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

by Ian W. Toll

  The invasion force had sailed two days earlier from Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, under the command of Rear Admiral Sadamichi Kajioka. There were thirteen ships in the column: six destroyers, three light cruisers, and four transports carrying 450 troops. Kajioka brought his ships directly in, close under the southern beaches; he apparently assumed the shore guns had been knocked out of action by the airstrikes of the past three days, and had no inkling that he had been spotted and was being led into an ambush. At 5 a.m., with the blue glow of dawn breaking in the east, and the column about four miles off Peacock Point, the cruiser Yubari, Kajioka’s flagship, turned port and ran parallel to Wake’s southern beach. Her companions followed astern. A few minutes later, the cruisers opened fire. From that range the shells came in at a low trajectory, rumbling and whining in the ears of the American defenders. No direct hits were scored on any of the beach guns, still hidden beneath camouflage netting, and the marines remained snug in their bunkers and foxholes, but two oil tanks in the vicinity of Camp 1 were set ablaze. The Japanese transports hung back, and began transferring the landing parties into their boats.

  At 6:15 a.m., when it seemed to the marines as if they had been waiting for hours, Major Devereux gave the word to open fire, and the 5-inchers on shore came to life. Battery A, at Peacock Point, opened up on the Yubari. The first salvo sailed high but struck a destroyer farther south; the gun crews depressed the elevation and scored four quick hits on Yubari at range 5,700 yards. Smoke boiled out of ugly holes torn in the flagship’s starboard side, but she was fortunate in that all of the shells had struck above the waterline, and she could still make way at diminished speed. She turned south and fled for safety. Battery L, on Wilkes Island, commanded by Lieutenant John A. McAlister, had a clear field of fire on almost the entire column, but aimed its first salvo at the first and closest of three destroyers advancing in a single column at range 7,000 yards. That was the Hayate, and she was soon to be no more.

  The battery’s targeting equipment having been ruined in the previous day’s bombing run, McAlister had to find the range by the time-honored technique of firing and spotting the splashes made by the falling shells. With help from another position connected by telephone, Battery L “walked” its successive splashes toward the target. The Hayate charged into the teeth of those hostile salvos and turned port to bring her entire broadside to bear. The spirited approach only exposed the brave little “tin can” to the full brunt of Battery L’s next salvo, which struck home amidships and touched off her magazine. A jolt, a white flash, a thunderclap, and the Hayate was torn apart—her bow floated one way, her stern the other, each section bobbing pitifully on the sea, and then both quickly sank, taking 168 men down with them. The battery’s crew let out a full-throated cheer. “Knock it off, you bastards, and get back on the guns!” bellowed Platoon Sergeant Henry Bedell. “What do you think this is, a ball game?”

  McAlister trained his guns onto the Oite, the next destroyer in the column, already turning south to flee. She laid down a smoke screen to conceal her retreat, but Battery L managed to land two hits on her upper works. McAlister lobbed several shots at two transports, much further to the east. Though the range was nearly two miles, he scored one hit on the Kongo Maru. Finally, McAlister trained his weapon on one of the light cruisers and struck her after-turret; she ran for safety, smoke trailing behind her. “Nothing could bother Battery L this morning,” Commander Cunningham later wrote gratefully. “Battery L was red hot.”

  On Peale Island, Battery B took aim on the second column of destroyers, running north to pass west of the atoll, and scored a hit on the Yayoi, topsides near her stern. The Japanese gunners responded quickly and with great accuracy, landing shells close to the battery on every side and severing a fire control cable to a nearby spotting tower. “Their deflection was perfect from the very first but since they too were firing flat trajectory weapons, they found our low lying position difficult to hit in range,” Lieutenant Woodrow M. Kessler explained. “At first their shells burst with greenish-yellow picric acid blobs in the lagoon directly in front of us. Then they went over us to land on the north beach. Then they split the straddle and we were in the middle of their pattern. It was unbelievable to see so many shell bursts in the battery position and yet to suffer no casualties.” Taking local control of the gun, the crew fired several more salvos, eventually scoring a second hit on the Yayoi and possibly one on the Mutsuki. The destroyers turned south, blowing plenty of smoke as they went. Now the entire task force was on the run. At 7 a.m., Admiral Kajioka cancelled the landing and signaled a general retreat back to Kwajalein.

