![]() ![]() Beginning on December 2 an unidentified plane had flown on four successive nights over Clark Field, north of Manila, and on three occasions squadron search missions had been flown to intercept it. It was not the first time they had been alerted. Although official confirmation did not come through till about 5.00, all but two of our Air Corps units had been alerted by 4.30 and the fighter pilots were in or standing by their planes. ![]() Thirty-five minutes later, a Naval operator in Manila picked up a radio flash from Pearl. At that moment clocks in Manila registered 2.25 A.M. The Japanese dive bombers, heading in on our Pacific fleet, were first sighted at 7.55 Pearl Harbor time. Actually when war broke out, the man in Manila saw the same sunrise as the man in Honolulu, though it had taken five and a half hours of the earth’s slow turning to bring it over Luzon’s Sierra Madres. So, ironically, it was through a man-made contrivance that Sunday in the Philippines remained a day of grace. ![]() The arbitrary dateline, by means of which man seeks to count his days, requires that the sun that rises over the Hawaiian Islands on December 7 rise over the Philippines on December 8. WAR did not come to the Philippines on Sunday, December 7, as it did to Pearl Harbor. ![]()
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