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

by Ian W. Toll

  An hour later, a declaration of war passed both houses, with one dissenting vote in the House and none in the Senate.

  ROOSEVELT WAS STILL ON THE RADIO as the sun rose over Pearl Harbor. A soft rain was falling over the half-sunken, still-blazing battleships West Virginia and Arizona. Fireboats continued to work them over with hoses, and immense columns of greasy, black, evil-smelling smoke continued to roll into the sky. On Ford Island, men stumbled into the mess halls for coffee and breakfast, “their eyes puffy, faces drawn, unshaven, and dirty.” Few had slept at all, and many had neglected to eat since the previous morning’s attack. For twenty-four hours they had been fueled by nervous energy and adrenaline, and were only now realizing that they were exhausted and wolfishly hungry.

  At the Naval Hospital, a handsome stucco building wreathed in palm trees along the Navy Yard side of the harbor, the short-handed staff had been working without respite since the previous morning. It had been a long and petrifying night. Small arms and antiaircraft fire kept up a constant din, persuading the doctors and nurses that a battle was raging outside the windows. Surgeons struggled to keep their hands from shaking while bent over the operating tables. At about eleven o’clock, when an exploding flak shell blew out many of the windows of the upper floors, doctors, nurses, corpsmen, and patients had cried out all together in fright. The nurses had worked relentlessly, mechanically, without relief, doing what they were trained to do—sterilizing trays of instruments, giving shots, setting up intravenous feeds, changing dressings. Observing strict blackout conditions, they worked with flashlights covered with blue carbon paper to dim the light. It seemed obvious that a Japanese invasion was underway. Having been warned of how the Japanese would treat female prisoners, some of the nurses carried pocketknives and resolved to slash their wrists if the hospital was taken. Dawn brought a puissant sense of relief. “No one could imagine what daylight meant to us,” said Lieutenant Ruth Erickson, a nurse at the hospital. “We could now see outside. Even the air was cleaner, purer. There was a feeling that we had made it. Our material possessions meant nothing. The fact that we were alive—that was the full meaning. We had prayed many times, and we were grateful that our prayers had been answered.”

  With daylight, casualties continued to arrive at the hospital in great numbers. As the wards filled, the corpsmen pushed the beds closer together to make room for more. The burn cases were the worst. The standard weekend uniform at Pearl Harbor was shorts and shortsleeve shirts, leaving exposed skin on the arms and legs. A witness described the wounds as “charred, crisp skin like bacon rind, black and oozing.” Burns were treated with a variety of dressings—mineral oil sprays, sulfanilamide powder, tannic acid, boric acid. But not much could be done for the men in the burn wards, except to keep them heavily dosed with anesthetic. The smell of burnt flesh permeated the hospital, especially at night when the blackout curtains prevented air from circulating. “I can still smell it,” recalled Lieutenant Erickson, many years afterward, “and I think I always will.”

  The dead were placed in white canvas body bags and moved out to the lawn in front of the hospital. Not all of those who had been declared dead were actually dead: witnesses were horrified to hear muffled groans from within some of the bags. “I started to go back and see,” recalled Vivian Hultgren, an army wife, “and then my reasoning said, ‘Well, they must be so badly damaged that they can’t be helped. They must just be on their last legs. So what can I do?’ And that just really haunted me.” In the harbor, dozens of bodies were floating to the surface, and motor launches were assigned to bring them to Aiea Landing for identification and burial. At first the crews hauled the bodies into the boats, said Seaman Jack Kelley of the Tennessee, but it “got to where, if we pulled them into the boat, they would bust open and run all over the bottom of the boat. So we would just tie a little piece of rope around their leg or their arm or whatever you could get a hold of and get you a string of them and tow them over rather than trying to pull them into the boat.” Another sailor assigned to that grisly duty remembered, “The worst part was when the body would start to disintegrate, and we would have to stop in the middle of the tow and re-lash.”