  Soon the retiring ships were beneath the southern horizon, but the marines were not yet finished with them. The four remaining flyable F4F Wildcats had been circling high above the atoll, remaining at altitude to receive any Japanese airstrikes that might arrive in coordination with the invasion fleet. “Well, it looks as if there are no Nips in the air,” radioed the VMF-211 commander, Major Paul A. Putnam. “Let’s go down and join the party.”

  The Grummans streaked south in chase. Being fighters and not bombers, they were not designed to sink ships, but they had been jury-armed with two small 100-pound bombs each, and they could strafe the enemy decks with their .50-caliber machine guns. Those four planes flew nine consecutive sorties, attacking the retreating task force and then returning to Wake over the gradually widening range for fresh bombs and more ammunition. The squadron’s air attacks knocked out a torpedo tube on the cruiser Tenryu, wiped out the radio shack on the cruiser Tatsuta, strafed the transport Kongo Maru and set her on fire, and sank a second destroyer, the Kisaragi, by lighting up a rack of depth charges in her magazine. The planes were hit by flak and machine-gun fire, and although none was shot down, all were shot up. One Grumman’s bullet-riddled engine lost so much oil on its return leg that the pilot was forced to crash-land on the beach; he walked away, but his plane would never fly again.

  The gun crews and aviators had damaged nine of the thirteen ships in Kajioka’s invasion force, sinking two. Japanese losses were never reported, but were probably in the range of 500 dead and twice that number wounded. Remarkably, only one American had been killed and only four wounded. That was the sole instance in the entire war to come in which shore batteries turned back an amphibious invasion force. The marines were exultant. “When the Japanese withdrew, you’d have thought we’d won the war,” said one Battery L gunner. It had been a remarkable victory, especially after the ruinous bombing raids of the past three days, and was the only such performance of any Allied unit during the initial Japanese offensive. “I am very certain every man on that island grew a good two inches at least,” wrote a sergeant assigned to Devereux’s staff. “Several people stopped by and congratulated Devereux. We had some kind of hope. We felt great. We were Marines, weren’t we?”

  But Wake could not hold out much longer. Only two aircraft remained in service. The island was short of critical equipment, ammunition, and manpower. It needed to be reinforced, rearmed, and resupplied—or failing that, evacuated and abandoned to the enemy. “They had no illusions about the future and expected the enemy to return in greater force,” wrote Samuel Eliot Morison, “but they assumed that the Navy would make an earnest attempt to relieve them.”

  WITH GOVERNOR POINDEXTER’S DECLARATION of emergency on the afternoon of December 7, Hawaii had come under martial law. General Short, before he was relieved, had issued a statement warning civilians to obey all orders “instantly and without question. . . . Avoid the slightest appearance of hostility either in words or in act. . . . All citizens are warned to watch their actions carefully, for any infraction of military rules and regulations will bring swift and harsh reprisals.”

  A blackout and curfew were strictly enforced: lights-out at six, everyone off the streets at six-thirty. Curfew violators played the nocturnal game of “dodge the police,” running through yards and hiding behind bushes and under parked cars, and more than a few of those adventurers were
shot. All through the night, blackout wardens roamed the darkened streets, and everywhere their cries were heard: “Lights! Lights! Put out that light!” Blackout offenders were arrested and hauled before the army provost marshal in Honolulu. They entered a plea and made a brief statement, then heard the verdict. Violators were generally fined $100 (a month’s wages for the average citizen) or sentenced to one hundred days in prison. For minor violations, such as lighting a cigarette in one’s backyard, the offender was sometimes ordered to donate a pint of blood.

