Jim Doyle was an aerial photographer’s mate 1st Class sleeping in a hangar on Ford Island, in the middle of Pearl Harbor, when Japanese planes attacked Dec. 7, 1941.
Doyle, who joined the U.S. Navy in 1939 when he was 16, grabbed a camera and went to work. Many of the pictures he shot that day have become iconic reminders of the attack.
He still remembers the smell of burning flesh and the sight of wounded men floating in water coated with oil.
“That was a horrible day,” Doyle, 91, said on Sunday, the 73rd anniversary of a surprise attack that plunged the United States into World War II.
Doyle and Luz Valerio, 96, a U.S. Army veteran who manned a seacoast gun battery during the attack, were honored at a memorial service Sunday at the Colorado National Guard headquarters in Centennial.
“I could see all those buildings burning,” Valerio said.
The bombing took the lives of about 2,400 Americans and wounded 1,178 others.
Doyle learned to fly from a crop-duster pilot who lived near his boyhood home in western Colorado. After Pearl Harbor, he went on to fly scouting missions.
Flying a plane that had a camera bolted to its belly, he was shot down twice during the Battle of Guadalcanal.
“I got some shrapnel in my butt,” he said.
A second wound was more serious. The Japanese had soldiers hiding in a forest on islands near Guadalcanal, and the Marines wanted to know what they were up to, Doyle said.
They sent him to photograph the activity.
“I was at 8,000 feet and three Zeros jumped me,” he said. He dodged them, but when he brought his aircraft closer to the ground, he was set upon by more Japanese planes.
“That was when I woke up in Australia,” he said. “My head was crushed, and I had a wet cloth on my brain.”
Doctors patched him up, but he required a second surgery to stop the bleeding in his brain.
Doyle, who was medically dischaged from the Navy in 1943, won a Distinguished Flying Cross and two Purple Hearts.
Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Salvatore “Sal” Villano, a Vietnam-era veteran, conducted a ceremony to honor the two.
“It gives me a great sense of satisfaction to honor these war heroes,” Villano said.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671, tmcghee@denverpost.com or
