I thought it was just a drill that nobody told us about," Art said. "I could look out and see the Japanese planes, which were just airplanes to me. Seemingly out of nowhere, the first wave of 353 Japanese bombers, fighting planes and torpedo planes darkened the clean blue sky. Radioman Second Class Art Montagne raced to his battle station, high above the main deck, on the flag deck to join the Admiral's staff. "So the next morning, on December 7th, I woke up, had a cup of coffee, and about 7:50 I hear this tremendously loud clang, clang, clang followed by the bugle call, which was our signal to go to battle stations," Art recalled. It began with a plane and ended in flames The opal ring that Bud bought for Ellene. That turned out to be the difference between the ring being delivered, or lost forever in the sunken mail room of the USS California. On the way back to the ship, he made a special trip to the Honolulu post office to mail it to her. And for the girl back in Long Beach, he bought an opal ring. He did some Christmas shopping: muumuus for his sisters games for his little brothers. The next day, Art went ashore to check out the fleet's Saturday night Battle of the Bands. Three weeks later, on December 5, 1941, the USS California pulled into Pearl Harbor. It's kind of like love on first sight," he said.Īrt remembers mentioning the word "marriage", but at midnight both he and Joe had to catch a boat back to their ship. "It was the first girl I'd ever met that I really was smitten with. Looking back, Art laughs about it: "It was a joke, but he did approach her!" Ellene, and when I go to the men's room, old Joe Ross leans over and says, 'Come on, why don't you ditch and come out with me?'" He's back, ready to go aboard ship, after giving his girl a ring set. "We went to a very nice place in Long Beach and we sat down and ordered a round of drinks," he recalled. Though she had other plans, Ellene accepted a date with a young sailor, who was, after all, heading to the Pacific for months to come. Her name was Ellene, and Art was overwhelmed with a desire to see her once more before shipping out the very next night. "And I said, 'You must have come from Iowa.' And she said, 'No, as a matter of fact, I grew up in Nebraska.' So she didn't know the Palladium Shuffle or the Balboa Hop and some of our California dances." "I took her out on the dance floor and realized right away she didn't know California-style dancing," Art recalled. One night he walked into the Crystal Ballroom and spotted a girl so pretty he did something unusual: He hesitated before asking her to dance. It meant Art had a few days to indulge his passion for big band music and dancing back in Long Beach.
#Midnight video abilene free#
This turn of events did leave Joe free to go back to Abilene, Texas, and propose to his high school sweetheart. had decided it needed all the men it had in uniform. So in October of 1941, on leave back in Long Beach, the first thing Joe and he did was head for the Canadian consulate, only to hear, "We're sorry, but you're a few months too late." Navy.Īt this point, London had survived the blitz, France had fallen and Dunkirk was history. The two buddies had hatched a plan to transfer to the Royal Canadian Air Force to fight the Germans alongside the British, something permitted by the U.S. He assured his mother people did not live in grass houses and Honolulu was more modern than Sioux City. His early letters home revealed a wide-eyed boy on the adventure of a lifetime.
What's more, having graduated at the top of his class, the young sailor was assigned to the USS California, the flagship of the Battle Force, handling the Admiral's communications. "I've been accepted into the radio gang," Art wrote. Soon, his mother received a gleeful letter. Even with a small scholarship, this high school track star couldn't afford to go to college.
His family was still struggling out of the Depression. To his parents and six younger brothers and sisters, he wrote: "I've joined the Navy. There, 18-year-old Art "Bud" Montagne left a note behind in an empty house. My dad's story starts two years before Pearl Harbor, on a summer day in Sioux City, Iowa.
Art Montagne in Honolulu, 1940 his letter to his mom, December 1941 and the American destroyer USS Shaw exploding during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
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