Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

by Ian W. Toll

  TEDDY ROOSEVELT, failing to reclaim the presidency on the third-party Bull Moose ticket in 1912, entered his political afterlife as a writer, speechmaker, and crusader on behalf of his favorite causes. As always, he preached that friendly and peaceable relations with Japan should be “one of the cardinal principles of our foreign policy.” He returned to the same nostrums he had prescribed since the California schools crisis in 1906—to lavish courtesy and flattery on the Japanese, in hopes of soothing their delicate sense of national honor; to avoid senseless provocations, both in California and in Asia; and to remain prepared, at all times and at the drop of a hat, to send the main battle fleet of the U.S. Navy to the western Pacific. Roosevelt also continued to suspect the Japanese were “bent upon establishing themselves as the leading power in the Pacific.” War might yet be inevitable, but American foreign policy should be aimed at postponing the day of reckoning as long as possible. The Philippines were largely indefensible, and would remain so even if Congress could somehow be persuaded to pour tens of millions of dollars into their defense. The only hope of forestalling Japanese aggression was a credible naval deterrent. Roosevelt returned again and again, with stridency verging on apoplexy, to the theme of “naval preparedness.” It was one of his favorite watchwords, a term he coined—“preparedness”—and he hammered it home in speeches, letters, and articles. The navy was the nation’s right arm, he wrote in the New York Times, and “woe to our country if we permit that right arm to become palsied or even to become flabby and inefficient.” Americans, if they failed to prepare for war, would have a “bitter awakening; and if ever that bitter awakening comes, I trust our people will remember the foolish philanthropists and the recreant congressmen and other public servants at whose doors the responsibility will lie.”

  As Woodrow Wilson took office in 1913, he named to the post of assistant secretary of the navy a thirty-one-year-old former New York state senator named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Franklin was Theodore Roosevelt’s fifth cousin, and had married the latter’s niece, Eleanor. (TR had given the bride away at their wedding in 1905.) Though FDR was a Democrat, and would be working for a president who had just defeated TR in a national election, he was also a dyed-in-the-wool navalist and a disciple of Mahan. On his fifteenth birthday, in fact, Franklin had received from Theodore a gift-wrapped copy of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. According to FDR’s mother, the boy had “practically memorized the book.” FDR would run the day-to-day operations of the navy during his stint in office, as TR had done when he held the same post in the McKinley administration.

  In May 1913, TR wrote to congratulate the younger man on his appointment, and also to offer unsolicited guidance. Never permit the fleet to be divided between the Pacific and the Atlantic, he warned, and added: “I do not anticipate trouble with Japan, but it may come, and if it does it will come suddenly.”

  The words were prophetic but twenty-eight years too early. When the “bitter awakening” came, on a bright Hawaiian morning in 1941, it came more suddenly than all but the most ardent pessimists had imagined. FDR, having followed in TR’s footsteps through the offices of assistant navy secretary and governor of New York, would be serving in his ninth year as president of the United States. In ironic fulfillment of Mahan’s law of concentration, the battleships of the Pacific Fleet would be moored in a double file in the East Loch of Pearl Harbor, bow to stern and beam to beam, as neat as a team of horses harnessed to a stagecoach. But they would not be prepared.

  War is the tao of deception.

  Therefore, when planning an attack, feign inactivity.

  When near, appear as if you are far away.

  When far away, create the illusion that you are near.

  If the enemy is efficient, prepare for him.

  If he is strong, evade him.

  If he is angry, agitate him.

  If he is arrogant, behave timidly so as to encourage his arrogance.

  If he is rested, cause him to exert himself.

  Advance when he does not expect you.

  Attack him when he is unprepared.

  —Sun-Tzu, The Art of War

  Chapter One

  FOR THE INHABITANTS OF OAHU, THERE WAS NOTHING UNUSUAL IN being jerked out of sleep by guns and bombs and low-flying aircraft. The island was crowded with military bases, and live-firing drills were commonplace. In early 1941, as the danger of war had seemed to grow, the services took to conducting “simulated combat exercises”—mock battles pitting the army against the navy, the navy against the marines, the marines against the army. On these days, a colossal amount of ammunition was thrown up into the air, and the island’s lightly built wood-frame houses would shake and rattle as if an earthquake had struck. So when the familiar racket started up, at a little before eight in the morning on that first Sunday in December 1941, most of the residents pulled a pillow over their heads, or turned back to their coffee and comic strips and radio programs, and tried to ignore the deep concussive thuds of distant bombs, the heavy booming of antiaircraft batteries, and the faint rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns.

