by Ian W. Toll
Numerous reports had Japanese planes patrolling about 100 miles off the coast, and on Monday night it was confidently reported by the Army Air Forces that sixty Japanese planes had appeared over the Golden Gate Bridge, and were beaten off by American fighters. Asked how he knew the planes were Japanese, General William Ryan replied, “Well, they weren’t army planes, they weren’t navy planes, and you can be sure they weren’t civilian planes.” When, on Tuesday, there were suggestions (later proven accurate) that there had been no Japanese planes over the bay, Lieutenant General John DeWitt replied angrily:
Death and destruction is likely to come to this city at any moment. The people of San Francisco seem unable to appreciate that we are at war in every sense. . . . Those planes were over our community for a definite period. They were enemy planes. I mean Japanese planes. They were tracked out at sea. Why bombs weren’t dropped I do not know.
The general might have stopped there, but apparently could not help himself:
It might have been better if some bombs were dropped to awaken this city. We will never have a practice alert. We will never call an alert unless we believe an attack to be imminent. . . . If I can’t knock these facts into your heads with words I’ll turn you over to the police and let them knock them into you with clubs.
Americans depended on radio and newspapers to keep them informed, but both were full of wild rumors. Military and civil officials were quoted faithfully and respectfully, but it was apparent that the confusion, fear, and disorientation went to the top. The quick clampdown of military censors in Hawaii only amplified the rumormongering. The Japanese had control of the Pacific; California was indefensible; the army was preparing to meet the invader in the Rocky Mountains or perhaps on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River. Admiral Stark, chief of naval operations, briefed congressional leaders at the Navy Department on Tuesday, December 9. The briefing was strictly classified, but reporters waiting on Constitution Avenue needed only to study the dark expressions on the faces of the emerging congressmen to deduce that the news was very bad. “The atmosphere in the Capitol was on the narrow edge of hysteria,” wrote the journalist Marquis Childs. The crippling losses suffered at Pearl Harbor were the worst-kept secret in town: “Each senator by nightfall had told ten other persons and they had told ten others, the story losing nothing in the telling.”
Partisan politics were, for the moment, deeply out of favor; and congressional leaders of both parties avowed unity in the face of the emergency. For the navy this development was a mixed blessing, however, as the unanimous rage of Democrats and Republicans was unleashed against the culprits who had allowed the cherished battleships, built over many years with elephantine budget appropriations, to be blindsided in the heart of the nation’s great Pacific stronghold. Who was to blame for the travesty? On Monday, Democratic congressman John Dingell of Michigan called for an investigation, suggesting that the navy must have been grossly incompetent. The demand for answers was echoed angrily in the press, and on Tuesday, Congress announced a formal inquiry. Heads were obviously going to roll, and by Wednesday it seemed that one of those heads might belong to Navy Secretary Frank Knox. With timing that could not have been any worse, in the week immediately before the war, Knox had launched a media offensive to reassure the country that the navy had nothing to fear from the Japanese. He had been interviewed by Collier’s magazine, a week before Pearl Harbor, in an article lamentably titled “The Navy Is Ready.” If it came to war, he had predicted, the navy would need no more than six months to “knock Japan out of the water.” Secretary Knox had granted another interview to The American Magazine, whose January issue landed on newsstands the same day Japanese bombs landed on Battleship Row. The day after the attack, the story was still being advertised in newspapers across the country:
Equipped with amazing, new, secret, deadly devices that no enemy will ever know about (till it’s too late)—the biggest, toughest, hardest-hitting, straightest-shooting navy in the world is primed and ready to write “finis” to aggressors . . . Let ’em come—from both sides, if they want to—“we can win on two oceans!” says Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, in the January American Magazine—“now out!”
The humiliated secretary shrewdly made himself absent from Washington in the first week of the war, flying to Pearl Harbor to assess the catastrophe in person.
