She ran out of the little cottage after a friend told her bombs were falling on the island, after the man on the radio said the Japanese navy was invading Hawaii.
She ran into the backyard, and something loud drew her eyes up, and she saw three planes with red circles on the ends of their wings bearing down upon her, 20, maybe 30 feet above her head.
“They must have seen my face,” said Sheila Feigen. “I must have looked like, ‘I’m here. Shoot me.’ ”
The fighters, Japanese Zeros, roared into the horizon, and Feigen’s Pearl Harbor saga began.
The Japanese navy bombed Hawaii 70 years ago Wednesday. Feigen, 94, remembers the details surrounding the attack with great clarity.
This should not surprise.
As the bombs exploded, and planes and smoke filled the skies, as she hid in a dirt tunnel for days, assuming Japanese soldiers had stormed the island, she believed she would die.
It stuck with her.
A call to duty
The Denver resident was little more than a newlywed when her husband, Gerald Feigen, received a telegram from President Franklin Roosevelt ordering the freshly minted surgeon to an Army base in New Jersey. The United States had not yet involved itself in the wars in Europe. But as hostile Germany and its Axis partners conquered different nations on the continent and in Africa, the specter of war grew for Americans.
One measure: preparing doctors.
The telegram arrived during winter 1940. Months later, the Army told Feigen he was headed toward a military base in Hawaii and ordered him to San Francisco. From there he and Sheila would take a boat to Honolulu.
The Feigens hopped in a secondhand Buick and gunned it from New Jersey to U.S. Route 6, the old Grand Army of the Republic Highway, an early transcontinental road that still bisects Colorado (Denver’s Sixth Avenue is part of the Route 6 road network).
During the Colorado leg of the six-day summer journey, Sheila remembers her husband exclaiming, “Oh! This is the real West!” when he got to Denver. Later, when he saw San Francisco, he vowed to remain in the city after the war.
That summer, the Feigens — first Gerald, then Sheila — rode ocean liners to Honolulu and began exploring the island’s volcanoes and beaches. The mission, war preparation, was serious, but they could not resist the island’s seductions: the turquoise water, the flowers and fruits, the glorious climate.
On one of their sightseeing gambits, a mountain hike, Gerald fell and broke his tibia.
The injury might have saved his life.
After the Japanese attacked and the United States entered the war, his unit was shipped to the South Pacific theater. But Dr. Feigen’s busted leg kept him in Hawaii.
A picnic postponed
On the morning of Dec. 7, Sheila Feigen awoke early and began assembling tuna sandwiches. They were headed to Wheeler Army Airfield, north of Honolulu, for a Sunday picnic that never happened.
The airfield was the site of the first attack.
The bombs fell in waves. They fell for two hours. In the middle of it, Gerald and another doctor rushed to the hospital where they worked, reporting for duty.
The Feigens’ house contained the only basement on the block. Neighbors quickly began showing up, some carrying infants. At one point, Sheila Feigen ran across the street to another house, to retrieve a neighbor’s heart medicine. Nobody else would brave the outdoors.
“I knew I would be a heroine,” she said. When she looked across the bay, toward Pearl Harbor, “I couldn’t see anything but black smoke. And the noise, the terrible noise of the flames.”
“Everyone was in a panic,” she said. “There was a lot of shooting. The Army and Navy were shooting at everything in the sky that moved.”
When the planes vanished from the sky, Feigen and another woman walked into the street and got a ride to Tripler Army Medical Center, the hospital where Gerald worked. They wanted to help.
“The floor in the lobby was slippery with blood,” Feigen said. “There was a line of stretchers with people on them, waiting for triage. Some men were crying and shouting. Some were dead.”
She observed one red-headed man wrapped in a blanket and talking. His legs were gone.
She watched people jumping into a latrine trench, thinking it would keep them safe from attack, like a foxhole.
The women went looking for Feigen’s friend’s husband, a psychiatrist, and found him in his office.
“Here’s this big psychiatrist with his head in his hands,” said Feigen, “rocking back and forth, saying over and over again, ‘We’re doomed. We’re doomed.’ ”
Everybody, she said, felt doomed.
Running for shelter
Feigen rolled bandages for a few hours, until military officials began shouting “All volunteers to the lobby!” and soon they were packed into buses and sent to a tunnel behind the hospital, a narrow, high-ceilinged shaft with dirt for walls, for ceilings, for floors. More than 300 women and children crammed into the tunnel.
“There were babies screaming and crying, women crying to get out,” said Feigen. “Every young woman without children had to do something. I was sent to the kitchen.”
The kitchen: a stove top and oven where Feigen sliced Spam and placed it in roasting pans with canned tomatoes.
All of them remained there for four days.
At first Feigen at least had a cot, but she quickly gave it up for a mother with a baby. So she slept in the dirt. But she didn’t get much rest. As Feigen cooked Spam and waited … and waited … she and the rest of the women believed they would be captured or killed, that Japanese soldiers had vanquished the island and soon men in strange uniforms would storm through their dark, dank world of Spam and cots and dirt.
They entered the tunnel on Sunday evening. They walked out and witnessed daylight again on Thursday afternoon.
A will to keep serving
After the ordeal, Feigen’s parents toiled to “pull strings,” she said, to return her to the mainland, but Feigen wanted no part of leaving, even though she rarely saw her husband. She found an “essential” job as a secretary and stayed put until that job’s status — essential — changed and she couldn’t find another one.
She had no choice. In March 1942, Feigen found a berth in an ocean liner and set off for San Francisco in a convoy of ships. Her husband stayed behind, working in the hospital.
Tension electrified the 10-day voyage. Several times, ships in the convoy “dispersed” and dropped depth charges, to defend against what they thought were Japanese submarines. The threat of attack forced a certain stoicism among the thousands of passengers. People did not hold luaus on the deck. Sailors banished cigarettes from the ships once darkness fell, for fear a Japanese plane would spot the orange glow, “and in those days everybody smoked,” Feigen said.
Just before pulling into the harbor, near the Farallon Islands, the convoy of ships plying the Pacific encountered the most serious peril: not just a rumor of submarines but evidence.
“Our ship would set off depth charges,” Feigen said, “and the entire ship would shudder and shake.” Passengers assumed the ship would sink.
Two months after Sheila Feigen arrived in San Francisco, Gerald Feigen returned and found a job with a medical practice immediately. He never lived outside of California again, fulfilling the vow he made during the cross country journey. The couple raised their children in San Francisco, where Sheila Feigen lived — when the archaeologist wasn’t on digs in Italy and Greece and Africa — until 1989, when she moved to Denver to be closer to a daughter and grandchildren.
Pearl Harbor was just a handful of months, 70 years ago, for Feigen. But the experience never left her.
Dreams about it still haunt her sleep. In one, she sits on a plane that is fleeing something, but the wheels never rise more than a foot above the ground.
The months of chaos, however, are more than just memories and nightmares.
She never lost her fear of the sound of airplanes.
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
