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

by Ian W. Toll

  For Roosevelt, the Oval Study was a refuge of sorts, his inner sanctum. Often he spent his entire day here, seated in his wheelchair, behind his desk, his back to the large south-facing windows with their view of the Ellipse and the Washington Monument. Much of the substantive work of his presidency was done at this desk. Here he read reports, dictated letters and memoranda, spoke on the telephone, and received aides and visitors. But this was also the room in which Roosevelt liked to relax, as he was doing on this particular Sunday afternoon. Dressed in an old gray turtleneck sweater and flannel slacks, he was tinkering with his stamp collection while carrying on a desultory chat “about things far removed from war” with his closest aide and good friend, Harry Hopkins. The two men had eaten lunch in the study, on trays. Earlier, the president had sent word that he would be unable to join First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and about thirty guests at a luncheon in the Blue Room. Eleanor would subsequently tell the disappointed visitors (a mixed group of friends, relatives, and government officials) that her husband had been detained by the crisis unfolding in the Pacific, but that was not strictly true: Roosevelt had sent his regrets before the raid had even begun. He was tired and he wanted to relax. He would have no such luck.

  The black telephone on his desk rang at 1:40 p.m. (Washington time). It was Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, who advised Roosevelt that an alert had just been transmitted from Pacific Fleet headquarters: “Air raid Pearl Harbor. This is no drill.” Knox could offer no further details, but promised to call back as soon as he knew more.

  Hopkins was incredulous. Japan, he said, would not and could not attack Hawaii; the report must be wrong. Roosevelt did not agree—he said he believed the report was “probably true,” and remarked that “it was just the kind of unexpected thing the Japanese would do.”

  Within minutes, Admiral Harold R. “Betty” Stark, the chief of naval operations, called to confirm the appalling news. Stark and Knox had been on the phone with Rear Admiral Claude C. Bloch, commandant of the Fourteenth Naval District in Hawaii, who had given them a real-time eyewitness account of the raid while the second wave of enemy planes was over the base. A few minutes later, the president took a call from Joseph B. Poindexter, the territorial governor of Hawaii, who requested and was granted authority to declare martial law in the islands. During this brief conversation, Poindexter’s voice rose to a frantic pitch. The president turned to Hopkins and the other aides who had crowded into the study and exclaimed, “My God, there’s another wave of Jap planes over Hawaii right this minute!”

  The news passed quickly through the White House. Eleanor was told by one of the White House ushers just as she was seeing her luncheon party off. The visitors “stood around in stupefied knots,” one later wrote; “—there was nothing to say—it was absolutely incredible. The guests seemed to melt away—nobody bothered to say goodbye to anyone.” The first lady went upstairs and slipped into the president’s study, but the room was already crowded with aides, and she soon realized that her husband “was concentrating on what had to be done and would not talk about what had happened until this first strain was over.” She withdrew to her sitting room and went to work on her correspondence.

  Throughout the afternoon, updates poured into the White House. Grace Tully, the president’s chief secretary, took several calls from Admiral Stark. She made shorthand notes of what he told her, then quickly typed the information into memos and handed them to Roosevelt. “The Boss maintained greater outward calm than anybody else but there was rage in his very calmness,” Tully wrote. “With each new message he shook his head grimly and tightened the expression of his mouth.” A steady stream of aides was entering the study, and soon the din of loud voices made it impossible for her to work. She moved out to the hallway, and then to the private telephone in the president’s bedroom. While she was typing, members of the staff hovered behind her and peered over her shoulder. She later wrote: “The news continued to come in, each report more terrible than the last, and I could hear the shocked unbelief in Admiral Stark’s voice as he talked to me. At first the men around the president were incredulous; that changed to angry acceptance as new messages supported and amplified the previous ones.”

