News, Then No News
News of the attack quickly reached the United States , and war was declared.President Roosevelt tried to inspire and reassure the country, but in the days that followed, reassurance was hard to come by.The essence of what happened was known; many horrifying details had been reported, or were easy to infer.Although every family in the country with someone stationed in Honolulu worried, most of those families would hear nothing for weeks.For now, cataloguing the missing and the dead would have to wait.
The first priorities were making Oahu defensible, tending to its injured, and repairing its infrastructure.There was an abundance of highly-motivated men to do that work, servicemen who on paper were still assigned to unusable ships or aircraft.They helped clear debris, repave roads and runways, move building supplies, and do whatever else they could.Many guns on sunken warships were still above-water and usable.Navy men helped re-purpose them into new land-based anti-aircraft and artillery batteries.
Gradually, things stabilized, and people could tackle the job of compiling lists of casualties and missing personnel. Both the attack and the subsequent rebuilding effort had scattered servicemen around the island.One could only work from whatever lists or muster rolls could be found.People who were not with their assigned units, or among the identified dead or injured, were "missing" - but in reality, they might be alive and well, working somewhere on an important but impromptu task.It would serve no good purpose to send "missing in action" telegrams to the families of such people yet.
Tracking everyone down was important, but it had to be done thoroughly and carefully.
***
