A U.S. Army radar operator, Elliott was on duty trying out his new equipment when he saw something strange on his screen: a swarm of approaching planes.
It was “something completely out of the ordinary” 137 miles away, he remembered later. “When they were 132 miles out, that’s when I reported them.” Officials at Pearl Harbor shrugged the warning off as a squadron of American planes, but an hour later it became apparent that the planes were in fact Japanese, and the surprise attack at the Hawaiian naval base on December 7, 1941, brought the U.S. into World War II.
“If they had heeded our warnings, all the sailors and officers who are entombed in the Arizona would not have been below the water line,” Elliott said later. He died December 20 after a stroke. He was 85.