1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls Read online

  According to author Walter Lord’s account of the attack, “McMillan knew now, but kept on conducting. The years of training had taken over—it never occurred to him that once he had begun playing the National Anthem, he could possibly stop. Another strafer flashed by. This time McMillan unconsciously paused as the deck splintered around him, but he quickly picked up the beat again. The entire band stopped and started again with him, as though they had rehearsed it for weeks. Not a man broke formation until the final note died. Then everyone ran wildly for cover.”6

  As the first torpedo bombers came in, some Pearl Harbor personnel waved at them before they realized who they were. Seeing the red rising sun “meatball” on the wingtips, some even concluded that they were Russian planes, perhaps come from a visiting Russian carrier. Most still assumed at first it was some sort of drill being conducted by the army. Even when the bombs and torpedoes began to fall and explode, some believed it was a U.S. pilot “gone crazy,” or that “a wheel had just fallen off an airplane.” Recreational fliers in small light planes out for an early Sunday spin were bewildered, then terrified, as they realized what these huge flights of foreign warplanes meant. Great geysers of water shot into the air as Fuchida’s torpedoes splashed into the harbor on their way toward the U.S. battleships. Meantime, at Wheeler and Hickam Fields and other U.S. air bases, the American airplanes—lined up in rows per the antisabotage instructions of General Walter Short—were being systematically wrecked and turned into burning infernos on the runways.

  All of this took only a few minutes. In his home in the hills overlooking Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander in chief of Pacific Fleet, had been in the process of dressing for a golf game with his army counterpart, General Short. But by then the duty officer had phoned with news of the destroyer Ward’s attack on the Japanese sub. Kimmel canceled the game and began redressing in his navy whites to attend to the situation from his office when the phone rang again with frantic news that Pearl Harbor had just come under Japanese air attack. The admiral rushed outside, his uniform jacket still unbuttoned and flapping, just in time to see the first explosions. He dashed next door onto a neighbor’s lawn, which had a better view of Battleship Row. There he encountered Mrs. John B. Earle, wife of the Fourteenth Naval District commander’s chief of staff. The two of them gaped appalled at the unfolding spectacle. The sky was completely filled with Japanese planes and Kimmel instantly recognized this as no casual raid but a full-scale assault. The booms from the torpedo and bomb explosions began to reach their ears. Suddenly the battleship Oklahoma seemed to shudder and then slowly roll over in the shallow harbor until only its bottom was visible.*7

  “It looks like they’ve got the Oklahoma,” Mrs. Earle remarked, awestruck.

  “Yes, I can see they have,” Kimmel told her, his face now a blanched mask of horror.8 He was experiencing a naval commander’s worst nightmare, as his fleet was being destroyed before his very eyes.

  Then the battleship Arizona seemed actually to lift out of the water and an enormous flash of fire and smoke mushroomed above her forward decks; slowly she began to list and settle, and kept on settling. In that instant eleven hundred U.S. sailors perished. One of the big Japanese sixteen-inch naval shell bombs had hit the Arizona’s deck forward of the turrets and penetrated four decks below into the powder magazine. The ship blew up. The concussion was so stupendous that it blew sailors off of other nearby ships into the water; it sucked up all the air in the area, actually stopping the engines of cars and military vehicles onshore rushing to or away from the scene; it blew people down inside of their own homes and offices, and even Fuchida, the Japanese air leader circling high above, felt his plane rock and roll. Battleship division commander Admiral Isaac C. Kidd and the Arizona’s skipper, Captain Franklin Van Valkenburg, had been standing on the bridge and were incinerated by the blast.9

  Kimmel’s staff car roared up from nowhere and the stricken admiral jumped in and set off for his Pacific Fleet headquarters. By the time he got there the first wave of attack was reaching its most pitiless crescendo: bombs, torpedoes, and machine-gun fire from dive-bombers and fighters filled the air; great billows of smoke from burning fuel oil obscured much of the harbor; and added to this was the constant roar of American antiaircraft guns, which had finally begun coming to life.

