Jackson Hole woman recalls Pearl Harbor attack

JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) — All was tranquil on the hillside above the city of Honolulu on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, as 9-yearold Gainor Lloyd lay in bed reading a book.

When she heard explosions outside, she looked out her bedroom window to see bombs hitting the city on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. She raced down the hall to tell her parents.

“My mother just rolled over and said, ‘It’s just military practice,”’ 82-year-old Jackson Hole resident Gainor Bennett recalled. “I said, ‘The bombs are hitting the city, they’re not offshore.”’ Her parents turned on the radio and discovered that Japanese planes were bombing ships in Pearl Harbor.

The Lloyd family lined up along their living room window and watched airplanes fly by. Upon realizing the glass could shatter, they moved outside to gawk at the spectacle.

“I remember seeing a Japanese fighter plane fly by,” Bennett said, “a silver plane with the red sun on the side of it.”

At that moment life in a tropical paradise was forever changed for the daughter of a pineapple businessman. The coming days, weeks and years were spent under military control, nightly curfews and without any visible lights at night.

Today marks the 73rd anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, “a date which will live in infamy,” as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said the next day when asking Congress to declare war.

The attack that claimed more than 2,400 American lives left people feeling violated and afraid, Bennett said.

“When they talk about 9/11 today and say that’s the first time we’ve ever been bombed,” Bennett said, “to those of us who lived in Hawaii it was a very real attack by a foreign party right out of the blue.

“No one imagined that Japan, from 4,000 miles across the Pacific, was going to come and attack,” Bennett said. “It was an amazing concept.”

The surprise factor does invite comparison with the 2001 attack, though.

“Who would have ever imagined someone could hijack a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center,” Bennett said, “and with such devastating results.”

The bombs the Lloyd family saw hitting the city of Honolulu likely weren’t meant for civilians, Bennett said. They were from high-altitude bombers whose crews “hadn’t judged the strength of the trade winds adequately.”

Bennett’s mother, Margaret Lloyd, thought to pick up the telephone and call her minister. She advised him to turn on his radio and not drive to the church because of the danger of airplanes strafing any moving vehicles.

“His car was strafed as he was driving to church,” Bennett said.

Radio announcers advised island residents to hurry to fill their bathtubs for drinking water in case the city’s supply was interrupted, Bennett recalled.

“They kept repeating: Do not go out on the street. Fill your bathtubs with water.”

Next came darker news: “They said we’re now under martial law,” Bennett said. “The military took over completely. They said it’ll be a total blackout tonight, no lights. Prepare any food before it gets dark.”

Military officials were afraid of nighttime air attacks, Bennett said.

“If you had a light shining onto the street, military people would come and shoot the light out,” Bennett said. “They didn’t want anyone signaling the Japanese. They wanted no light to escape to guide anybody in.”

Those first few days were the hardest before the family could cover some of the home’s abundant windows with tar paper. Her mother’s sewing room only had two small windows, so that was the easiest to black out, Bennett said.

In the short days of December and January, the family would “get something to eat and then crawl into our little dark places,” Bennett said.

It would be almost three years before the curfew was lifted and homes were allowed to be lighted again at night without window coverings.

“You couldn’t have dates or parties,” Bennett said. “You couldn’t go over to somebody’s house unless you spent the night. You couldn’t be on the street. Totally no traffic on the roads, totally blacked out. It was a different way to grow up.”

A pineapple cannery that Bennett’s father, Robert Lloyd, oversaw was retrofitted to package military rations.

School classes were held in people’s homes for a time because the military seized all the schools to use them for troops, Bennett said. Eventually some elementary schools reopened, but no buses were available so everyone walked to school, toting along their government-issued ID cards and gas masks.

Army troops busied themselves building a huge barbed wire fence around the large high school campus just below the Lloyd property. They weren’t immune to the kindness of neighbors, Bennett said.

“It was hot and they’d be working on the fence and mother would come down with lemonade and cookies,” Bennett recalled. “She finally said, ‘My children have to walk to school and they have to go right through that area. If they have to go around, it will add more than a mile to their walk.’ So they put in a gate for my brother and I to walk to school. My mother bribed them.”

The war ended when Gainor was a teenager. She went to college at Stanford and flew off to New York, where she worked a stint for Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue, before meeting Joe Bennett, a handsome man from Minnesota. They bought property in John Dodge in 1988 and moved to Jackson Hole full-time shortly thereafter.

Her brother, Alan Lloyd, who was 13 when Pearl Harbor was attacked, remained fascinated by the military and the history of the battle. After college at the Naval Academy and a few years working stateside as an engineer with power companies, he made it back to Hawaii, where he has lived and given lectures and tours of Pearl Harbor as a hobby.

Their parents, newlyweds who had moved to Oahu in 1928, stayed on the island the rest of their lives.