  Civilians were required to wear identification tags around their necks or wrists, and to carry bulky gas masks on their persons at all times. All had to be fingerprinted and immunized. Stores closed their doors each day at 3:30 p.m. No liquor sales were permitted, and padlocks appeared on all the bars and taverns. Food, medicine, and cigarettes were suddenly scarce, and there were long lines each day at the grocery stores until the shelves were swept completely bare. Gasoline was rationed, 10 gallons per car per month. Ham radio operators were required to turn in all their equipment, and no photographs could be developed without a special permit. Phone calls to the mainland were monitored from the telephone company’s switchboard. If a caller violated any rules—speaking in any language other than English, making small talk about the weather in Oahu—the censor would either cut the connection or (more disconcertingly) break into the conversation and sternly admonish the speaker. “No one has much aloha for censorship,” wrote a local journalist. “It is accepted, rather gracelessly in some cases, as one of the evils of the war.”

  Banks of sandbags were placed around the doorways of public utilities and other important buildings. Camouflage patterns were painted on roofs, buses, even the landmark Aloha Tower on the Honolulu waterfront. Lei makers were put to work making camouflage netting to cover gun emplacements, trucks, and aircraft. The word hawaii was overprinted on all paper currency—in the event of invasion the U.S. Treasury would declare the bills worthless. National Guardsmen, stationed at intersections and bridges, carried rifles with fixed bayonets, but many of the civil defense volunteers who stood alongside them were armed only with the weapons they had brought from home, including knives, clubs, and machetes. Beaches were cordoned off by trenches, pillboxes, and coils of barbed wire. Crude bomb shelters were dug in public parks and private yards, often nothing more than a trench lined with cardboard and covered with a panel of tin siding. During the frequent air-raid warnings, all civilians were ordered to get to a shelter and stay there until the all-clear sounded. Peggy Hughes Ryan, whose husband was a submarine officer stationed at Pearl, recalled that her backyard bomb shelter was overrun with toads and scorpions. “We absolutely refused to go there during air raid warnings, preferring bombs to crawling, jumping things.”

  Hawaii was home to a large population of ethnic Japanese, including both citizens and foreign residents. They numbered about 158,000, or 37 percent of the territory’s population. There were 82,000 on Oahu alone. It was widely assumed that “they” had known in advance of the attack, and had provided intelligence to the enemy or committed acts of sabotage. Navy Secretary Knox had said so, and his statements had been quoted as fact. (No evidence has ever emerged to support that thesis.) Mass internment of the Hawaiian Japanese was never seriously considered as an option: there were far too many, and they provided much of the islands’ essential labor. Indeed, many of the Hawaiian National Guardsmen, who were posted along the roads and throughout the islands, were of Japanese descent. Shortly after the attack, a newly arrived group of sailors hitched a ride into Honolulu. “I could see the look of consternation on the faces of my passengers,” the driver recalled. “The chief petty officer with four gold hash marks had the courage to speak up, ‘Gosh, did the Japs win?’” Though the Hawaiian Japanese were never locked up in camps, they lived under a cloud of suspicion. “The Japanese are good, law-abiding citizens,” the Honolulu police chief told a reporter, “and in a wrangle between the United States and Japan I wouldn’t trust them for twenty-five seconds.”

  Servicemen’s families were ordered to evacuate to the mainland. The high command wanted fewer civilian mouths to feed, and feared for the safety of wives and children should the islands be invaded. Families were told they must be ready to depart by ship with only twenty-four hours notice, so they packed their bags and waited, living “day to day out of suitcases, never sure when our call would come.” Pets had to be left behind. Families moved furniture and other belongings out to the sidewalk and offered them for sale, but there were far more sellers than buyers. Men stationed at Pearl Harbor or the island’s other bases were often unable to communicate with their families, even if they were only a few miles away. Wives listened to the radio hoping for news of a husband’s ship or unit, but under military censorship the radio reported nothing they could use. Instead, there was constant trafficking in rumors. “Those terrible, dreadful rumors affected the women worse than anything else,” recalled the wife of a destroyer skipper. “People could scream because of them!” Lieutenant Horace D. Warden, a medical officer on a destroyer, the USS Breese, recalled that he and his crewmates were eager to get to sea, “but my family was on the other end of Oahu, so the first thing I wanted to do was get ashore and let them know that I was okay, and find out that they were okay.” Not knowing was the worst ordeal of all, said Warden: “That was probably the worst week of the war for me.”

