Pearl Harbor

Editorial: A Century Lies Between
Friday December 12, 1941
Vineyard Gazette
One wonders what Nathaniel M. Jernegan would think if he were alive. Or his wife. They were together on the whaleship Eliza Mason in 1851 when Captain Jernegan sailed his vessel into Hakodate while Perry was still there. This was one of the first of the treaty ports when Japan was opened, reluctantly, to the world, and Mrs. Jernegan was the first white woman to sleep ashore in Japan for more than two hundred years.
 
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Vessel Lost at Pearl Harbor Once Stranded on the North Shore
Friday December 19, 1941
Vineyard Gazette
The mine layer Oglala which was lost in the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor was formerly the 4,200 ton passenger steamer Massachusetts of the Metropolitan Line of the New England Steamship Co. On March 12, 1909, she went ashore on Cedar Tree Neck in Vineyard Sound.
 
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Things Insular: Pearl Harbor Memories
Friday December 8, 1961
Vineyard Gazette
There is not a particle of doubt that Vineyarders who were alive and understanding of world events on Dec. 7. 1941 found themselves yes­terday, on the twentieth anniversary of that day, remembering all sorts of circumstances. The sunny, rather brisk weather of that fateful Sunday is as clear as was the sunlight then.
 
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Remembering Pearl Harbor, Island Veterans Gather
Friday December 20, 1991
Virginia Poole

Fifty years after the sinking of the United States naval fleet at Pearl Harbor, a group of Island veterans and their supporters gathered Dec. 7 in Oak Bluffs for breakfast to remember the day and honor their countrymen who lost their lives in this and other battles of World War II.

Every parking spot at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall on Towanicut avenue was filled at 9 a.m.

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Historic Date Ended an Era Of Innocence
Friday December 13, 1991
W. C. Platt

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7, 1941, is a landmark in the life of this nation, by which we judge where we are and where we were. The moment the news came over the radio that Sunday afternoon, it caught a nation in one instant like some great group photograph.

Fifty years have passed, and now we look back to pay homage to those who offered their lives and energies to fight fascism and imperialism, and to re-examine a symbolic moment in history.

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Pearl Harbor Horror as the Wives and Children of the Army Saw it Related by Visitor
Tuesday July 13, 1943
Vineyard Gazette
As the planes swooped and roared past the windows of his home, the young Army officer, seeing the big red suns which marked them - for the great power which sent them on their errand still thought then that the sun was rising on the land it ruled - cried out: “It’s Japan! It’s war!”
 
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Killed in Philippines
Friday December 26, 1941
Vineyard Gazette
One of the victims of the Japanese surprise attack upon the Philippines on Dec. 7 was John H. Campbell, son of Mr. and Mrs. Fred P. Campbell of New Britain and Oak Bluffs. He had spent all of his summers at Oak Bluffs, except that of 1941, and he had many friends in the town and among the summer colony. He enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1940, and would soon have qualified as a pilot after training in the fundamentals of aviation.
 
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Vineyard Boys Serving in Far Eastern Forces
Friday December 12, 1941
Vineyard Gazette
A tremor of mixed excitement and dread swept the Vineyard on Sunday when the first news of the Japanese attack on the Pacific islands became known through the radio broadcasts. Not for eighty years has this Island scene been duplicated, when the opening of the Civil War found Vineyard men at sea and in or near the war zone. The opening of this Far Eastern war likewise finds Vineyard men in or near the scene, not merely in ships of commerce, but in the armed forces of the country.
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Scrap Metal, Spies and Soldiers: A Girl Recalls Island in Wartime
Thursday March 25, 2010
Jim Hickey

The Vineyard was a frightening place for a young girl to be during World War II, but exciting too. Servicemen were walking the streets before their deployment to Europe. Navy and Army pilots conducting training exercises overhead occasionally came crashing into the ocean. And there were the constant rumors of enemy spies and submarines along the Island’s shores.

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