  Seated behind his desk at the center of the storm, Roosevelt remained calm and composed. He spent much of the afternoon on the telephone, attending to troop movements, dictating a news release for the press, setting up new security procedures for ports and strategic installations, ordering measures to observe or detain enemy nationals. Dozens of executive orders were required; Roosevelt told his aides to execute the orders immediately, and bring them to him for a signature later. One by one, the president’s leading military and foreign policy advisers arrived in the study and took a seat—Secretary Knox, Admiral Stark, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall. The president asked hard questions. How could the attack have succeeded? How bad was the damage? What were the Japanese likely to do next? It was still not clear what was happening in Hawaii. The radio-telephone connection to Oahu was lost several times, cut off in mid-sentence, and at one point there was a period of several hours in which no connection could be obtained. Were the air strikes continuing? Each new report suggested that the destruction was worse than previously believed. As the meeting adjourned, about 4:30 p.m., it was agreed that the full cabinet would be summoned to meet at the White House at eight-thirty that evening, with the congressional leaders to follow at nine.

  Many of the people around Roosevelt judged that he was, in a sense, relieved. The waiting and uncertainty were finished. The American people had been bitterly divided over the prospect of war, but now (as Secretary of War Stimson put it) “a crisis had come in a way that would unite our people.” Eleanor agreed: “I thought that in spite of his anxiety Franklin was in a way more serene than he had appeared in a long time. I think it was steadying to know finally that the die was cast.”

  AS THE LAST OF THE JAPANESE AIRCRAFT headed back out to sea, the East Loch of Pearl Harbor was littered with flotsam of every description, much of it blackened by the flames: clothing, shoes, books, life vests, mattresses, accommodation ladders, lifeboats, barrels. There was an almost indescribably foul combination of odors—the oppressive fumes of fuel oil; the vast billowing clouds of black, acrid smoke; the sickly-sweet smell of charred flesh. Millions of gallons of oil had erupted into the harbor from the torpedoed battleships. “People who have never seen this at sea cannot imagine what oil is like once it is exposed to cool seawater,” said Private Cory. “It becomes a globlike carpet about six inches thick, gelatinous.” Sailors who leapt from the burning ships, or were blown off the decks by explosions, found themselves swimming through congealed oil. It was exhausting and dangerous. Seaman Mason of the California tried to swim beneath the surface, but when he came up for air, the “gummy black oil was clogging my nose and ears, burning under my eyelids. The rank, sweet taste of the stuff made me want to vomit.”

  The wind was blowing hard, about 25 knots; photographs taken that morning show flags flapping hard on their poles. Inevitably, the fires on the battleships, fanned by those powerful gusts, spread to the harbor. Survivors described a conflagration advancing toward them across the water, how it engulfed the heads of other men; the brief, agonized screams from behind the curtain of flames, and then silence. Even from a distance, the heat radiating from the vicinity of Battleship Row was almost unendurable, but motor launches and whaleboats plowed directly into the maelstrom in the attempt to rescue survivors. The crew of one boat tried to douse the fires using handheld CO2 extinguishers: “Each time this was done the sides of the boat broke into flames, which had to be put out before the next run,” said Lieutenant Ephraim P. Holmes. “The heat was so intense that the men in the boat had to lean way over the unexposed side to protect themselves.” Swimmers found salvation in a boathook, as they were seized by the belt or collar and hauled into a boat. These rescued men were choking on oil, spitting oil, vom
iting oil; many were so thoroughly drenched in oil that it was difficult to determine whether they had been wounded. “I remember one sailor that I pulled out of the water, and I took my handkerchief and wiped the oil from his face,” said Marine Private Leslie Le Fan; “I couldn’t tell if he was a black man or a white man or a Chinaman.” They were laid in the bottom of the boats, said Seaman Ed Johann, until each boat “was loaded with the wounded, all pressed together, all in great pain.”

