Pearl Harbor survivor endured war's turmoil

VIRGINIA BEACH

The first image is a photograph, taken on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, 1939.

In it, Julia and Harry O'Cain lounge in the sand of Waikiki Beach, squinting and smiling in their swimsuits and sepia-tone tans. Jean, their 8-year-old daughter, sits in her father's lap, looking off to her right.

The second image, also a photo, shows Jean, about 10, standing beside the family's new 1941 Ford at their Honolulu bungalow. She's holding an American flag and smiling.

The third image is a mental one, formed in that same 10-year-old's mind several months later and still fresh after 67 years.

She's standing in military housing at Pearl Harbor. Her father, a naval officer, is nowhere to be found.

Her mother, dying for a smoke, slips into a closet and has Jean stuff pillows and blankets around the door to block the light from the flame. Though she does, and though they've blacked out the windows, U.S. Marines start pounding on the front door as soon as she strikes the match, ordering her to put it out.

The Japanese, they say, just might be coming back.

 

Jean came to the Hawaiian islands with her mother on the cruise ship SS Lurline in 1939, joining Jean's father and settling in Honolulu. Jean started school, made friends and began a tropical childhood.

It wouldn't last. In 1941, Harry O'Cain, a chief warrant officer, got orders for Pearl Harbor, 10 miles up the road. His family followed, arriving to find a different world. The roads weren't ready, nor was the schoolhouse, nor the grass in the front yard.

"Why in the world did we come here?" the young girl wondered.

Because of this reshuffling, school started late that fall, in a retrofitted barracks at Hickam Field. To make up time, the children had classes seven days a week.

When this proved to be too much for them, the schedule was cut back to six days. This put Jean at home one Sunday soon after.

She woke that morning and headed out across the muddy yard to the Ford to retrieve her coloring book. Meanwhile, Japanese planes were coming over the northern tip of Oahu, bound for Pearl Harbor.

On the way back to the house, Jean heard a BOOM. Looking toward the Navy base, several blocks to the west, she saw oily black smoke rising to the sky.

She ran inside and woke her sleeping mother.

"Jeannie Marie, what's wrong with your arm?!"

The child looked down to see a bloody gash extending upward from her right wrist. She'd later learn the shrapnel had damaged their car as well.

Soon the sky was filled with planes and smoke and fire. Jean peered from a front window as her neighbors sprang from their houses, pulling on shirts and pulling up pants. Many jumped on the running boards of passing cars bound for the base. Japanese fighter planes strafed the men as they roared down the street.

Then U.S. Marines were at her door, urging them to board a bus for the nearby mountains. Julia O'Cain told them she wasn't in the Navy and she wasn't leaving.

The Marines told her they could stay but would have to cover their windows with black-out paper and keep their lights out at night. Then, preparing for a possible invasion, they began digging a trench across Jean's front yard.

The second wave of Japanese planes reached Pearl Harbor soon after. Jean's father, who was supposed to have returned on a small boat the night before, was missing. That same night, Jean's mother, a chain smoker, was caught lighting up.

The next day was the start of a new life. The Japanese attack had destroyed much of the naval base and the airfields, including Hickam.

Jean's neighbor was desperate for news of her sailor husband, who also was missing. Jean accompanied her to the base, which was still a smoking mess.

With no luck there, they continued to a nearby arena, where she'd once watched "Gone with the Wind." The space had become an open-air hospital, filled with wounded sailors stretched out all around it, baking in the Pacific heat.

Jean was stricken. Her father had entertained these same young men in their home. What could she do?

Then it hit her: If she couldn't heal, perhaps she could distract. She ran home and grabbed her vast comic book collection and returned to find the sailors appreciative, but not in the way she'd imagined. Instead of reading the comics, they put them over their faces and bodies to shield them from the blazing sun.

Jean then returned to her cinder block bungalow to take up her spot by the radio, listening to the Missing in Action reports for hours, hoping for news of her father.

 

Harry O'Cain showed up about a week after the attack, emerging from the bombed-out desolation in crisp dress whites, a pistol and sword at his side.

He'd sidestepped death because of a faulty generator, which had given out as he and his crew traveled between islands. They had floated for days without lights or a radio and didn't learn of the attack until they had made repairs, steamed back into Pearl Harbor with their lights on and been ordered to shut them off.