  Kimmel stood watching from the window of his War Plans office calm but grim-faced, with teeth clenched. Like the Oklahoma, the Arizona had gone down. The explosion had broken her in half. The battleships California and West Virginia had also begun to settle to the bottom. Another battleship, the Utah, had sunk too, but the Japanese had basically wasted their bombs and torpedoes on her: Utah was old and being used only as a target-practice ship. For the moment there was little Kimmel could do. The now famous message had already been dispatched to Washington and other naval commands: “Enemy Air Raid Pearl Harbor. This Is Not a Drill,” and Kimmel had quickly ordered all flyable navy planes to begin searching for the Japanese carriers. (By this time, there were precious few of these aircraft left.) Suddenly a spent . 30-caliber machine-gun bullet smashed through the window and hit Kimmel on the chest before dropping to the floor. The admiral looked at it, picked it up, and said to one of his staff members, “It would have been merciful if it had killed me.”10 At that point Kimmel was feeling so low that he would probably have accepted crucifixion as his punishment, and in the end that is what he got, although it was a long and slow crucifixion.

  Out in the harbor the hundreds of men ordered to abandon ship, or who had been blown off their ships, floundered in oily goo several inches thick, much of it on fire. The torpedoes had loosed millions of gallons of fuel from the stricken battleships. An odd assortment of boats scurried about plucking as many as possible from the treacherous blazing waters—admiral’s gigs, launches, yard tenders, workboats, even a “honey barge” (garbage scow) joined in the rescues—all while the skies continued to rain down Japanese bombs and bullets.

  Oil-coated men, many seriously burned or otherwise injured, hauled themselves up on nearby Ford Island. Hundreds of wounded were laid in improvised medical areas such as tennis courts and mess halls. In one instance, sixteen-year-old Mary Ann Ramsey, daughter of Lieutenant Commander Logan C. Ramsey at the Ford Island command center, went from wounded man to wounded man, writing down their names and comforting the dying, of which there were many.

  Aboard the sinking West Virginia, which had taken six or seven torpedoes in her port side, Captain Mervyn Bennion had been disemboweled by a shard from the Arizona when it exploded. He lay on the bridge perfectly conscious as his ship was gradually engulfed in fire, inquiring how the fight was going. At some point his officers decided to move him to a safer spot and for this agonizing task they recruited a large black cook, third class, named Doris Miller, who was the West Virginia’s heavyweight boxing champion. Captain Bennion died a short while later and Doris Miller, who knew nothing about weapons or weaponry, went out to a machine-gun station and in no time was “blazing away as though he had fired one all his life.”*11

  Lieutenant General Walter Short, the army commander on Hawaii who had just missed his golf game with Admiral Kimmel, heard the racket at home and stepped out on his porch to see what he could see, which was not much more than smoke since he lived near Honolulu. He was soon informed and rushed to his headquarters. Arriving, he encountered an intelligence officer on his staff and asked, “What’s going on out there?”

  The officer, Lieutenant Colonel George W. Bicknell, replied, “I’m not sure, General, but I just saw two battleships sunk.”

  Short looked at him like he was crazy. “That’s ridiculous!” he snorted, and stalked off.12

  Meantime, the U.S. military was fighting back as best it could. Short had immediately ordered army troops to the antiaircraft guns, which was hardly necessary, but many guns did not have ready ammunition and much of what they did have was old World War I stuff with many duds. They tried their best. At one point a Japanese bomb blew out the
side of the prison stockade at Schofield Barracks and the suddenly freed prisoners rushed to help where they could.

  Two young army fighter pilots, Lieutenants Kenneth Taylor and George Welch, had planned to spend their Sunday at the beach. When they saw the runway wreckage at Wheeler Field they jumped into a car and rushed off to a little grass landing strip about ten miles away where there were a few P40 fighters parked. Soon they were in the air and loaded for bear. Before it was over they racked up seven of the eleven Japanese planes shot down that day by the U.S. Army Air Corps.

