Molesworth in March 1943. A key responsibility of his bomb group, the 360th, and his squadron, the 303rd, was to assault the German U-boat bases along France’s western coast. The U-boats themselves, as long as they were in their pens, were safe; the concrete and steel protection, built by slave labor, was so indestructible that the French Navy used the sub pens for their submarines throughout the Cold War.

In 1943, the U-boats were attacks were devastating, the tonnage sunk so vast that England was in danger of starving. (My father gifted a British family, in 1944, with a bag of California oranges. The mother of the family burst into tears. They hadn’t seen fresh oranges since 1939. That was the work of the U-boats.)

Later, the Halcyon brothers, the Varians, would help to develop the klystron tube, an improvement on radar that, in air attacks, devastated the U-boats once they’d slipped into the slipped from their protection at St. Nazaire or Lorient. I once read a gripping autobiography written by a U-boat captain, appropriately entitled Iron Coffins; by 1944, that’s what they’d become.

So it wasn’t the sub pens themselves that were the targets of Magee’s squadron: it was the yards where torpedoes were gathered after their shipment from German factories to the French coast.

His B-17 was named “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” after the Rice Krispies characters, which made for far less racy nose painting than the generously-bosomed Vargas girl imitations that adorned so many B-17s. (Pilots averaged around twenty-two; some gunners, liars, were fifteen.)

Since Magee was a ball-turret gunner, that meant he was the tiniest of the nine men he flew with. Only a small man could fit in the bubble beneath the B-17. An electrical motor rotated the turret; the exit hatch, however could only be opened from inside the B-17’s fuselage, .

Magee was lucky. When “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” was riddled by German fighters on the St. Nazaire mission, on January 3, 1943, He found his way onto the flight deck, inside the seeming safety of the fuselage.

That’s when the B-17 blew up.

Magee was thrown out by the blast, semiconscious, and began to fall.

He had no parachute.

He had 22,000 feet to fall.

What broke his fall was the steel-and-glass roof of the St. Nazaire train station, made famous in studies by the Impressionist Claude Monet, obsessive, in 1877, about capturing light properly at different times of the day, experiments he could continue with the Rouen Cathedral and along the banks of the Seine.

The train roof broke Magee’s fall, and it broke Magee. One arm was nearly severed. one leg was broken, he suffered massive internal injuries and the surface of his body was peppered by bits of shrapnel. In a story not uncommon for the war in Europe, a German military doctor saved his life. The antiaircraft crew that had shot down another Morro Bay copilot offered him a hot bowl of potato soup once they’d recovered him, about to be shot by an irate German farmer. When he was on his way to a POW camp, he boarded a train with his Luftwaffe guard, who slipped the latches of the briefcase he was carrying, removed its contents, and wordlessly offered Lt. Robert Abbey Dickson a thick slice of sausage atop black bread.

In the 1990s, Alan Magee returned to France for the unveiling of this memorial to the crew of “Snap! Crackle! Pop!”

That might be the end of the story, but of course it isn’t. Weeks later, another member of the 303rd Bomb Squadron was killed returning from a raid on the submarine facilities at Lorient. Clair Abbot Tyler was from Morro Bay. I once lived on Piney Way, the street where he grew up. The best man at his wedding, to a schoolteacher and descendant of the Dana family, was Alex Madonna, for whom my father worked.

Like so many fliers I wrote about in Central Coast Aviators in World War II, Tyler left a little girl behind.

Here is his story.

And one final point, but this one about U-boats. There have been so many fine World War II films, and one of the finest is German, written and directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Das Boot (1981) humbled me in that it separated Germans from Nazis. In this scene, the crew sings a popular British tune from the First World War, mostly to infuriate the boat’s political officer. He got off easily. In The Hunt for Red October, Sean Connery strangled his political officer.

i