by Rising Sun Victorious: An Alternate History of the Pacific War
With Nevada gone, the level bombers and remaining dive bombers shifted their attention to the battleships California and Pennsylvania and the cruisers still at anchor. California took three torpedoes from lurking minisubmarines during this assault, which caused her to settle to the bottom of the harbor. The destroyer Alwyn sank one of the minisubs with gunfire when it broached the surface after firing its torpedoes. A total of fifteen Vals and Kates fell to antiaircraft fire and the guns of the Marine Corps Wildcats that had arrived over the harbor from Ewa Field.
Bombers also struck Hickam again, destroying the few hangars not hit in the first strike and leveling the machine shops. The runway escaped damage, even though more of the planes there were damaged.
Second Lieutenants Taylor and Welch led the Haleiwa contingent of P-40s against the twenty-plus Vals and Zeros that began their raid on Bellows Field at 0900. Their aerial offensive broke up the attack and sent a half-dozen Vals crashing to the ground. Having experienced the abilities of the Zeros earlier, these pilots refrained from dogfighting but instead dove to the attack and then zoomed away to gain altitude before reengaging. Five of them drifted over Kaneohe Naval Air Station, where they surprised the Vals and Zeros in mid-attack. Several of the enemy went down. Meanwhile, the Zeros and Vals that had been interrupted in their attack on Bellows switched to secondary targets at Wheeler Field. After climbing to altitude, the Zeros swept down on the defending P-36s, effecting a near slaughter of the obsolescent aircraft. Even so, the P-36s kept the Zeros from strafing the field, restricting the damage there to a dozen bomb hits from the Vals, several of which hit the ball field, planned originally as the location of underground gasoline storage tanks.
By 0930 the second attack ended and the attackers disappeared over the horizon. Radar tracked them to the north until they went out of range at 130 miles. En route home, the formation intercepted and shot down two PBYs of Patrol Wing 2, but not before one got off a location report that confirmed the continued flight north beyond radar range.
The Third Wave
Nagumo's carriers began recovering the first wave at 1000 hours. At 1030 the admiral met with his staff to discuss initial attack reports and information radioed by Fuchida on the success of the second wave, which was still an hour out. Captain Genda proposed that Nagumo execute a planned third strike. The targets would be Pearl's oil storage farm, submarine docks, headquarters, and maintenance shops. Nagumo was reluctant to risk his fleet by staying in the area for another strike. Genda countered that the sinking of Enterprise left only Lexington unaccounted for. Meanwhile, the sinking of Nevada prevented the surviving cruisers and submarines from exiting the harbor, so there was no surface threat to worry about.
Since Nagumo continued to fret, Genda suggested that he send scout planes to search to the west and south—the location of Lexington by his guess, since Midway Island was in that direction. Nagumo agreed that it was time to use the scouting force and launched it. He delayed his decision on the third attack, however, until Fuchida returned and reported on the damage he had seen.
Commander Fuchida landed on Akagi at noon. He reported the attack results to Vice Admiral Nagumo, emphasizing that the channel was closed and that what was left of the U.S. Pacific Fleet was trapped inside Pearl Harbor. He recommended the immediate launch of a third strike to take out the port's oil tank farms and machine shops. There were also a number of submarines that had largely gone unscathed. The Zeros, he added shot down over sixty American planes and left the remainder burning on the ground eliminating any threat from that direction. After taking all this in, Nagumo decided to launch the strike, but emphasized that it would be the last and that the fleet would withdraw as soon as it returned. At 1300 hours fifty-four Zeros, thirty-six Vals, and forty-four bombers took off.
Recovery and Search
The shock and devastation of the first two strikes had by then begun to sink in. Admiral Kimmel surveyed the burning and sunken hulls that had been the main battle line of the Pacific Fleet. He was further saddened by a report from Rear Admiral Spruance that Enterprise, two heavy cruisers, and three destroyers had also been lost. He found no solace in the fact that thirty of Enterprise's SBDs had survived and would soon land at Ford Island. Most distressing of all was his realization that Pearl Harbor was useless, plugged by the wreckage of Nevada. His chief salvage officer had informed him that it would take several months to clear her, especially if she could not be refloated. It might, indeed, be easier to dig a new channel if equipment to do the job could be brought in from the West Coast.
Lieutenant General Short had less damage to deal with. Forts Shatter, Debussy, and Kamehameha had largely escaped attack, and Schofield Barracks had received only minor damage. His antiaircraft batteries were now deploying to positions around Pearl Harbor and the two main airfields. Meanwhile, both of his infantry divisions were intact and moving to man beach defenses. Even so, Major General Martin's Hawaiian Air Force was shattered. Martin had lost four of his six serviceable B-17s. Out of thirty-six obsolete B-18s, only eleven survived, and his fighter strength was reduced to twenty-five P-40s and sixteen P-36s. On the positive side, nine A-20 light attack bombers had escaped destruction,12 and the safe arrival of Major Landon's twelve Flying Fortresses had given him a small but valuable heavy bomber force. Martin decided to get the B-l 7s back to Hickam Field and prepare to attack the Japanese fleet if it could be located.
Commander Taylor informed Rear Admiral Bellinger that army radar was tracking the Japanese planes as they returned to their carriers. Bellinger relayed this and the PBY report to Admiral Kimmel, who ordered the information to be relayed to Lexington along with orders for it to seek out and engage the Japanese fleet. He also ordered the SBDs to be recalled and readied for launch once the fleet was located.
