Letters from the Front

"It is now 9:05 Sunday morning and we've been bombed now for over an hour, Our anti aircraft guns are yammering and every so often a bomb strikes so close as to rock this ship. Again a bomb. We're helpless down here in the Forward Engine Room because our main engines are all tore down.…I am on the interior communications telephone and I can hear the various stations screaming orders at one other. A man just brought us our gas masks.…"

What makes this moment-by-moment description of an attack all the more compelling is the date in the letter's upper right-hand corner: "Dec. 7, 1941;" William Czako was trapped inside the docked USS New Orleans at Pearl Harbor.

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