GEORGE E. ELLIOTT JR. / WWII SOLDIER
Private’s early detection
of Japanese was ignored
The Army radar operator whose Dec. 7, 1941, early-morning report of planes approaching Oahu went unheeded died Saturday in Florida of complications from a stroke. He was 85.
George E. Elliott Jr. saw something unusual on the radar and alerted his superiors, but an officer dismissed the sighting. Less than an hour later, Japanese aircraft attacked.
George Elliott: The North Shore radar operator spotted planes headed for Pearl Harbor
Tom Elliott, his son, said in a phone interview from Navesink, N.J., yesterday that his father thought Japan's success in the Pearl Harbor attack resulted from "a series of blunders," only one of which was ignoring the early-morning radar sighting.
"He always said that had they heeded their warning," Tom Elliott said, "we could have gotten planes up in the air and defended ourselves better."
George Elliott was a 23-year-old private assigned to Signal Company, Aircraft Warning, Hawaii, at Fort Shafter on Dec. 7. He and Pvt. Joseph Lockard manned one of the Army's new radar vans at Opana Point in the Kahuku foothills. They were supposed to have quit work at 7 a.m., Elliott later told several military and congressional investigative panels.
McDonald was the radar operator, while Elliott's job was to plot the locations of anything that showed up.
In 1944 testimony before an Army Pearl Harbor Board, which was investigating the Japanese attack, Elliott testified he had only two weeks of training on the radar. Elliott testified that at 7:02 he saw "something completely out of the ordinary." Using a field phone Elliott tried to relay the information to the Army's information center at Fort Shafter. When the switchboard operator called back, he talked to McDonald and told him a lieutenant at the center said "to forget it." Later, Lt. Kermit Tyler would say that he thought the soldiers' sighting was a flight of B-17 bombers flying in from California.
Elliott, in testimony, said "we followed the flight all the way in until it was approximately 15 or 25 miles from the island of Oahu, and the flight was lost. It was lost due to technical reasons." Elliott estimated that the aircraft were 137 miles from Oahu when they first appeared on their radar screen. He added: "at 7:45 our truck came from our camp ... to pick us up to take us to breakfast." Ten minutes later, the attack began.
Tom Elliott said that while his father was eating breakfast at Kawailoa he realized "what they had phoned in."
Elliott served in the Army from 1940 to 1945 and went on to work at New Jersey Bell Telephone Co. in Long Branch, N.J., for 33 years.
Elliott died in Port Charlotte, Fla., where he had moved from New Jersey to retire. His son said his father's Pearl Harbor role was included in the 1970 movie, "Tora, Tora, Tora."
Survivors include a brother, Clarence Elliott of Florida, and companion Eloise Falknor.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
