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Memories of a day that lives in infamy

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Next Wednesday marks 75 years since Japanese fighter planes unleashed two separate attacks on Pearl Harbor and its environs, bombing ships, planes and airfields and killing more than 2,000 military personnel and civilians. It was an event that spurred the U.S.’s entry into World War II and a pro-war mindset among Americans that united the country.

Joe Macchio, 93, of East Meadow, was drafted by the Army Air Corps (which later became the Air Force) in 1943. He served in a radar equipment maintenance unit in the 547th Night Fighter Squadron in the South Pacific, tending to P-61 Night Fighters. He said he remembers Dec. 7, 1941, the day of the Pearl Harbor bombing, like it was yesterday.

“I could never forget that day,” he said.

The then 20-year-old Macchio was in the Bronx, visiting his younger sister, Marie, her boyfriend and his family when he heard the news.

“We were getting ready to go on an outing when all of a sudden, an announcement came on the radio,” he said. “We heard that Pearl Harbor had been bombed, and the first thing we all asked was, ‘Where is Pearl Harbor?’ Nobody knew where it was, so at first we didn’t really pay attention.”

Macchio said the announcements of the attacks became more descriptive by the minute, and panic set in. “When we learned that Pearl Harbor was in Hawaii, we all knew what it meant,” he said. “We didn’t want any part of the war. But the bombing sealed us in it, and we knew we had to fight back. I hope we never see a war like that again.”

Macchio said the frenzy that followed was similar to that seen after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “Everyone was scared,” he said. “When we all learned what was happening throughout the day, everyone was in a panic.”

On the same day just southwest of the Bronx, World War II veteran Enedio Torre, 93, a past commander of Cathedral Post 1087 in West Hempstead, recalled he had just stepped out of the Paramount Theatre in Times Square after seeing a show when he and hundreds of others were shocked by the headlines flashing past on the electric news ticker on One Times Square — known as the “zipper” — saying that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

“Where the heck is this place that they bombed?” Torre remembered saying to his friends. Echoing Macchio’s reaction, Torre asked, “‘Where is Pearl Harbor?’ Everyone was in the streets, running around. It was chaos.”

Torre, who was drafted and stationed at bases across the South Pacific from 1942 to 1945, said the military also practiced air raid drills. Before Pearl Harbor, wars had been fought on land and sea — never in the air. The bombing in Hawaii gave the country a new fear of air attacks, and the military and residents alike were scared. “Where you bunked, you had to dig a hole, and every time a plane came over you had to jump out of your bed into the hole,” Torre recalled of his time in the South Pacific. “When you finally came home from the service, you ended up on the floor because every time you heard a plane, you thought we were being bombed.”

West Hempstead resident Roger Eastman, 94, who joined the war effort by entering the Navy in 1943, recalled that the country was expecting war at the time, but was shocked nonetheless by the surprise bombing. “It came to me as a surprise that all of a sudden the Japanese were bombing us,” Eastman said, adding that his brother, Wilbur, who was only 17 at the time, joined the Army a week after Pearl Harbor.

Malverne resident Joseph Sortino said he was lying on his bed in his Brooklyn home on Dec. 7, listening to the radio, when the broadcast was interrupted by a news bulletin about the attack. “I was 14 years old, it was a Sunday, and I was listening to the Giants football game,” Sortino recalled.

When he turned 17, Sortino joined the Coast Guard, and soon found himself in San Francisco, loading troops into a boat to invade Japan.

“While we were doing that, we heard about the atom bomb and all of us wondered, what’s the atom bomb?” he said. “We didn’t know what it was. And two days later, there was another atom bomb, and then we didn’t have to bring soldiers to invade Japan anymore. We were lucky.”