President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that Dec. 7, 1941, will be “a date which will live in infamy.” For the survivors and Veterans of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it is a day of remembrance.

Born and raised in Hawaii, Abby Laterza, 85, was there that fateful day. “What I remember about the war is that I was four years old and my brother Samson was two,” she said. She and her brother were playing. Her father had gone to work delivering airplane fuel for the planes stationed at Pearl Harbor.

Laterza was used to hearing planes flying overhead because she lived near the flight path of Pearl Harbor and Hickam Airfield. “We didn’t think about it. Then, all of a sudden, it became very, very loud, and a lot of planes,” she said.

She and her brother got scared when the house began to shake. “I don’t know what that is, but I’m afraid,” Laterza remembered saying to her brother. “Let’s hide under the bed and maybe whatever it is will go away.”

Woman with a photo of herself dancing

Abby with a photo of herself, at six, dancing at a picnic celebrating the end of the war.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor began at 7:55 that morning. The entire attack took one hour and 15 minutes, leaving 2,403 American service members and civilians dead and another 1,178 injured.

After a while, the loud noise stopped

“You had no cell phone, no TV back then. We didn’t know what was going on,” Laterza remembered. Sometime later she learned that Pearl Harbor was attacked and all about the heroics of her father who leaped from his truck to alert G.I.s to the attack.

Hawaii immediately came under martial law. “After then, our lives were changed. Every time the sirens went on, we had to get to the shelter. You’d have to go to the shelter and put on a gas mask. Then, you sat there until the all-clear siren came on,” she said.

Most of Hawaii’s food came from overseas. But fewer ships would be transporting supplies during the war. “We had rice patties, so we ate a lot of rice. We didn’t raise cattle, but we did have some pigs and chickens.”

As food became scarce, families had to sign up for a ration book. It contained stamps that were exchanged for food and goods. Hawaiians had to stand in long lines to get routine items. “We got powder that you added to water and that was milk,” she said. “They had this piece of lard with a coloring thing that you added and that was your butter. I never tasted hamburger meat until after the war.”

Asked to dance after the war

Laterza and the rest of the islanders lived that way until the war ended Sept. 2, 1945, four years later.

Celebrating the end of WWII, Laterza’s community had a big picnic and they ask her to dance. “I understood what it meant. Because when you live it, you understand that patriotism that rises from the destruction and despair.”

Laterza went on to support the troops by dancing on USO tours. Both of her brothers joined the military at 17 and went on to serve in Vietnam.

She accompanies her Veteran husband several times a week to his appointments at the Southern Nevada VA.

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2 Comments

  1. Earl Stout December 8, 2022 at 13:13

    I was living in a small community in southwest Arkansas, on that unfateful day, only 3.5 years old! my mother and I walked to the local community
    grocer store, where then heard on the old radio sitting there that Pearl Harbor had been attacked by the Japanese! I remember after that, we would have blackouts, when we were under possible attacks again! we would! My Dad would get all the kids together and pray to God for our safety! I later in life went into the USAF, and I had an older brother who served in the Army Air Force during the war. Yes I l know what the price of Freedom is!! Abby you did a great service for the effort you put forth after what you went through that time!!

  2. Jaison Bloom December 7, 2022 at 12:15

    What a wonder person Abby is!

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