NNG - A narrow miss by a Japanese bomb fragment 79 years ago

Here is a Japanese bomb fragment that my wife Patsy's dad dug out of the palm tree that she was standing in front of on December 7, 1941. The fragment impacted the tree just inches over her head, after which she ran screaming down the road.

Patsy holding the fragment showing the smooth inside surface



The rough outside surface of the fragment



The story is that after the Pearl Harbor attack began, the military men were called to the base. Since her dad worked for the YMCA, he was not called to the base, and he stood with Patsy, her grandmother, and a number of neighborhood women at the culdesac where they lived to try to find out what was happening. Patsy's mom had gone inside to make coffee for the people on the street when a group of planes flew over. Patsy says you couldn't see their insignia at the speed they were approaching, when the last plane dropped a bomb. Patsy thinks that one of the planes likely had a bomb left over, and couldn't land on the carrier with it, and so the pilot dropped it on a group of people standing in the street. The bomb destroyed the house next door, but none of the people on the street were hit by shrapnel, and the people in the destroyed house had left for the base. 5-year old Patsy probably came the closest to getting killed, with the fragment hitting the tree just above her head. Today she keeps the fragment in a safe place as a memento of what could have happened had luck not been her side that day,

So a lifetime of adventures, like spotting tigers in the Bandhavgarh Forest more than 78 years later, would have never happened. A small distance can make such a huge difference. (Patsy in the front, son Jeff in the back, February 2020)







Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/08/2020 07:20AM by Olaf Rasmussen.