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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Pearl Harbor photos land at Museum of Flight

Paige Dickerson Peninsula Daily News

PORT ANGELES, Wash. – Memorabilia from Port Angeles resident Lee Embree, who snapped the first known photographs of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, will be on permanent display at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

The display at the William M. Allen Theater in the museum will be dedicated during a public ceremony at 6 p.m. Thursday.

Embree, a retired World War II Army Air Corps officer and photographer, will attend the dedication and participate in a panel discussion featuring veterans of World War II.

“I’m really glad it will all be preserved in a permanent location,” Embree said.

Embree, then an Air Force staff sergeant, and his crew on the B-17E didn’t set out to take pictures of a battle. They were traveling from Hamilton Field, Calif., to their next assignment at Hickam Field, Hawaii.

As they approached the island, the crew saw Japanese planes and rising smoke. Low on fuel and with no ammunition aboard, they circled the island, looking for a landing place.

Embree, leaning out of the plane, snapped photos with his 35-pound camera. One shot included several Japanese planes, one fallen and smoking on the ground, while two others soared above the island. Another shot showed the USS Arizona billowing smoke in the background.

Some of Embree’s photographs were published in Life magazine.

The display will include Embree’s camera – which is fully intact with all of the pieces still in the box that carried it – along with an audio recording of his story and photographs he took.

A Port Angeles real estate agent, fellow veteran and World War II aviation buff, Alan Barnard, began talking with Embree about the collection when Embree attended the Wings for Freedom event featuring B-17s in Port Angeles in June.

“I got to talking with Lee and asked what happened to all the negatives from the camera,” Barnard said.

“He told me that he had them all at home. That is how it started – Lee and I sitting under the wing of a B-17, talking.”

Barnard volunteered to look into what it would take to get the items on permanent display.

“We sent out a few letters, and the most promising response came from the Seattle Museum of Flight,” Barnard said.

For Cory Graff, the assistant curator for military collections at the museum, Embree’s photos were a must-have.

“It’s obviously an important event in the nation’s history, and these are the only aerial photos of the attack, so for us it wasn’t much of a decision,” he said. “This was the moment that America became involved in World War II. Especially to have them come from a local source – it’s a real find.”

The Museum of Flight at Boeing Field is considered by some the nation’s top nongovernmental aerospace museum, second only to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in the diversity, rarity and display of its collection.

The museum’s $53.5 million Personal Courage wing, which opened in 2004, offers a collection of fighter aircraft, including the world’s first fighter, the Caproni Ca 20.

The pictures that captured the first images of the strike against the United States were almost lost soon after Embree developed them.

“I took the pictures to be developed and went back to pick them up the next day, and they said, ‘No, we can’t give them to you,’ ” Embree said.

The secretary of the Navy had seen the pictures and taken the negatives and pictures with him to Washington, D.C.

“I thought, ‘Oh boy, I’ll never see them again,’ ” Embree said.

“But a year later, a manila envelope arrived. My negatives were inside, and the outside of the envelope was just covered with APO numbers from all over the Pacific. They were trying to find me, and a year later they did.”

Those negatives will now be part of the permanent display.