ithout warning, on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, Japan launched 353 aircraft from its carriers in two waves of attacks. These air raids were supported by two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, two battleships, eleven destroyers, and 35 submarines. Within just a few hours, Wake Island, in the US, was in turn also razed. On Wake Island, there were seven Basque-American workers, hired by the Morrison-Knudsen engineering company of Boise, Idaho, who were paradoxically building military defenses against a possible Japanese attack.
The American defenses of Pearl Harbor, taken by surprise, offered little resistance to the incessant aerial bombardments. Barring extraordinary instances of heroism, American military and civilians were stunned bystanders of the chaos and catastrophe unleashed by the Japanese. Their placid lives had turned into a nightmare. They had unwittingly become historical witnesses to the unwanted involvement of the United States in the Second World War (WWII). Among them we have been able to identify six people of Basque origin who experienced it first hand. They are Mary Sala, the brothers Fermín and Alfonso Aldecoa Arriandiaga, Leandro Urcelay Llantada, Gregorio “George” Ascuena Monasterio, and Domingo Amuchastegui Guenaga.
Mary Sala, born in 1920 in Ely, Nevada, to a Nafarroan father and a Quebecer mother, who died when Mary was 6 months old. Unfortunately her father died in 1928, leaving her and her older brother, John, orphans at only 8 and 10 years old. Without a relative, the authorities decided to send them to an orphanage in Ogden, Utah. Fortunately, a neighbor in Ely, the Behe Nafarroan Catherine Mong Bercetche, married at the time to another Behe Nafarroan Louis Harriett (they will later separate), decided to adopt them and raise them together with her other two children, Emile Josephine and Louis Genty “Shanty.” It would be at the University of Nevada, in Reno, from where she will later graduate, where Mary met her future husband Mitchell Anton Cobeaga Laca, born in 1917 in Lovelock, Nevada, to Bizkaia parents. Mitchell, commissioned as a lieutenant in the Air Force in May 1940, married Mary in April 1941, was destined for a post at the Hickam Air Force Base, Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, as a pilot of the 19th Bombardment Group, assigned to the mythical Boeing B-17 “Flying Fortress.” At that time, the command decided to transfer the group to the Philippines to improve its air defense in the Pacific, a move in which Mitchell participated. He was on a transfer flight to the US when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The Hickam base was completely devastated, killing 189 people. Young Mary, four months pregnant and from her home in the port, was a privileged witness of how Japanese aviation attacked the North American fleet; the ship bearing the name of her home state – the USS Nevada – was the only battleship to get underway that day, although it was hit by a torpedo and no fewer than six bombs, eventually sinking in the port.
Her brothers John and Shanty later served in the Navy in the Pacific Theater of Operations during the war. Her husband Mitchell continued his military career until his retirement in 1968 with the rank of colonel, having also participated in the Pacific front during WWII, and later in Korea and Vietnam. Mary passed away at the age of 76 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The brothers Fermín and Alfonso Aldecoa, born in Boise in 1915 and 1918 to Bizkaian parents, were in Honolulu working for the aforementioned Morrison-Knudsen company in its main office in Pearl Harbor doing accounting work. Morrison-Knudsen had been contracted by the US government to develop different naval military projects, including at Pearl Harbor, Midway, and Wake Island. Fermín, 26, had arrived in Honolulu from San Francisco, California, aboard the SS Mariposa in September 1941, while his brother, 23, had arrived in April on the SS Lurline. Hawaii, an exotic and distant island in the Pacific, seemed to be the ideal place to take a job, with a salary that was almost double what they would receive in B