  On the previous afternoon, civilian lumberyards in Honolulu had been ordered to build as many pine coffins as they could, and these were transported to Pearl Harbor by the truckload. At Aiea Landing, medical corpsmen wearing rubber gloves took dental impressions in the effort to identify the dead. Identified bodies were placed in a numbered box, and a record made of the dead man’s name. But many bodies or parts of bodies could not be identified, and these were distributed at random into boxes. Trucks were loaded with coffins and driven to Oahu Cemetery, where bulldozers were digging 150-foot-long trenches. It was necessary to get the dead under the ground as soon as possible: many coffins were leaking blood and oil, and men handling them had to wear masks to cover the odor. It was a gruesome task. “One flatbed truck came up, stopped abruptly, and a box fell off,” said Marine Private Le Fan, who spent several days working at the cemetery. “It hit the concrete and burst. There was the trunk of a man, three arms, and one leg in this particular box.” For weeks after the attack, funeral ceremonies were held continuously. When a dead man could not be identified, a priest, a rabbi, and a minister would sometimes preside over a single burial. An honor guard would sound “Taps” and place a wooden stake over each grave. In a newspaper photograph of one such ceremony, held shortly after the attack, civilians and uniformed naval officers stand with heads bowed while a trio of grass-skirted Hawaiian women play ukuleles and sing (according to the caption) “Aloha Oe.”

  Throughout the base, there were alternating scenes of jubilation and grief as men discovered who among their shipmates had survived and who had not. Survivors described a kaleidoscope of contradictory feelings. Some were relieved at having escaped with their lives and limbs intact. Seaman Theodore Mason remembered a peculiar celebration in the shower of the CINCPAC administration building, as a number of sailors were scrubbing the oil from their bodies. “A feeling of elation possessed me,” he remembered. “I was alive! The other men in the shower shouted and laughed and sang. I joined them.” Hard on the heels of that curious euphoria came a crushing sense of guilt and shame. “How many of my shipmates were dead, wounded, hideously burned?” Mason asked himself. “Why was I singing? It took years, and additional combat experience, before I forgave myself.”

  Most of the enlisted men and junior officers at Pearl Harbor were young, in their late teens and early twenties; and they admitted feeling confused about the causes of the war. Many were not in the habit of reading the newspapers, except the comic strips or sports pages, and had not paid much attention to the deterioration of U.S.-Japanese relations in the last months before the war. Japan, and all of Asia, had seemed remote and not particularly important to their lives or to the lives of their families and friends at home. Virtually no one had taken Japan seriously as a military threat. Now, as the Pacific battle force lay in ruins, they felt a pervasive sense of collective disgrace. “Friends back home used to ask about the Japs,” recalled Marine Lieutenant Cornelius C. Smith, Jr. “[I answered] ‘Hell, we could blow them out of the water in three weeks!’ but here we are with our pants down and the striking force of our Pacific fleet is settling on the bottom of East Loch, Pearl Harbor. Who wouldn’t be ashamed?” Seaman Nick Kouretas wondered how he could ever face his family again. “What am I going to say to them?” he asked himself. “How can I explain this?”

  As terrible as the fate of the Arizona had been, many witnesses were even more shaken by the sight of the Oklahoma. After being hit by a barrage of aerial torpedoes, she had listed to starboard and then rolled nearly vertical, leaving her gigantic steel hull pointed up to the sky and her superstructure buried in the soft mud bottom of the harbor. Three generations of officers and enlisted men had been taught to believe that every battleship was a fortress, permanent and impregnable. For such a ship to roll over like a toy boat in a bathtub seemed ludicrou
s, almost inconceivable. But there she was. Gunner’s Mate Third Class George E. Waller of the Maryland recalled: “We had been told all of our lives that you couldn’t sink a battleship, and then to see one go upside down. . . . It was heartbreaking.”

  But the carriers had survived. At least the carriers had survived.