  Admiral Kimmel, soon to be relieved by Nimitz, had given plenty of thought to Wake Island even before December 7. The previous April he had surmised that the little atoll might serve as bait to bring Japanese naval forces out into the open, “thus offering us an opportunity to get at naval forces with naval forces.” On Wednesday, December 10, Kimmel approved an audacious plan to deploy all three of his carrier task forces far to the west, where with a little luck they might ambush the Japanese fleet and troopships he expected to converge on Wake. Saratoga, en route from California, would be placed under the command of Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher. She would be the nucleus of a task force (No. 14) that would reinforce Wake, while evacuating the wounded and civilian workers. A detachment of the 4th Marine Defense Battalion, with ammunition, weapons, and supplies, would embark in the seaplane tender Tangier. (Though the initial plan did not call for the abandonment of Wake to the enemy, the option was there; Captain Charles H. McMorris, Kimmel’s chief war planning officer, had written on December 11 that the Tangier could take the island’s entire population of 1,500 aboard: “She would be crowded to an extreme degree, but I believe it could be done.”) Lexington (Task Force 11, Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, Jr.) would conduct a diversionary raid on the enemy airfield on Jaluit in the Marshall Islands, and then head northwest to join Fletcher if needed. Enterprise (Task Force 8, still under the command of Admiral Halsey) would cruise west of Johnston Island and be ready to raise steam and support her sisters if the engagement should develop into a major battle. With the various cruisers, destroyers, and auxiliaries attached to the three flattops, the expedition involved substantially all of the naval power (except submarines) available to Kimmel after the calamity of December 7.

  From the start, the rescue mission was plagued by an almost unbelievable series of delays, variously blamed on weather, refueling mishaps, and submarine scares. The hard truth was that the American carrier groups were not yet accustomed to operating at sea in wartime conditions, and were climbing a steep learning curve. Heavy seas slowed the progress of the screening destroyers. Refueling while underway in any kind of weather was an art yet to be refined. Bogus submarine contacts were rife. (In one of the Enterprise’s early war cruises, Halsey had signaled his task force: “We are wasting too many depth charges on neutral fish. Take action accordingly.”) Entries in the CINCPAC war diary dwell on those problems throughout December. December 12: “Task Force Twelve was still unable to fuel at sea and it was decided to bring the Lexington group into Pearl Harbor to accomplish this.” December 12 again: “The Saratoga was being delayed by the effect of rough weath
er on her escort of three 1200-ton destroyers.” December 13: “The arrival of Saratoga was still further delayed by weather.” She was four hours from Pearl when a faulty report of a Japanese midget submarine skulking in the harbor forced her to hang back: she did not put in until the morning of December 15.

  Fletcher sent the Tangier, an oil tanker, Neches, and a division of destroyers on ahead, with the intention of overtaking them when Saratoga was fueled up. The carrier put to sea on December 16 and raised steam for the northwest, overtaking her companions the next afternoon. The task force crept along at the regal pace of 13 knots, the maximum speed of the Neches. The weather had been fair for days, but on December 22, when the task force was still 600 miles from Wake, the wind rose to 20 knots and a white-capped cross swell kicked up. Fletcher had received orders from Pearl to refuel at specified coordinates, so that the Lexington group could rendezvous if necessary. The underway fueling process was long and painstaking, with all the usual profanity-laced pratfalls of near collisions and broken fuel lines, particularly when the destroyers came alongside the heaving deck of the Neches. Ten hours passed and the task force made barely any westward progress at all, and by that time the battle for Wake Island was near its end.