Aiming to soothe the collective hysteria that seemed to have possessed the country, the White House announced that Roosevelt would address the American people by radio in his twentieth “fireside chat.” Presidential speechwriters Bob Sherwood and Sam Rosenman had been hard at it since Sunday evening, and they tinkered with new drafts until minutes before the broadcast at ten o’clock Tuesday night. More than 60 million Americans would tune in, repeating the size of the previous day’s radio audience for the “infamy” speech to Congress.
The president was an acknowledged master of radio, having used the medium since the 1920s to advance his career, enact his agenda, and hammer down his opponents. His sonorous, lilting voice carried well over the airwaves. He had a thespian’s natural feeling for cadence, pace, and emphasis. Above all, he employed a deft common touch that belied his sheltered upbringing as a scion of the Hudson Valley gentry. He did not try to disguise the aristocratic inflections in his voice, knowing perhaps that the attempt would expose him as a fraud, but he managed to be warm and plainspoken without sounding patronizing or insincere, and he used a laid-back, conversational tone that created, in the listener’s mind, an uncanny intimacy. It is often said that Americans liked Roosevelt because they felt they knew him as a neighbor or a friend. That was especially true of Americans middle-aged or older, for whom broadcasting was still a novelty. Never having heard radio until reaching adulthood, they were less inclined to take it for granted than were their children, who had listened to it all their lives. When the president came over the airwaves, they were more susceptible to the unconscious illusion that he was really there—that his presence, and not just his voice, had come into their living rooms; that he was not just speaking but in a sense conversing with them.
Tuesday night’s broadcast was made from a large room on the first floor of the White House. Radio engineers set up their microphones on a wooden desk, on which also sat a reading lamp, an ashtray, a pitcher of water, and a glass. Fifty or sixty people sat in rows on wooden folding chairs. At about ten minutes before ten, the president was wheeled into the room and behind the desk. He opened his looseleaf notebook and shuffled through the pages of the speech. He smoked a cigarette; he stubbed it out. At ten o’clock, the radio announcers each spoke into their microphones, introducing the president. He began: “My fellow Americans.”
It was about as angry a speech as Roosevelt ever delivered, a hard-hitting Philippic against the Japanese militarist regime, whose “sudden criminal attacks,” he said, “provide the climax of a decade of international immorality.” He returned again and again to the theme that Japan and its Axis accomplices were a league of thugs who had to be stopped by the decent and law-abiding nations of the world. “Powerful and resourceful gangsters have banded together to make war upon the whole human race. . . . We must be set to face a long war against crafty and powerful bandits. . . . There is no such thing as security for any nation—or any individual—in a world ruled by the principles of gangsterism.” He defined the war as a defense of “our right to live among our world neighbors in freedom, in common decency, without fear of assault.” There should be a massive increase in war production, with a seven-day week in all war industries, to support not only American military forces but also those of America’s allies. Acknowledging that the American people and the press wanted to know what was happening in the Pacific, he insisted that it was necessary to conceal the full truth from the enemy. As for Pearl Harbor, he admitted the damage was “serious” but would say no more. Guam, Wake, and Midway were under attack and might fall; the Philippines were “taking punishment, but defending themselves vigorously.” Wartime se
crecy would be a burden for the American people, but he warned them not to believe half the rumors they were hearing—“These ugly little hints of complete disaster fly thick and fast in wartime”—and asked the press to exercise restraint in printing unconfirmed reports.
He did not deny the success of the Japanese attack: “We may acknowledge that our enemies have performed a brilliant feat of deception, perfectly timed and executed with great skill. It was a thoroughly dishonorable deed, but we must face the fact that modern warfare as conducted in the Nazi manner is a dirty business. We don’t like it—we didn’t want to get in it—but we are in it and we’re going to fight it with everything we’ve got.”
