1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  This message was of course snatched out of the air via MAGIC and arrived translated on the desks of the pertinent intelligence officers in Washington, who then began to distribute it to higher authorities. The Japanese ambassadors had not even read it yet. Navy lieutenant commander Alvin D. Kramer was alarmed when he read the first thirteen parts and, using his wife as a driver, he began delivering copies to appropriate high-ranking naval authorities, as well as to the White House. Kramer’s opposite number in army intelligence, Colonel Rufus Bratton—who had become disturbed when he saw the earlier MAGIC intercept asking for information on ships in Pearl Harbor—was told by his boss, General Sherman Miles, that this latest Japanese message was of “little military significance” and ordered him not to disturb General of the Army Marshall with its contents.14

  When the message reached the White House about nine P.M., however, there was quite a different reaction. Roosevelt was seated in his study talking with his aide Harry Hopkins, who was pacing the floor, when a naval assistant brought it in. Roosevelt read the thing and handed it to Hopkins, and when Hopkins had finished it Roosevelt said to him, “This means war.”

  Hopkins agreed and suggested that if that were so, then it might be best to attack the Japanese first. “No, we can’t do that,” Roosevelt replied. “We are a democracy and a peaceful people.” Then he added something strange: “But we have a good record.”

  What was meant by this odd remark has never been fully explained. Roosevelt did try to reach his chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold Stark, but Stark had gone to the theater to see The Student Prince and Roosevelt decided not to disturb him. Nor did he call General Marshall.15

  What followed remain a lot of what-ifs.

  Next morning, December 7, Marshall, still unaware of the Japanese message, went out for his usual long Sunday morning horseback ride in the fields near Arlington, Virginia. When somebody finally found him about eleven-thirty A.M. he had gotten to his office and was slowly reading the first thirteen parts of the message. Colonel Bratton held in his hand the final (fourteenth) part, as well as something that had alarmed Bratton even more: the final instruction to the Japanese ambassador indicating that Tokyo had ordered him to deliver the message to the U.S. secretary of state at precisely one P.M. Washington time. To Bratton, this meant that something was probably going to happen in the Pacific at that time, he just didn’t know where; he never suspected Pearl Harbor because, as he explained later, “After the original ‘War Warning’ the week earlier, everyone in Washington naturally assumed the fleet would be at sea.”

  Commander Kramer, who had delivered copies of the message the night before, was equally alarmed. He had calculated that at one P.M. in Washington it would be dark in the Philippines, but it would be just after sunrise in Hawaii. The full import of this reckoning did not immediately strike him, but he did communicate it to Admiral Stark.

  Bratton stood fidgeting in Marshall’s office while the general perused the first thirteen parts of the message with excruciating slowness. Bratton tried several times to interrupt him to show him the last part and the one P.M. deadline message, but the chief of staff waved him off.

  Finally Marshall accepted Bratton’s remaining documents and at last recognized the significance of the whole message, especially the one P.M. time frame. Though the message contained no actual declaration of war,*16 it did state that the Japanese were breaking off negotiations and Marshall assumed they were certainly up to something.

  He conferred over the phone with Stark, who had by then also read the message. Stark was at first reluctant to send out another “war warning” to his Pacific commanders. He assumed the one he had sent a week earlier had been sufficient, and did not want to appear to be crying wolf. After all, if he sent out another, and nothing happened, and then after that something else arose, and he sent out another, and so forth, the commanders were almost sure to relax their guard. It is almost impossible to keep a large military force on a constant alert status, to the detriment of all else.

  However, after further consultation with Marshall, Stark agreed that whatever message Marshall was going to send should be communicated by the various army commanders to their navy counterparts in the Philippines, Panama, the West Coast, and, belatedly, Pearl Harbor. It read: “Japanese are presenting at one P.M. eastern standard time today what amounts to an ultimatum, also they are under orders to destroy their code machine immediately. Just what significance the hour set may have we do not know but be on alert accordingly. Inform naval authorities of this communication. Marshall.”