  At “Ten-Ten Dock,” across the harbor from Ford Island, wounded men were lifted on stretchers from the boats. The scene was chaotic. Sailors and officers who had spent the night ashore pressed forward, hoping to find a boat that could take them back to their ships. Sirens screamed; medical corpsmen shouted to clear a way for the stretchers; dead and wounded men were laid in rows on the concrete pier. Private cars and ambulances were arriving in great numbers, immobilizing traffic. The wounded were administered a shot of morphine and offered a drink of water. Their faces were blackened by smoke or soot, their eyes almost smashed shut; some had lost all of their hair and much of their skin. It was necessary to strip the burn victims of their clothing, but oil-soaked fabric had seared into the flesh, and when it was removed, long ribbons of skin came off with it. “I was trying to put some petroleum jelly on them and trying to cover them with gauze,” said Shipfitter third class Louis Grabinski of the West Virginia, who lent a hand with the wounded. “But that wasn’t helping; it seemed to be taking their skin off. It seemed like it was better to just leave the skin open instead of putting something over it. They wanted to tear the gauze off, or if they had a skivvy shirt, they wanted to tear that goddamn thing off, because they were blistered, burnt.”

  Emergency treatment centers were set up in several locations throughout the Navy Yard and Ford Island, including the Marine Barracks, the Dispensary, and the Bachelor Officers Quarters (the “BOQ”). All were soon overwhelmed with casualties. At the Ford Island mess hall, wounded men were laid on all of the tables, and newly arriving stretchers had to be left on the patio outside. “Some of these men looked beyond help, burned flesh and bone showing through the oily mess,” said Seaman Victor Kamont. “Some of these men were half clothed, raw meat just hanging from their bones. Some cried like babies, babbling for their mother, father or loved ones. It was a sickening sight.” Lightly wounded men were wandering around in a daze, refusing to respond when spoken to, resisting violently when others tried to lead them into the centers for treatment; there were men who were completely naked but seemed unaware of their nakedness, even in the presence of civilian women or Red Cross nurses. Carl Carlson, a sailor who was fortunate to escape from the Arizona with minor wounds, recalled meeting one of his shipmates in the sick bay at Ford Island. The man was “laying across from me . . . and he was holding his intestines in with his hands. And he looked up at me, and he said, ‘War sure is hell, isn’t it, shipmate?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, it is.’ And I wasn’t bleeding anywhere so I got up and walked out of there.”

  On the docks and landings, the dead were being laid in two rows, with a walkway down the center. The heads in each row pointed inward, so that the bodies could be identified, either by their faces or their dog tags. Some of the dead men’s faces had an unnaturally dark pallor, but their bodies showed no visible wounds: that indicated that they had been killed by the concussive force of one of the huge explosions, shattering the blood vessels without breaking the skin. Seaman Nick Kouretas of the USS Raleigh spent several hours searching for his brother: “I would run along the aisle and, knowing my brother’s characteristics, look for him. He chewed his nails. I knew where he had a wart; I knew every little mark on his body. I would get so far, and I’d say: ‘Well, this guy looks like him,’ but I couldn’t see a face. I’d pick up the hand, and I’d say: ‘No, that’s not him,’ and then go on.” Eventually, sheets or blankets were brought to cover the bodies. “I’ll tell you one thing,” said Seaman William Fomby of the Oklahoma. “When you see all these people in bed sheets laying out stacked up like cordwood, it takes all the glamour out of war. You really realize that something bad is going on.”

  The Ford Island airfield was a ghastly sculpture garden of twisted, burning clots of aluminum wreckage, the remains of aircraft wiped out on the ground. Thirty-three out of seventy planes had been destroyed in the raid. At the southeast end of the island, Hangar Six lay gutted and smoking: it had been struck by at least three Japanese bombs. On the seaplane ramp, the strafed and burning fragments of the big PBY Catalina seaplanes were scattered among the ubiquitous palm trees. Concrete surfaces throughout the island were littered with shrapnel and pocked with large craters, each marking the spot where a 550-pound bomb had landed. Sailors who had been ordered to abandon their ships were milling around in confusion, their uniforms smeared with blood and oil. “There was a lot of us there in limbo, just standing around,” Seaman Elmo Rash remembered. “I started thinking about everything that had happened, and I started to shake. I walked around for a while until I was feeling better.” Men were in various states of undress, and some plundered the abandoned barracks and dependents’ housing for clothing. There were reports of men wearing bizarre get-ups: a sailor’s cap and a lieutenant’s dress blue jacket; a tuxedo with bare feet; a bathrobe and boots; seaman’s dungarees with a swallow-tailed coat and a “fore and aft” admiral’s hat. Gangs of sailors roamed the island, bandoliers of ammunition slung over their shoulders, like bandits in a western film. In the Ford Island administrative building, said Bosun’s Mate Howard French, “There was mass confusion. . . . There was no order, no control, no authority. People were milling around like so many lost sheep.”