He told this tale, grabbed a bag and was gone again, off to help make a new chapter in U.S. history. Jean would see him only twice more before they reunited in Norfolk at war's end. In the meantime, she and her mother stayed behind at Pearl Harbor.

"We were the crazy ones."

All Jean's friends were gone. School was over. There were no libraries, no stores, no swimming pool, no tennis courts, no television. Meals were commissary rations and dehydrated milk.

The island was under martial law, which meant curfews and blackouts. The beaches were strung with barbed wire. Everything was kapu, Hawaiian for forbidden or taboo.

At first, Jean occupied herself by making paper dolls cut from pictures in the Sears Roebuck catalog. She read everything she could get her hands on, including her father's Popular Mechanics magazines. But she soon grew restless.

"I didn't want to stay in a house with no light or windows and listen to the radio."

She decided to make a world for herself. To escape to it, she turned to two things: a mutt puppy named Rags ("My dog saved my life") and an Elgin bike ("I rode everywhere").

After hooking up with some of the island's remaining children, the adventure began. Jean's group rambled the island, exploring reservoirs, train trestles and fields. Many of these areas were kapu, but "kids could climb over fences and get through gates."

Most of the island's Marines were busy guarding Oahu's harbor and airfields, so they weren't particularly worried about sneaky children. They also took pity on Jean's mother, accompanying her to the commissary, and letting her smoke with them in the underground dugout in their front yard.

While her mother worried and smoked, Jean roamed. And four months passed in a blur.

 

The next chapter began in April 1942, when Jean and Julia O'Cain boarded a transport ship for San Francisco. They were ultimately bound for the family's South Carolina homestead as Harry O'Cain kept fighting, somewhere in the South Pacific.

"It had become a crazy lifestyle. I had made a world for myself." Leaving "was just another adventure."

At first, they saw only the sea. Then other ships appeared on the horizon. Jean thought they were being attacked, but it turned out to be the rest of their convoy. For the next 12 days, the ships zigzagged across the Pacific. Some had fake guns mounted on deck to ward off the Japanese.

On board, conditions were much more cramped and spartan than they'd been on the Lurline three years before. But some families had it worse, so Jean went to work, baby-sitting and entertaining the other children.

Once the ship reached the West Coast, Jean and her mother waited in Oakland for their Ford to arrive, then set off across the country for Elloree, S.C.

In Texas, the pair passed a convoy of Army trucks headed westward and beyond, to the Pacific. When the soldiers spotted the Ford's Hawaii tags, they raised a ruckus of horns, shouts and waves.

Jean arrived at the ancestral home skinny as a rail, a "wild thing" with a strong aversion to wearing shoes. Her extended family addressed the former with Southern cuisine, the latter by dolling her up.

She adjusted gradually to her new life. She ate heartily. She enjoyed being part of a large family. She dove under the bed at any loud noise.

 

Jean grew up and had more adventures, careers, husbands, children, grandchildren.

She's never gone on another cruise. She's been back to Hawaii, but avoided Pearl Harbor. She just recently began attending the local memorial ceremony but avoids crowded, boisterous events.

Talking about the attack and the world it made excites her as it exhausts her, winds her up and wears her out. What she doesn't say carries as

much weight as what she does.

"I think there's so much bottled up in me. The tragedy and the grief of it," she said last week.

"I don't think people today appreciate sacrifices, all the sacrifices we made. Maybe it was too much sacrifice."

She switches gears.

"I've always made an adventure of misfortune. Looked on the sunny side. I don't want to be a bitter old lady."

World War II created a sense of camaraderie and shared destiny that she misses. But it also made her tough.

"If I'd not been a little bit wild, I wouldn't have been able to make it. I had to be a little, free creature," she said.

"I still think we can be too civilized. I think we need to have a wild streak."

Memory is selective, and childhood memories tend to stick with you long after the adult ones have passed.

What Jean remembers, what persists, is that flame from her mother's match, its light seeping from under the closet door when the war was yet to be won and the future was as black as that cinder block house.

"The darkness doesn't overwhelm the tiny lights," she said.

Matthew Jones, (757) 446-2949, matthew.jones@pilotonline.com