“Don’t worry about it.”

Those words, which he uttered on a peaceful Sunday morning in 1941 on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, would haunt Kermit Tyler for the rest of his life.

Tyler was the Army Air Forces’ first lieutenant on temporary duty at Fort Shafter’s radar information center on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when a radar operator on the northern tip of the island reported that he and another private were seeing an unusually large “blip” on their radar screen, indicating a large number of aircraft about 132 miles away and fast approaching.

“Don’t worry about it,” Tyler told the radar operator, thinking it was a flight of U.S. B-17 bombers that was due in from the mainland.

Instead, the blip on the radar screen was the first wave of more than 180 Japanese fighters, torpedo bombers, dive bombers and horizontal bombers whose surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the island’s main airfields shortly before 8 a.m. plunged the United States into World War II.

“I wake up at nights sometimes and think about it,” Tyler said in a 2007 interview with The Newark Star-Ledger. “But I don’t feel guilty. I did all I could that morning.”

Tyler, who suffered two strokes within the last two years, died Jan. 23 at his home in San Diego at age 96, said his daughter Julie Jones.

After Pearl Harbor, Tyler flew combat missions in the Pacific.