  But it was soon clear that these were no ordinary exercises. Floors shook, windows rattled, airplanes roared low overhead, and empty machine-gun casings fell on rooftops like hail. In Honolulu, civilians emerged from their homes, many still wearing pajamas and nightshirts. Explosions could be heard in the city, and smoke rose above King Street in the McCully district. Sirens blared, and to the west, above Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field, a gigantic pall of oily black smoke boiled thousands of feet into the sky. Looking up, observers on the ground could see a small armada of dive-bombers circling at high altitude in lazy figure-eight patterns. Every so often, a group of the aircraft would coalesce into an orderly attack formation; and then individual planes would peel off, one by one, to begin their dive-bombing runs.

  The spectators were impressed: the flyboys were putting on a terrific show. Twelve-year-old Dan Kong, still in his pajamas, remarked to his brother, “Wow, spectacular maneuvers.” The two climbed an avocado tree in their family’s backyard for a better view. “I had to admit it was very realistic,” another civilian witness recalled. A sailor at Pearl Harbor pronounced it “the best goddamn drill the Army Air Force has ever put on!” The heavy smoke over Pearl Harbor was thought to be “smoke bombs”—or perhaps, as Honolulu mayor Lester Petrie supposed, a “practice smoke screen . . . I thought that was a perfect demonstration.”

  At four minutes past eight, KGMB interrupted its regular Sunday morning radio broadcast of organ music carried live from the First Baptist Church of Waikiki. The announcer, Webley Edwards, read a brief statement recalling all military personnel to their bases and stations. Normal programming then resumed, but new interruptions followed every few minutes, with announcements calling firemen, doctors, rescue workers, and disaster wardens to work. At 8:40 a.m., Edwards came back on the air: “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important news. Please pay attention. The island is under attack. I repeat, the island is under attack by hostile forces.” Skeptical listeners refused to take the news seriously, assuming that the announcement was another element of an unusually vivid practice alert. Some recalled the panic caused by Orson Welles’s fictional War of the Worlds broadcast three years earlier. Shortly before nine, Edwards returned to the air. In a quavering voice he pleaded with his listeners to believe him: “This is no maneuver. Japanese forces are attacking the island. This is the real McCoy!”

  Even seasoned military men found it difficult to believe what they were seeing, and admitted to feeling bewildered and disorientated as the attack unfolded. The notion that an actual raid was underway was slow to enter their minds. In the eyewitness accounts, that pattern of belated comprehension is repeated again and again. A plane approaches. (“Why are those planes flying so low?”) American ground-based antiaircraft guns fire at the intruder. (“Why are the boys shooting at that plane?”) A bomb drops. (“What a stupid, careless pilot, not to have secured his releasing gear.”) It ex
plodes. (“Somebody goofed big this time. They loaded live bombs on those planes by mistake.”) As the plane turns upward, the Japanese “Rising Sun” insignia comes into view on the underside of the wings. (“My God! They’re really going all-out! They’ve even painted the rising sun on that plane!”) An American ship explodes. (“What kind of a drill is this?”) Even then, some men refused to believe that a war had begun that morning—perhaps, as Commander A. L. Seton of the light cruiser St. Louis first guessed, the attacker was “a lone, berserk Japanese pilot who somehow had gotten to Pearl and now would be in trouble with his navy and ours.”

  On the street outside the YMCA in downtown Honolulu, sailors were piling into buses, jitneys, taxicabs, and private cars. Military trucks roared down the main thoroughfares, crammed with “armed soldiers wearing tin helmets, looking skyward.” Fire trucks, rescue units, and policemen on motorcycles raced toward the fires burning in several parts of the city. Sirens screamed; rubber shrieked on pavement. No one observed the speed limits. On the two-lane blacktop highway to Pearl Harbor, recalled Lieutenant Commander Lawson Ramage, “every conceivable vehicle was loaded with sailors—buses, taxis, and everything else—rushing to get out there.”