  The Marine Barracks, a massive concrete building in the Navy Yard, was hastily converted into a receiving and billeting center for these itinerant sailors. Men who had crawled out of the harbor were instructed to strip off their oil-soaked clothing and place it in garbage cans, and then stand in line for a hot shower. In many cases, the sludge oil had penetrated so deeply into the men’s pores that it was nearly impossible to get clean. “You wiped off as much as you could with towels and whatever rags you could find, but there was no way in the world to get it all off,” said Seaman Jim Lawson of the Arizona. Soap and water did not do the trick—it was necessary to scrub the oil-stained skin with alcohol or gasoline. Some men went so far as to actually bathe in gasoline; but even those who managed to remove the visible stains complained for weeks afterward that they were coated head to foot in a thin film of oil, that their eyes smarted from the gasoline, or that they were plagued by intense headaches and blurred vision.

  The marine quartermaster sergeant issued clean, dry dungarees, underwear, socks, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a razor, and a ditty bag to any man who needed them. Paperwork was ignored; no one was required to sign for anything. The marine mess sergeant did his best to feed any hungry sailor who walked into the mess hall, and the chow line was continuous, with men lining up for lunch behind others still waiting for breakfast. It was feared that the drinking water may have been poisoned by saboteurs, so men drank beer, soft drinks, Kool-Aid, and water drawn from swimming pools. One sailor remembered that he and his mates were grateful to be served “dry sandwiches and coffee made from chlorinated swimming pool water. We were hungry so it was delicious.”

  A check-in station for sailors was set up on the first floor of the Marine Barracks. The name of each abandoned ship was stenciled on the wall behind a table staffed by a junior officer. Sailors and officers checked in and were told to wait for reassignment. Many were ordered to join cleanup details on the ships and around the base. On Ford Island, teams of sailors removed debris from the hangars and pushed wrecked aircraft off the runways. Others carried fire extinguishers and put out dozens of small brush fires that had sprung up in the grasslands around the airfield. Men were given buckets and ordered to pick up shrapnel and scrap metal. There was so much shrapnel on the ground that “you could walk out on the parking lot and scoop it up with your hands.” The public wor
ks staff of the Fourteenth Naval District was hard at work laying a new 16-inch water main from Hospital Point to Ford Island, and other workers were getting the dry docks back into working order. Sailors returned to the stricken battleships with galvanized steel buckets, and began the grisly task of collecting the remains of their slain shipmates. “I recall finding severed knee joints as well as shoulder fragments and torn, burning body torsos, all unidentifiable because of their burned condition,” remembered Seaman Charles Sehe of the Nevada.

  Though the shock of the raid was still fresh in everyone’s minds, the survivors made a concerted effort to raise their collective morale. Music helped: on the waterfront at Ford Island, a jukebox blared “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” and on the battleship Maryland, the ship’s band performed on deck while the repair teams worked. The crew of the Nevada agreed on a new nickname: the “Cheer-Up Ship.” Signs on her deck proclaimed: “We’ll Fight Again” and “Cheer Up the Cheer-Up Ship.” The crisis tended to bring out the best in the malingerers, the lazy men, even the prisoners in the brig, who were ordered out of their cells and put to work. Everyone pitched in. “Things were so bad at Pearl Harbor,” Seaman Mason recalled, “that even the chiefs were working.”