Please Help Save Ewa MCAS, Ewa Field from Developer Bulldozers, John Bond

By William Cole

On the 67th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, a look back at history...

Surprised and outgunned by attacking Japanese warplanes on Dec. 7, 1941,

Marine Sgt. John Hughes' defense of O'ahu came at the end of a bolt-action Springfield rifle.

Every time a plane swooped down low, spitting bullets and cannon rounds that chewed up

American aircraft on the tarmac at Marine Corps Air Station 'Ewa, Hughes figures he got

off three shots. There wasn't much time to think. Hughes, who came in from California

for the 67th anniversary of the Dec. 7 attack, said it was "just excitement. Shoot, defend."

The National Park Service's Martinez last week accompanied Hughes back to the former

Marine Corps Air Station 'Ewa, where the California man had been stationed at the time of the

attack. With Hughes were six of his children and relatives, themselves in their 40s and 50s.

Adjacent to the shuttered Barbers Point Naval Air Station, the long-forgotten 'Ewa Field --

including a main entry road once traveled by President Franklin D. Roosevelt --

is choked in a tangle of kiawe and weeds.

In two waves and other sporadic attacks, Japanese planes destroyed or damaged nearly

50 Marine aircraft parked on the tarmac. None got into the air. Machine gun and 20mm

strafing gouges and burn marks are still visible on the concrete tie-down area.

"It started off just before 8 a.m. when I first saw this torpedo plane," Hughes said.

Martinez calls it "sacred ground."

"His fellow Marines died where we are standing," Martinez said. Four Marines were killed; 13

were wounded. Hughes, now 89, was waiting for the morning paper. He ran to the corner gate

and into a guard shack, and told the sergeant of the guard to break out the ammo. A handful of

the Marines ended up near a pool under construction. Hughes, whose ship, anchor and USMC

tattoos on his arms have turned into an unrecognizable and wrinkled blur with age, still was

spry enough to bushwhack through the overgrowth and re-create his kneeling position

photographed at the time of the attack.

Martinez said it's one of only about five photographs he's aware of showing men

fighting back that day.

"I knew right then we were in a war. A lot of us thought they'd follow up with a landing party,"

Hughes said. "Where was a good place? 'Ewa Beach."

Lt. Yoshio Shiga, the commander of nine Zero fighters, later recalled one Leatherneck at

'Ewa Field, who, oblivious to the machine gun fire striking the ground around him, stood

transfixed, emptying his sidearm at Shiga's Zero as it roared past.

Shiga would describe that defiant Marine as the bravest American he had ever met.

"What this year's commemoration is about is broadening the interpretation of Pearl Harbor,"

said USS Arizona Memorial historian Daniel Martinez. That interpretation by the National

Park Service has evolved from a focus on just the Arizona and its loss

to a wider look at O'ahu as a battlefield.