Hugh Lytle, 100; First to Tell of Pearl Harbor Hit

Hugh Lytle, the journalist whose teletype message provided Associated Press and the world with the first account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, died Aug. 16. He was 100.

Lytle died at an assisted living facility in the Northern California community of Novato, according to his son, David.

The senior Lytle, AP’s Honolulu correspondent and a reserve Army officer, was awakened at home by the Army on Dec. 7, 1941, as Japanese planes bombed the U.S. fleet, according to David Lytle.

“I heard the phone ring, and I heard the conversation,” David Lytle recalled. “[My father] said, ‘They’ve bombed Pearl Harbor. I’m out of here.’ I didn’t see him for two weeks.”

The senior Lytle quickly left for his AP office at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, where he filed a brief account of the attack in progress, then reported for military duty with the Army.

Military censors clamped down shortly after Lytle transmitted his dispatch, and virtually no official accounts of the Japanese attack were sent from Hawaii until much later that Sunday.

Lytle joined the Army’s intelligence unit, and spent much of the war as a military censor on the island of Oahu, filtering information to the media and authorizing articles to be printed, his son said.

Hugh Lytle later earned a Bronze Star for risking his life when he led the 10th Army Information and Historical Service on Okinawa, a covert project documenting American military strategies.

He also served as the co-administrator of the Hawaiian territory with Harry Albright, who became a longtime friend.

In 1945, Lytle and Albright joined the Honolulu Advertiser as co-managing editors.

Lytle was considered a conservative voice as opinion page editor until the early 1960s.

He left the paper to become press secretary for Gov. William Quinn, and then retired in 1968.

He moved to the Big Island of Hawaii with his wife, Druzella “Drue” Lytle, who was editor of the women’s section of the Advertiser from 1953 to 1969.

Born in New Philadelphia, Ill., Lytle moved around the country growing up, following his stepfather, who worked for Western Pacific Railroad.

Lytle graduated from high school in San Francisco, earned a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and joined the Chico Record newspaper.

He moved to Honolulu in 1938 to work for Associated Press. He moved back to the mainland in the early 1990s.

In addition to son David of Sea Ranch, Calif., he is survived by a grandson, Douglas; and two great-grandchildren.