When the president had finished and been wheeled back into the Oval Study, Sam Rosenman went to see him. He found him alone, behind his desk, smoking a cigarette and poring over his beloved stamps. It was a rare man who could deliver such a speech, on the third day of a war that had started so badly, and then head back to his office to tinker with his stamp collection. He was serene, apparently content, clearing his mind of the day’s work so that he could sleep soundly and awake the next day fresh. “He knew by this time all the damage that had been done to us at Pearl Harbor,” Rosenman wrote. “Yet I felt, as I looked at him, that he was confident that ultimate victory, as he had said, was certain.”
TO CRITICS HOWLING for the heads of the men responsible for Pearl Harbor, FDR had offered an oblique reply: “There is no such thing as impregnable defense against powerful aggressors who sneak up in the dark and strike without warning.” The same could not be said for Allied commanders in positions west of Hawaii, who failed to put up any meaningful resistance to enemy planes that struck later the same day. Beginning just hours after the raid on Pearl Harbor, as dawn broke over the western Pacific, land-based bombers and fighters of the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a tightly choreographed aerial Blitzkrieg against American and British bases throughout the region, and by the third day of the war the local Allied air forces had been reduced to mincemeat. That was a defeat more ruinous in its consequences than the raid on Pearl Harbor, because it led directly to the fall of the Philippines and Malaya. It also gave the lie to the theory, bandied around by those unwilling to admit they had underestimated Japan, that Pearl Harbor had been a lucky “sucker punch” that could never be repeated.
At dawn on December 7 (December 8 west of the International Date Line), medium G3M and G4M bombers, accompanied by Japan’s sleek single-seat fighter plane, the A6M “Zero,” lifted off from airfields on the island of Formosa and set out across the China Sea to pulverize American air bases in the Philippines. Others took off from newly constructed airfields in Indochina to strike British air bases in Malaya, Burma, and Hong Kong. Still more roared north from the remote atolls of the Marshall Islands to attack Wake Island. A small carrier task force, built around the Ryujo, sailed from Palau to launch strikes on Legaspi, on the southern coast of the Philippine island of Luzon; and then turned south to pummel the U.S. naval base of Davao, on the island of Mindanao.
General Douglas A. MacArthur, the U.S. Far East commander, had received several hours’ warning of the raid at Pearl Harbor, but his Manila headquarters was thrown into a state of dazed confusion in the first hours of the war, ensuring that the initial Japanese air raids scored with overwhelming success. Much of the blame would later be fixed on General Richard K. Sutherland, MacArthur’s chief of staff, who seemed determined to keep subordinate officers away from his boss. The upshot was that American air forces were effectively paralyzed for lack of orders. At midday, Japanese bombers appeared suddenly over Clark Field (the principal American air base in the Philippines, located about forty miles northwest of Manila), and dropped their sticks of bombs from 18,000 feet. From the ground, these appeared as columns of evenly spaced silver glints falling diagonally behind the planes. They grew steadily larger, and Americans on the ground dove for foxholes. A procession of cataclysmic explosions fell across the heart of the air base, among the hangars and maintenance shops and parked planes. Every bomb released fell within the base, and not one structure in the vicinity was left unscathed. An American pilot looking down at the scene could not even see the airstrip, because “the whole area was boiling with smoke, dust and flames. In the middle was a huge column of greasy black smoke from the top of which ugly red flames billowed intermittently.”
No sooner had the bombers passed over than the Zeros roared in at rooftop altitude, locked in compact three-plane formations, and strafed the parked planes that had not been finished off by the bombs. None of the American planes caught on the ground at Clark that day would ever fly again. By the end of that first day of the war, half the airpower defending the Philippines was gone. Twelve B-17s and thirty P-40s were totally destroyed; five more B-17s were damaged. That initial disaster guaranteed that more would follow, as the Americans had lost the ability to mount counterstrikes on Japanese air bases or to put up any effective fighter resistance to the wave of air raids that would inevitably follow.