  In Washington, it was now nearly noon. People were returning from church services or preparing for Sunday dinner. The D.C. football stadium (Griffith Field; now demolished) was filling up with fans for the Redskins—Philadelphia Eagles game. Stark had offered Marshall the use of the navy communication services, but Marshall declined and Bratton was given the assignment to get the warning to the Pacific commanders by the highest priority. As historian Gordon Prange has pointed out, “No one seriously considered using the telephone, even with its scrambler, because it was still considered insecure—and, given the wording of Marshall’s message, it would be obvious to anyone listening in that the U.S. was reading Japan’s secret communications.”17

  Bratton anxiously rushed Marshall’s handscribbled warning to the army communications center, where it would have to be typed out, encoded, and sent, then decoded and delivered. There was still nearly a precious hour left to alert the Pacific to the coming danger, but then a new glitch appeared. A big solar storm had brewed up overnight and the army’s radio communications with Hawaii became impossible. The signal officer on duty decided on the spot that civilian commercial services would be the next-best way to get Marshall’s warning out. So he had it teletyped from his office directly to Western Union, which sent it on to San Francisco, which sent it to the RCA office there, which cabled it to Honolulu, which would deliver it by messenger to the army message center at Pearl Harbor, which, after decoding it, would give it to the commanding general, Walter Short, who would pass it along to somebody who would give it to the navy admiral commanding the fleet, Husband Kimmel. By the time it finally got there, neither General Short nor Admiral Kimmel would have need of it.

  Chapter Five

  As General Marshall’s warning message was wending its tortuous path across the Pacific, the sailors and soldiers at and near Pearl Harbor were only beginning to wake up. Sunday was generally a lazy day in the prewar military; men were sitting around in mess halls enjoying coffee and cigarettes. Some were preparing for Sunday morning services or recreational activities, perhaps planning to spend the day at the beach; some were sleeping it off from Saturday night on the town. All in all it looked to be another beautiful Hawaiian tropic day.

  Two hundred miles north of Pearl, just as the first rosy glow of dawn began to spread over those desolate reaches of the ocean, a hair-raising tableau would have appeared to anyone who came across it unsuspecting. There in the roiling misty sea was a mighty gray battlefleet flying the flag of the Rising Sun—twenty-four fast warships: battleships, cruisers, destroyers, supply vessels—and standing out against these in stark relief, dwarfing them even, were six enormous aircraft carriers, launching hundreds of planes.*

  Here was the zenith of Yamamoto’s scheme, and it had so far gone perfectly. They had made their way across the deserted and freezing North Pacific in December completely undetected; the spy Yoshikawa in Honolulu had just made his final report, indicating that the U.S. battleship fleet was in, the weather was clear, and there seemed to be no undue alarm. Just another Sunday at Pearl Harbor.*

  One person who was not particularly pleased was the Japanese air commander Minoru Genda because the U.S. aircraft carriers were missing from Pearl Harbor, and he did not know why or where they were. As an airpower advocate the American Pacific carriers had been Genda’s ultimate target, for they were the main force capable of striking back at Japan itself or, for that matter, at his own carriers.
In fact the U.S.S. Enterprise and Lexington were off to the West, delivering fighter planes to Wake and Midway Islands, and the Saratoga was just arriving in Seattle for an overhaul. Yorktown and Hornet had recently been sent to the Atlantic.

  Despite the original qualms of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, commanding the Japanese armada, the First Air Fleet was finally entering into the riskiest and, up to then, most crucial mission of its existence. Nagumo, a fifty-four-year-old veteran of the old “gun navy”—battleships and cruisers—was inexperienced with airpower and he had fretted and stewed all across the far reaches of the North Pacific about the success of the attack. Fierce winter storms were encountered with mountainous seas. During refueling operations sailors had vanished overboard after being swept from the carrier decks by hoses used for fueling at sea, which often snapped in the storms and whipped across deck like giant writhing snakes. Still the fleet sailed on, observing strict radio silence, communicating by signal lamps, and flags if weather permitted. The ships could receive messages from Japan, however, without giving up their positions, and seven days out the fleet received from Tokyo the word everyone had been anticipating: “Climb Mount Niitaka.” This was the code phrase telling them that the negotiations with America had failed; that the Pearl Harbor attack was to proceed; that there would be no turning back.