  Admiral William F. Halsey’s Task Force 8—the Enterprise and her accompanying cruisers and destroyers—had been safely at sea on the morning of the attack. They had been due back in Pearl Harbor on Sunday morning, but on Saturday afternoon, northwest of Oahu, a line dropped by a destroyer had managed to wrap itself around one of the propeller shafts of the cruiser Northampton. It was the kind of familiar mishap that routinely beset ships operating in close formation at sea, usually prompting savage recriminations, blame-trading, and fusillades of profanity. The entire task force had lingered as divers worked to unravel the fouled line. When news of the air raid arrived by radio the next morning, the ships had steamed hundreds of miles south in a long, fruitless search, thereby avoiding Vice Admiral Nagumo’s carriers, which had withdrawn to the north. Had Halsey chased north, he would have thrust his two carriers into striking range of Nagumo’s six, and with such overpowering force the combat-hardened Japanese aviators might easily have sent both the Enterprise and Lexington to the bottom.

  At sunset on Monday, with seven destroyers following in a single file, the Enterprise crept down the long outer channel into Pearl Harbor. She inched around the stern of the crippled battleship Nevada, which lay beached on the western edge of the channel with her bow thrust into a grove of algaroba trees. In the failing light, men stationed on the carrier’s bridge, flight deck, and catwalks took in enough to understand what had happened in their absence: the charred remains of seaplanes and hangars on Ford Island; the smell of fuel oil and roasted paint; the fires still burning in the half-sunken ships; the columns of smoke still spewing into the sky. One of the Enterprise’s own 4F4 fighters, shot down the previous evening by friendly fire, was half-awash in the shallows near the channel. Passing Ten-Ten Dock, they saw the half-sunken remains of the minesweeper Oglala, plugged with three Japanese torpedoes apparently intended for the Enterprise. A heavy blanket of black fuel oil lay across the water of the harbor—boats motoring through it raised barely a wake, lifting the oil-water surface, a sailor recalled, “in sullen little folds that fell back at once into the overall black melancholy.” The base was mostly dark and silent, observing strict blackout conditions for the second night of the war, but a few sarcastic voices called out to the gaping crew of the Enterprise as she crept past the stricken battleships: “Where in hell were you?” and “You’d better get out of here or the Japs will get you too.”

  Ordnanceman Alvin Kernan, observing the carnage from the flight deck, reflected that “In a violent way the attack had announced that the day of the battleship was gone.” The Enterprise and a handful of other aircraft carriers had been unwittingly thrust into the vanguard of the naval war. To men who had learned their trade in a fleet dominated by battleships that was a sobering prospect, but now the war must be waged by the carriers or not at all, because “there wasn’t anything else.” Admiral Halsey, watching with gritted teeth from the Enterprise flag bridge, was heard to mutter, “Before we’re through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.” Whatever their misgivings, whatever evils the war might bring, their longing for vengeance would nourish and sustain them.

  As soon as the carrier’s dock lines were secured to a Ford Island berth, Halsey descended into a launch that would take him to see Admiral Kimmel at CINCPAC headquarters on the other side of the loch. The boat was fired upon as it motored toward the Navy Yard landing, and it was only the darkness of the night that saved Halsey from being shot. He found Kimmel and his staff haggard and unshaven, still wearing their Sunday whites, which were crumpled and stained with blood, dirt, and oil. As he sat with Kimmel, new and far-fetched rumors circulated through the headquarters. One, a report that Japanese troops had been seen landing in gliders, prompted Halsey to chuckle. “What the hell is there to laugh at?” demanded Kimmel. Halsey said the report was obvious bunk: gliders did not have the range to fly from any Japanese island base, and the Japanese carriers would never waste deck space on “any such nonsense.” His reasoning was unassailable. As a carrier admiral he intuited what Kimmel by then suspected: that the Japanese were long gone, and the ongoing contact reports were products of mass hysteria. The previous morning’s attack had been a hit-and-run carrier air raid, and the enemy flattops were now well on their way back toward Japan.

  As the Enterprise berthed, the fuel lines were hauled aboard from a waiting tanker and inserted into her tanks. Refueling and reprovisioning continued at a hurried pace through the small hours of the morning: all wanted to be safely back to sea by first light. A long line of sailors snaked from the dock up a gangway through the hangar deck and down the ladders to the magazines and galleys, and through those hundreds of pairs of hands were passed the rounds of ammunition and victuals to replenish the Enterprise’s stores. New crew members reported aboard, many bringing nothing but the uniforms on their backs, because their sea bags were entombed on Battleship Row. By four in the morning, the Enterprise had drunk her fill of fuel oil and loaded all the ammunition and stores she could carry. Admiral Halsey came aboard without ceremony. Provisions were stacked on her hangar deck in unseamanlike fashion, waiting to be properly stowed below, but there was no time to lose: dawn was imminent.