The truth about MacArthur’s weird malfunctioning on that day remains shrouded in mystery even now. It is possible he was unwilling to order a strike on Japanese bases from Philippine territory, hoping that the Japanese offensive might otherwise spare the islands. Not only would the general escape scrutiny and censure for his inexplicable failures, no less ignominious and more avoidable than those at Pearl Harbor, but he would be adopted by the American people as a much-loved war hero, the preeminent Allied celebrity of the Pacific War.
In Malaya, the British air defenses fared no better. RAF fighters engaged enemy bombers and Zeros in a pitched air battle over Kota Bahru on the northeast coast, where a Japanese invasion force was put ashore on the first morning of the war. The result was a lopsided victory for the Japanese, as several Royal Air Force Bristol Blenheim and Lockheed Hudson bombers went down in flames. Meanwhile, Japanese G3M bombers from bases in Indochina, more than 600 miles away, appeared suddenly in the skies over Singapore and dropped sticks of bombs on RAF runways and base installations. The raid came as a bolt out of the blue, for the British had never imagined that the Japanese were capable of mounting air strikes across such great distances. An RAF aerodrome at Kota Bahru was abandoned in a state approaching panic, with men lighting out for the hills, ignoring the threats and imprecations of their officers, and allowing food, fuel, weaponry, and the best airstrip in northern Malaya to fall into the hands of the enemy.
British air defense plans had placed too much faith in the Brewster Buffalo, an obsolete fighter purchased from the United States. A pilot who detested the aircraft said it looked “a lot like the racing planes of the 1930s: all engine, a barrel fuselage, stubby wings, a large canopy, and almost no tail.” The underpowered Buffalo suffered fuel delivery problems that limited its rate of climb; it had a flawed landing gear, which often caused serious damage on landing; and its .50-caliber guns were prone to jamming, particularly in the humid weather of the tropics.
In both the Philippines and Malaya, the sudden onslaught pushed the Allied air forces into combat conditions for which they were not adequately prepared, multiplying their non-combat losses. Dozens of American and British aircraft crashed due to engine failures, accidents, or midair collisions with other planes in their squadrons. Planes were shot down by friendly antiaircraft fire when attempting to return to base; planes were forced to ditch when they ran out of fuel; planes managed to land safely but had to be scrapped because of heavy damage. To the Japanese, a crashed Allied airplane was as good as one shot down—perhaps even a little better since it involved no expenditure of ammunition. If the aircrew went down with it, so much the better.
In the years before the war, the Americans and British had taken comfort in a widely held conviction that Japanese airpower was not to be viewed seriously. That impression was nourished by quackish, pseudo-scientific theories proposed by “experts” of various fields. The Japanese would always make bungling pilots, the authorities patiently explained, because they su
ffered from innate physiological defects. They were cross-eyed and nearsighted, possibly a symptom of their “slanted” eyes. As infants, they had been carried on the backs of their mothers, causing their heads to wobble in a way that threw off the balance in the inner ear. Japanese cultural norms emphasized conformity and obedience; therefore, their young men must lack the aviator’s traits of individualism and self-reliance. Western aviation journals cited statistics (of dubious origin) purporting to show that Japan had the highest aviation crash rate in the world. It was acknowledged that Japan had developed a self-sufficient aircraft manufacturing industry—and that was a surprising achievement, admittedly—but the idea that Japanese-built planes could be any good was simply beneath consideration.
Only after the shocking losses of December 1941 did it begin to dawn on the Allies that they had seen only what the Japanese had wanted them to see. “If he [your enemy] is arrogant,” Sun-Tzu had written, “behave timidly so as to encourage his arrogance.”
In fact, the Japanese naval aviators were among the very best pilots in the world. They had been selected in highly competitive recruiting programs, and earned their wings by surviving long, intense training regimens. They were, on average, far more seasoned than their Allied counterparts. Many had flown more than 100 aerial combat missions over China since 1937, accruing an average of 500 to 600 flight hours in the cockpit. They were intensely motivated and eager to correct all the misimpressions that the West had held of them. They showed resourcefulness and adaptability; they worked supremely well together; and they were ruthless in attacking any weaknesses.