  Almost everyone had been up since the late midnight hours. The pilots dressed in their newly pressed uniforms and some put on the white hashamaki headband of the Japanese samurai warrior. The night before, many had written farewell letters to their families. They were treated to a special ceremonial breakfast of red beans and rice and sake. The man who was actually to lead the air attack forces was Lieutenant Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, a classmate and friend of Genda’s from their days together at the Japanese Naval Academy. As he walked into the officers’ mess Fuchida was greeted by a fellow officer who said to him, “Good morning, commander, Honolulu sleeps.”1

  Of course not everybody in Honolulu was sleeping. There was for instance the overtime-paid disc jockey at station KGMB, who had, at the request of the U.S. Army, played Hawaiian music all night so that a flight of B-17 heavy bombers en route from the West Coast would have a signal to home in on before they landed around eight A.M. Also there had been some strange doings around Pearl Harbor itself that morning, which caused some consternation.

  The destroyer Ward was on antisubmarine duty near the entrance channel to Pearl when a lookout spotted something strange in the water. The Ward, a World War I-vintage ship, had been instructed to sink on sight any submarine it saw, because no U.S. subs were supposed to be in the area. At first in the thin light of dawn they believed the strange object might be a buoy, but then it seemed to be following a supply ship, which was heading into Pearl through the opened antisubmarine nets. A closer look through binoculars revealed that the strange object appeared to be a conning tower of a submarine—except that it did not look like the conning tower of any submarine they were familiar with. The skipper of the Ward, Lieutenant William W. Outerbridge, was summoned. He immediately called general quarters.

  In fact what the Ward had sighted was one of five Japanese midget subs launched from five mother ships—regular submarines to which the midgets had been bolted on deck and ferried all the way across the Pacific to sneak into Pearl Harbor and, carrying two torpedoes each, do as much damage as possible in concert with the massive air attack. Basically, it was a suicide mission, since there was no way to recover the mini-subs, but their two-man crews were enthusiastic to sink American ships and die for their emperor.

  Lieutenant Outerbridge ordered the Ward to open fire on the sub when it was one hundred yards away, dead ahead. The first shot missed, but the second hit the conning tower and the sub wallowed. The Ward pressed on until the sub was “right alongside, almost sucked against the ship,”2 then it spun off in the Ward’s wake. Outerbridge ordered depth charges fired, and soon the ocean astern erupted in gigantic undersea blasts no submarine that close could have withstood. Outerbridge then sent a radio message to his headquarters at Pearl: “Attacked, fired on, depth bombed, and sunk, submarine operating in defensive sea area.” It was 6:53 A.M., barely an hour before the first wave of 183 Japanese warplanes were due to strike Pearl Harbor.

  Receipt of the Ward’s message was only the first of many snafus* that morning, which might otherwise have put Pearl Harbor on alert. The office that received it was manned only by an old navy reserve officer and a Hawaiian enlisted man “who understood little English and nothing about the teletype.”3 It took nearly twenty minutes to decode and comprehend the message, and even longer to reach the proper authorities. Even when this was done, Admiral Claude C. Bloch, commanding the Fourteenth Naval District, spent nearly ten more minutes trying to decide if the report was true. In the past there had been many such reports, which turned out to be attacks on whales or giant blackfish or just plain old flotsam. So Admiral Bloch turned to a time-honored navy custom: he told the duty officer to have the Ward verify its message and, in the meantime, to “await further developments.” These were not long in coming.

  Commander Fuchida was flight leader of the 183 planes in the first strike: 49 high-altitude level bombers, each carrying one of the big sixteen-inch navy gun shells converted into armor-piercing bombs; 40 torpedo planes with one torpedo slung under the fuselage; 51 dive-bombers; and 43 Zeros—escort fighter planes. Navigation was not difficult; after all, just like the flight of incoming American B-17s, they had the Honolulu radio station music to home in on.