  Among the most startled people that morning—and that included everyone—were the pilots and crews of the big four-engine B-17 bombers who arrived at Pearl Harbor at the height of the attack. The twelve planes had flown fourteen hours straight from the West Coast with skeleton crews, their machine guns still packed in Cosmoline, listening to the soothing Hawaiian music on the radio guiding them in. They had just about enough gas to make land when they arrived on the scene of the carnage. Japanese fighters, whom the crews first thought were U.S. Army planes, suddenly attacked them. Hickam Field, their designated landing spot, was mostly ablaze with burning aircraft. One B-17 somehow made a landing with three Japanese Zeros on his tail, blazing away at him. Others followed but the rest scattered for the other airfields on Oahu. One managed to land on a golf course, another on a twelve-hundred-foot grass strip half the size of what it took to safely land a B-17. Amazingly, only one bomber was lost when a Japanese fighter bullet set off a box of flares in the tail section; the pilots managed to land the plane, but the rear half broke in two and burned. The difficulty of shooting down these lumbering “Flying Fortresses” impressed at least one Japanese pilot, who predicted to his superiors that they would have much trouble in the future from such heavily armored flying machines. In this he was correct.

  At 8:40, half an hour after the attack had begun, there was a fifteen-minute lull, and then the second wave of 153 Japanese planes arrived. Pearl Harbor was so enshrouded in smoke by then that it was difficult to find targets, so many Japanese amused themselves by shooting up anything and everything. They strafed private homes, churches, hospitals, mess halls, groups of men, and, for target practice, speeding automobiles and trucks. One army ambulance received fifty-two bullet holes. What the Japanese did not do—and in hindsight this was one of the few blessings of the Pearl Harbor raid—was to destroy the huge fuel-storage tanks containing millions of gallons of precious fuel oil; nor did they destroy the vast naval repair shops and facilities. This oversight allowed the United States military to go on the offensive almost immediately after the attack.

  By this time military wives living near the base were taking all sorts of refuge against the attack to protect themselves and their children: some hid under mattresses;* others huddled in bathtubs or crawled under houses. The Japanese planes seemed to be everywhere, swooping and darting at treetop level and firing at anything that moved. One woman even hid under the lid of a galvanized-tin garbage can, as if that would have done any good. Another stuck her head into a bush, “literally like an ostrich.”13

  In the middle of all this a stirring spectacle unfolded. The U.S.S. Nevada, whose crew at the beginning of the attack had stood at attention while “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played and they were being bombed and machine-gunned, had somehow raised enough steam to get under way—the only big ship that did so. Her senior officers were all ashore but there was an experienced reserve officer aboard, Lieutenant Commander Francis Thomas, who took charge. He knew next to nothing about handling anything as big as a battleship but Chief Quartermaster Robert Sedberry did and by some miracle, or a series of them (it normally took four tugboats to free a battleship from a mooring and set her straight in the channel), the Nevada came on, so as not to remain a sitting duck for the Japanese. She was seriously afire amidships and had a hole blown into her bow the size of a house, but out of the smoke and flames and crash and gloom of the battle she emerged into the bright morning sun full speed ahead, her American flag snapping in the breeze. Men onshore stopped whatever they were doing and gaped at this sight to behold. Many wept tears down their grimy, oil-stained cheeks and a great cheer arose all along Battleship Row, for to see the Nevada headed for the open sea, all her guns blazing at the Japanese planes, meant there was still a fighting U.S. Navy left in the Pacific.

  By ten A.M. it was over, except for the horrid mess that remained to clean up, and the dead to be buried and the dying to die and the wounded to be cared for. The Nevada, bold as her dash for freedom had been, quickly became the target of practically every Japanese warplane over Pearl Harbor and, after taking six huge bomb hits, she beached herself to keep from blocking the narrow channel. Ships burned far into the night and the next day and the next. Many men were still trapped in the bowels of the sunken ships and heroic efforts would be made to extract them. Not all were successful. Some tapped on the insides of the hulls for more than two weeks, until Christmas Eve, when their tapping finally stopped.