  For many witnesses, the first direct confirmation that an actual attack was underway came as their vehicles were strafed by low-flying enemy planes. “We heard what sounded like the clicking of typewriter keys,” said Seaman Larry Katz, who was sharing a cab with several other sailors. “I looked out the back window . . . and saw a plane coming down the highway with fire coming out of its wings or engine. It was tracer bullets coming down the highway at all the cars, including ours.” Jack Lower, a civilian electrician, was riding with several other men in the back of an open truck. Each time a plane approached for a strafing run, the men pounded their fists on the roof of the cab, the driver stomped on the brakes, and the passengers dove into the roadside foliage for cover. As the aircraft passed, they clambered back into the truck and continued. Navy Lieutenant Clarence Dickinson recalled seeing sparks leap up from the pavement just ahead of the car in which he was riding as a passenger. Moments later, the car ahead was hit with a burst of 20mm cannon. “Suddenly from the shock of bullets that sedan rocked and was enveloped in a cloud of yellow dust,” he wrote. “We watched the car careening and bumping crazily on empty tires . . . I had time to register an impression of small holes of rain-drop size along that car, like stitches.”

  By 8:10 a.m., just fifteen minutes after the first bombs and torpedoes had struck the ships lying in Pearl Harbor, the main battle force of the Pacific Fleet was crippled. Along the eastern shore of Ford Island, in the anchorage known as “Battleship Row,” the battleships lay smashed, burning, and blackened, their masts and superstructures leaning over the harbor at 45-degree angles. So much thick black smoke was billowing out of the stricken ships that observers could barely tell which had been hit. The California was half-sunk, her keel resting on the bottom, her hull ripped open by Japanese torpedoes; the West Virginia was smashed and blazing, her paint charred and bubbling, with enormous volumes of smoke pouring from her stricken port side; the Maryland and the Tennessee were in better shape, but both ships were jammed against the mooring dolphins, immobilized and out of action. Oklahoma, hit by a barrage of torpedoes, had actually capsized, turning 150 degrees off the vertical, her long keel pointed up toward the sky.

  The battleship Arizona’s forward magazine had detonated in “a mighty thunderclap of sound, deep and terrible,” sending a ball of fire mushrooming into the sky to a height of several thousand feet. Seconds after the explosion, burning debris began raining down on the decks of nearby ships. It continued to fall for an improbably long time. “There were steel fragments in the air, fire, oil—God knows what all,” Seaman Martin Matthews of the Arizona recalled, “pieces of timber, pieces of the boat deck, canvas, and even pieces of bodies. I remember lots of steel and bodies coming down. I saw a thigh and leg; I saw fingers; I saw hands; I saw elbows and arms.” Much of the Arizona was simply gone—the ship had been turned inside out, as it were—and the surviving portion of the hull sank to the harbor floor, leaving only a portion of the superstructure and the muzzles of three guns from Turret Two showing above the surface. Her tower and cranes leaned steeply toward the channel, and dead men hung upside down from the ladders. The blast had killed more than 1,000 of the Arizona’s crew in an instant, and many of the survivors were so badly burned that their shipmates did not know how to help them. “These men were zombies, in essence,” recalled Marine Private James Cory, who served aboard the Arizona and survived the attack. “They were burned completely white. Their skin was just as white as if you had taken a bucket of whitewash and painted it white. Their hair was burned off; their eyebrows were burned off. . . . They were moving like robots. Their arms were out, held away from their bodies, and they were stumping along the decks.”