  Her lines were cast off and she retraced her route past the wrecked battleships, Hospital Point, the seaplane base, then made a slight course adjustment a few points to starboard, and headed back toward the beached Nevada, marking the passage to the open sea. Leaving the miserable waste of Pearl Harbor behind, recalled Alvin Kernan, the Enterprise sailed “down the channel, through the nets, and into the blue water, picking up speed as she went, the sun rising, the water beginning to hiss alongside, and the smell of oil, charred paint, bodies, and defeat left far behind. The planes landed aboard later and the war had begun.”

  IN WASHINGTON, the first chaotic stages of mobilization had been set in motion. Alistair Cooke was reminded of a silent film of the vaudevillian era, “when the resting firemen, grown amiable on undisturbed sessions of beer and games of pinochle, are electrified by the alarm and, diving headlong down the greasy pole, start to clomp importantly in every part of town.” Military units in trucks seized major intersections, causing monumental traffic jams on both Monday and Tuesday. Machine-gun nests and antiaircraft units were set up on the roofs of public buildings. This being December, darkness fell in late afternoon, and as a precaution against enemy air raids, the city’s streetlights and the huge floodlights which normally lit up the Capitol dome were left dark. Air-raid wardens waved down cars and shined flashlights into the eyes of motorists and pedestrians, asking impudent and idiotic questions. Four cherry trees on the Washington Mall were chopped down by some zealous patriot, presumably because they had been a gift from the Japanese government. Fear and confusion were everywhere evident. A downtown building caught fire, and when the fire engine sirens sounded, residents assumed that hostile planes were overhead. As in communities all around the country, there was a panic of buying, as people hoarded food and other consumer goods in anticipation of rationing or shortages. “By nightfall on December 8,” the journalist David Brinkley wrote of Washington, “the markets looked as if a high wind had blown them clean.”

  There were a quarter of a million government workers in Washington, D.C., up from 38,000 in 1917; that number would more than double during the war. Secretary of War Henry Stimson ordered the entire U.S. Army into uniform, numbering about 1.6 million men. The navy quickly decided to reinforce Pearl Harbor and set up a new aerial search pattern to guard against a renewed air raid. In cities throughout the country, police were placed on twenty-four-hour duty, guarding defense plants and bridges and water supply facilities against sabotage. Ports throughout the country w
ere closed to all foreign shipping. All weather reports by radio broadcast were halted, as they might prove useful to the enemy in choosing air-raid targets. A nationwide strike of 125,000 welders was summarily called off by the union leaders, who cited “the situation in the Pacific.”

  Looking back from the present it is practically impossible to reconstruct the terror of those early days of the war, when it was not at all obvious that the American mainland would be spared enemy air raids. On Monday, the radio waves and newspapers were full of reports of air raids over American cities. Associated Press tickers reported an unknown plane off Montauk Point, Long Island, and air-raid sirens wailed in the streets of Manhattan. The Brooklyn Eagle reported: “Enemy planes were approaching Long Island—from New England and then from the Virginia coast. Bombers, apparently, were heading for the Brooklyn Navy Yard, for Mitchell Field and other points. . . . Air raid sirens are sounded. Schools were closed. Employees were sent home. Police warned pedestrians to keep off the crowded streets.” On the west coast, men armed with shotguns and hunting rifles piled into cars and drove toward the beaches, eager to do battle with the Japanese landing forces. In San Francisco, the switches were pulled on street and bridge lights, but otherwise the city’s hills glittered almost as brightly as they had on December 6. Air-raid sirens blared throughout the night, and were repeated by ferry horns; eventually, it seemed the ferry horns were leading and the air-raid sirens answering. Vigilantes took baseball bats to automobile headlights, and threatened to smash the windows of merchants and homeowners who did not observe the blackout order.