  Grim scenes abounded all over the area. There had been ninety-four U.S. Navy warships in Pearl Harbor before the attack. Now eighteen of them, most importantly the great battleships, were either sunk or wrecked and on fire. Two thousand three hundred and forty American sailors, soldiers, and marines had been killed, and about sixty civilians, most killed by errant U.S. antiaircraft fire, which landed in or near Honolulu. Most of the U.S. airplanes had been wiped out on their runways—347 of them. But as historian John Toland put it, “It was a disaster, but it could have been a catastrophe.” Quite true, as we shall see later on. The Japanese had not gotten the American carriers, which were at sea, nor as mentioned did they seriously damage the oil storage and naval shops or the submarines.14

  Back in Washington it was early afternoon and the news was just getting around. Roosevelt was finishing lunch with his chief adviser Harry Hopkins at the White House, eating an apple, when, at 1:40, Secretary of the Navy Knox called to report the attack. Hopkins “expressed the belief that there must be some kind of mistake,”* but Roosevelt “thought it was just the kind of unexpected thing the Japanese would do, and that at the very time they were discussing peace in the Pacific they were plotting to overthrow it.”15

  Unfortunately for the Japanese ambassadorial delegation of Nomura and Kurusu (who were even then ignorant of the attack), there had been delays in decoding and typing up the final reply from Tokyo, which they had been instructed to deliver to Secretary of State Hull at one P.M. Sunday, December 7, while the Japanese warplanes were already winging their way from the carriers toward Pearl. Accordingly, they had to postpone their date with Hull for an hour. When they arrived at his office at two o’clock Hull had by then not only learned of the attack but of course already read the contents of their diplomatic note thanks to MAGIC. His was not a warm reception; the two Japanese were not even invited to sit down, but stood there, hats in hand, while Hull gave a cursory glance to the reply they had brought him.

  “I must say that in all my conversations with you over the last nine months I have never uttered a word of untruth,” said Hull, interspersing this with what Roosevelt historian Robert Sherwood described as “some pretty strong Tennessee mountain language.”

  “This is borne out absolutely in the record,” Hull seethed. “In all my fifty years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions—infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them.” He then dismissed the two mortified emissaries without even a good-bye and, characteristically, referred to them immediately afterward as “piss-ants.”16

  In Japan, which had installed a nationwide system of radio hookups plugged into loudspeakers on power polls in the streets of the major cities and towns, news of the attack was broadcast. Japanese citizens stopped and digested the information, then began cheering “and clapping as if it had been a ball game,” and dancing in the
streets. Then martial music began playing over the loudspeakers and the broadcast included a General Tojo speech about “annihilating” the West, “which was trying to dominate the world.” One of the songs they played, “Umi Yukaba,” was a sort of Japanese version of “God Bless America.” It went this way:

  Across the sea, corpses in the waters;

  Across the mountains, corpses in the fields,

  I shall die only for the Emperor,

  I shall never look back.17

  Meantime, the jubilant and victorious Japanese pilots had returned to their mother ships to a chorus of great cheering and backslapping. Commander Fuchida, the flight leader, immediately stormed onto the bridge of Admiral Nagumo’s flagship Akagi and buttonholed his friend Commander Genda, who had organized the mission. Fuchida urged Genda to let the pilots refuel and then go after the missing American carriers, which he assumed to be south of Oahu. (In fact, they were to the west, but still not far away.) Genda became enthusiastic too, and recommended this change of plan to Admiral Nagumo. But there was a hitch; the Japanese tanker train, which was already headed for a prearranged refueling point, could not possibly catch up with the fast carriers if they headed south, and the scheme had to be ditched for fear of running out of fuel.

  Not to be dissuaded, Fuchida then argued for continuing the strikes on Pearl Harbor to destroy the oil-storage tanks and machine shops missed in the first two attacks. After all, he reasoned, the Japanese attack force had lost only twenty-nine planes over Pearl that morning, leaving them with more than three hundred yet, and complete control of the air. Why not punish the Americans more while they were here and while they could—to finish the job, so to speak.