  But for many who witnessed the events of December 7, 1941, the most unforgettable image of all was the sight of the enemy airplanes, diving out of the sky in such numbers that the morning had seemed to dim, as if a cloud had passed across the sun. Before that morning, Americans had been led to believe that Japanese naval airpower was a joke, an assortment of second-rate airplanes piloted by third-rate aviators. But these planes were handled brilliantly. The dive-bombers planted their bombs with pinpoint accuracy; the torpedo planes came in low and made textbook drops; the Zeros roared in on the tails of the bombers and made deadly strafing runs. If not for the carnage on the ground and in the harbor, the entire spectacle could have been an air show. Witnesses were amazed at how low the attackers flew—so low (as one person remarked) that you could have thrown a baseball and hit a Japanese airplane; so low that witnesses on the third floor of the Navy Yard Hospital looked down on the torpedo planes as they began their runs on the American battleships. The Japanese pilots were plainly visible in their cockpits, many with canopies open; witnesses could see their “cat’s-eye” flight goggles, their windblown scarves, their brown aviators’ helmets, their white headbands—“Hell, I could even see the gold in their teeth,” said an army officer at Wheeler. Many witnesses recalled the strange sensation of making eye contact with an enemy pilot. Some of the Japanese smiled ruefully, almost apologetically; a few even waved. Others laughed and made taunting gestures. “They were so low you could see them grinning, you know,” remarked machinist’s mate Leon Bennett of the Neosho. “I mean, really, they were laughing, all smiles; they were having a field day, a ball.” A marine reported seeing a rear-seat gunner “let go the handles of his gun, clasp his hands high above his head and shake them in that greeting with which American prize fighters salute their fans. Then he grabbed his gun and shot some more.”

  Watching the diving planes, the falling bombs, and the exploding ships, some eyewitnesses were reminded of newsreel footage of the war in Europe, or a big-budget Hollywood production. The entire scene had an unreal, dreamlike quality. “I still expect to awaken from a bad dream or see the end of a war movie,” wrote Captain Elphege Gendreau, a fleet surgeon, several weeks afterward. Theodore Mason, seaman of the California, agreed: “The entire scene had the flickering two-dimensional quality of a B-grade war film.” In many cases it was the non-visual senses that left the most lasting impression on the memory—the terrified screams of the men trapped belowdecks; how the steel rungs of the ladders in the burning ships seared into the palms of the escaping sailors; the bitter taste of fuel oil in the mouth; the rank, cloying odor of burning flesh. The memories were jumbled, out of sequence; but they were also vivid, indelible, even after the passage of many years. The terrible suddenness of the raid, the abrupt transition from peace to war, the immense scale of the carnage, the almost incomprehensible fury and malevolence of the attackers—“It was like being engulfed in a great flood, a tornado or earthquake,” said Chief Petty Officer Charles Russell. “The thing hit so quickly and so powerfully it left you stunned and amazed.” For Signalman John H. McGoran of the California, the experi
ence of being at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was simply impossible to describe. “If you didn’t go through it, there are no words that can adequately describe it; if you were there, then no words are necessary.”

  FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT had been passing a tranquil Sunday afternoon in his Oval Study on the second floor of the White House. Not to be confused with the larger and more formal Oval Office, located downstairs, the study was a part of the president’s official residence; a set of double doors on the west side of the room led directly to his bedroom and private bath. In past presidential administrations, the study had been known as the “Yellow Room” or “Oval Parlor,” and had been used variously as a sitting room, a library, and a place for the storage of unwanted furniture and files. President Harding had played poker here with his friends and cronies, and the Hoovers had used it as a screening room for silent films.

  By December 1941, Roosevelt had occupied the study for nine years, and it had acquired a cluttered, lived-in, and slightly dingy appearance, much like his house at Hyde Park, in the Hudson River Valley of New York. Nearly every square inch of the walls was occupied with photographs and paintings of many different shapes, sizes, and themes. There were not enough bookcases to accommodate all of the president’s books, so volumes were jammed horizontally above the rows on the shelves, or stacked on the floor against the walls and in the corners. Heavy drapes blocked the natural light from the windows, giving the room a gloomy aspect; but the darkness helped obscure the fraying corners of the upholstery, the threadbare patches in the carpet, and the black cords that snaked along the floor from the lamps to the wall sockets. The ashtray on the president’s desk was often overflowing with spent butts, and the room smelled deeply of cigarettes. If the decor had any unifying theme at all, it was nautical. There were perhaps two dozen of Roosevelt’s beloved collection of Currier & Ives prints, depicting wooden sailing ships at sea; there were half a dozen ship models on the tables and bookcases, protected under glass display cases; and on one of the walls, next to a picture of the president’s own mother, hung a portrait of John Paul Jones, naval hero of the American Revolution.