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meant I was normally in the boiler rooms. This is what I was trained for. But my job for “general quarters”
was topside, up on deck, assigned to a World War I balloon gun designed to shoot down dirigibles.
    About one o’clock Saturday afternoon, 6 December, the captain called a “general quarters” drill to test his reserve crew. This was his first drill, and I think he was very wise to do that, as it later proved. We went to battle stations and I manned my three-inch gun up on the bow, right below our main battery, the number-one four-inch gun. We went through our drills and the captain was pleased, so we went back to our regular watches.
    There was a wire mesh net that was drawn across the harbor entrance at dusk. It normally wouldn’t open again until dawn. At night we’d make lazy figure eights outside the harbor entrance, sounding with our relatively new sonar. At 3:45 AM on the morning of 7 December, one of the minesweepers, the USS Condor , sighted what they thought was a periscope. We went to “general quarters,” raced over there, and searched for about an hour, but found nothing. And so then we went back on our patrol.
    At daybreak, about six-thirty, just as the harbor was coming alive, the USS Antares was standing off, waiting for the net to open so they could enter Pearl Harbor. And in the wake of the Antares we spotted this sub conning tower, about four feet out of the water, following the Antares , obviously intending to follow the supply ship into the harbor. We went to “general quarters” immediately, and as we raced over to it, a PBY overhead dropped a smoke bomb to mark the position for us. As I manned my gun on the bow, I could see we were coming up pretty fast.
    I’ve got a front-row seat. As we approached it, it looked as though we were on a collision course. Everybody was starting to brace themselves. But at the last minute, the captain veered to port. When he did, the starboard, or right side, raised up a little. Our naval guns could not depress down that far, so when we fired, the first shell, from number-one four-inch gun, went over the conning tower.
    By now we were almost parallel to the sub, and number-three gun on top of the galley deck, on the starboard side, trained on it and fired. We were so close that the fuse didn’t travel far enough to arm, but the projectile
put a hole right through the conning tower. It was a relatively small hole, but the sub took on water and started to sink. Obviously it filled up with water pretty quick.
    We thought it was a German U-boat and released four depth charges set for a hundred feet. With the added weight of the water she had taken on, the sub lost her buoyancy and she settled like a rock—in twelve hundred feet of water.
    We stayed at “general quarters,” and the captain gave the order to break out the Springfield rifles. About an hour or so later, two planes came at us from inside the harbor and we could see the “meatballs,” the red suns, painted on their wings. Our new anti-aircraft guns fired at the planes, and that’s really what saved us, because they broke off their attack. We got a splash on one side, a splash on the other side. And that was as close as we came to getting any hits.
    By 8:15, we could see the smoke and explosions ashore. About that time the captain told us that he had received a radio message that “this is no drill.”

ABOARD USS WARD
    PEARL HARBOR
7 DECEMBER 1941
0645 HOURS LOCAL
    After relaying what he had seen up on the bridge, Ken Swedberg busied himself at his gun station. At 0653, Commander Outerbridge transmitted a message to the commandant, 14th Naval District: “WE HAVE ATTACKED, FIRED UPON AND DROPPED DEPTH CHARGES UPON SUBMARINE OPERATING IN DEFENSIVE SEA AREA. STAND BY FOR FURTHER MESSAGES.”
    The crew of the Ward , though all Reservists assigned to an aging destroyer, had been trained well and responded quickly.
    As Ken