  One hour and forty minutes after leaving their carriers the Japanese attack force was flying at about 10,000 feet, above a thick layer of clouds, when, Fuchida recalled, “Suddenly, through an opening in the clouds, a long white line of breaking surf appeared directly beneath my plane. It was the northern shore of Oahu.” Fuchida veered southwest and Pearl Harbor came into view, veiled in a light morning mist. The American ships were lying peacefully at anchor; nothing below seemed to stir, not even a breeze. They had not been discovered (or so Fuchida thought) and he tapped out on his radio the message that everyone back on the carriers had been praying for: “Tora, Tora, Tor a” (Tiger, Tiger, Tiger); this meant that Japan had achieved complete surprise.

  In fact, they had been discovered. Out on a hillside at the northernmost point of Oahu was the Opana mobile radar station, manned by two U.S. Army privates. At seven A.M. they were about to shut down after their three-hour duty stint when “suddenly the oscilloscope picked up an image so peculiar that Lockhart [one of the privates] thought something must be wrong with the set.”4 Radar was fairly new to the U.S. military; these mobile radar stations were only a few months old and many of the crews were still in training. But a check of the set indicated it was working properly and what it was looking at was unmistakably an enormous flight of planes—at least fifty, maybe more—coming in from the north.

  The radar operators—even though they were technically now off-duty—decided to telephone in this discovery to the Fort Shafter information center, about thirty miles south, which was responsible for plotting and tracking aircraft movements. Here another glitch developed. The duty officer that morning was one Lieutenant Kermit Tyler, a rookie fighter pilot who had pulled this duty only one time previously. Not only that, but when the mobile radar station was presumed to be shut down at seven A.M. all the plotters promptly left and went to breakfast, effectively leaving Lieutenant Tyler alone.

  He digested the information from the Opana station privates and considered several things. First, that what they were looking at might be a flight of planes from a U.S. carrier (the Enterprise was headed back to Pearl that day). Then he also recalled that the flight of B-17s—the one the Honolulu radio station was playing Hawaiian music for—was due in the area about this time. So, without further explanation to the radar privates, Tyler told them, “Well, don’t worry about it.” They kept on watching, however, fascinated, as the blips drew nearer and nearer until they were finally blocked out by the shadow of a moun
tain just as Fuchida made his veer to the southwest toward Pearl Harbor.

  Fuchida’s attack plan was efficient and sensible. First the torpedo planes would glide in low and drop their deadly cargo; then the dive-bombers would swoop down at breakneck speed and deliver their explosives; next the level bombers with their big armor-piercing naval shells would unload—all while some of the covering Zero fighters hovered above, waiting for any sign of American aircraft, and others flew down on the deck to strafe the airfields themselves. And just when they thought it might be over, the second wave of 153 planes would arrive to finish the job. Fuchida, his canopy open, fired a flare from his rocket pistol, the signal to commence the attack.

  Fuchida’s dive-bombers had already climbed high in the sky for altitude while his torpedo bombers had descended and circled so as to come in low from the southwest, that is, the ocean side of Pearl Harbor. The American battleships were moored in line two by two alongside Ford Island, which is in the center of the harbor. It was almost eight A.M., time for morning colors, and aboard the U.S.S. Nevada bandleader Oden McMillan had just raised his baton to begin playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Some of the bandsmen were puzzled to see large flights of planes diving down toward the battleships at the opposite end of the island, but McMillan concluded it must be some kind of army air corps drill and with a wave of his baton the band struck up the national anthem. Almost in the same moment he heard explosions at the far end of Battleship Row.

  One of Fuchida’s torpedo bombers skimmed across the harbor and launched its torpedo at the Arizona, just astern of the Nevada, as McMillan’s band was finishing the first stanza, then swooped up right over the Nevada’s fantail, where the American flag was being raised. The Japanese tail gunner let loose a burst of machine-gun fire on the musicians, who continued to play the anthem. No band members were hit, but the American flag was suddenly shredded. Other sailors on deck, momentarily confused, stood at attention, their right arms still raised in salute.5