The Final Strike
At 1345 one of Patrol Wing 2's PBYs found the Japanese fleet steaming on a north-northeasterly course, 170 miles north of Oahu. It had just missed seeing Nagumo's third wave head south to strike Pearl. Receiving word of the discovery, Rear Admiral Bellinger notified Admiral Kimmel and Major General Martin. Martin ordered his B-17s to take off immediately, and Kimmel told Bellinger to send Enterprise's thirty Dauntlesses. They would be striking at maximum range, but he would chance that. Neither group had a fighter escort.
The Air Warning Center (AWC) had received a month's worth of training that morning and was functioning better than Major Bergquist had hoped. Again it was Lockard and Elliot at Opana Point who picked up the first track of incoming Japanese aircraft at 120 miles. Bergquist called Major General Martin, who ordered the twenty-five P-40s that could still fly to take off and orbit at 20,000 feet over Wheeler until they received instructions to intercept the attack. Meanwhile, the leader of the incoming Japanese, Commander Murata, split his sixty fighters, ordering half of them to range ahead to clear the skies of enemy interceptors. The other half would fly escort.
Martin's radars detected the splitting up of the Japanese force, and the AWC relayed both locations to the orbiting Tomahawks. Capt. James O. Beckwith, commander of the 72nd Pursuit Squadron, led his fighters against the larger formation, the melee beginning at 1435 hours, twenty miles northeast of Kaneohe Bay. Again the P-40s had an altitude advantage over their prey. They dove through the Japanese formation, shooting down six to ten Vals and Kates, but were then pursued by the Zero escort. During the next twenty minutes the Zeros shot down half of them.
For the first time that day, army antiaircraft greeted the attacks when they arrived over Pearl Harbor. The leading Zeros had already strafed Hickam Field and the ships in the harbor to divert attention from the bombers. Eighteen Vals dived on the tank farms at either end of the naval station between Hickam Field and the Southeast Loch. Carrying conventional 550-kilo bombs, they ripped a number of fuel tanks open, starting massive fires. The remaining eighteen dive-bombers hit eight submarines moored side by side in Southeast Loch, next to the Submarine Headquarters Building. They also hit the cruisers Honolulu, San Fra
ncisco, and New Orleans, all of which had escaped serious damage during the first two attacks. 13
Unknown to the Japanese, Admiral Kimmel had established his Pacific Fleet headquarters in the Submarine Headquarters Building the previous summer. The admiral preferred to operate from ashore in order to free his flagship for full duty with the fleet. When the headquarters was struck by 3,000-pound bombs, Admiral Kimmel and many of his staff were killed. Unintended as it was, Kimmel's death would provide the United States with her first hero of the war and her first winner of the Navy Cross. Kimmel had, after all, gone down with his ships. Performing as level bombers, the Kates next rained bombs on machine shops near a dry dock that held the Pacific Fleet's flagship, USS Pennsylvania.
Having destroyed the fleet's fuel reserves and her heavy repair shops, Murata led his force back to their carriers. However, Kimmel's death did not go unavenged. At the very moment when Murata was completing his mission and turning his force homeward, the Flying Fortresses found the Japanese fleet and launched their attack.
Major Landon's Flying Fortresses justified their name that afternoon by fending off the attacks of the twenty-four Zeros defending the fleet and absorbing intense antiaircraft fire from below. However, his hopes of sinking the carriers with the six 600-pound bombs each plane carried came to nothing. Dropped from 25,000 feet, they failed to score a single hit. .
The Zeros were still swarming around Landon's B-l7s when Enterprise's SBDs arrived and began slow but deadly dives on the enemy below. The ill-advised decision of the captains of Zuikaku and Soryu to cease evasive maneuvers and launch more Zeros attracted the attention of both Scouting 6 and Bombing 6, which walked their bombs the length of both carrier decks, ripping open their vitals and setting off gasoline, torpedoes, and bombs aboard planes held in readiness to strike Lexington. The price was high for the Americans, though; only eight of their aircraft made it back to Ford Island. Several more survived the encounter with the Japanese fleet but fell prey to the Zeros of Murata's returning strike force when their paths crossed.
The four intact carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Shokaku, recovered the returning planes at 1700, taking aboard the orphans from Zuikaku and Soryu. After the recovery was completed, Vice Admiral Nagumo ordered the fleet to head north-northwest and back to Japan. He had been right to worry. The August war game correctly predicted the loss of a third of their planes and two carriers. He left behind two cruisers and four destroyers to rescue the survivors of the sinking carriers.
The destruction of Zuikaku and Soryu was a bittersweet victory for the Americans, for the Pacific Fleet had ceased to exist as a battle force. One carrier and seven battleships had been sunk, the harbor entrance at Pearl blocked the machine shops destroyed and the fuel reserves gone. Although there remained twenty-five PBYs and fourteen B-l7s, only a dozen serviceable P-40s were left. The Hawaiian Islands lay open to another aerial assault.
The remainder of Task Force 8 steamed into Honolulu harbor the next morning, but the port was too small to serve as more than a temporary shelter for the Pacific Fleet's cruisers and destroyers. It could not hold a fleet. Lexington's TF 12 arrived on December 9. Vice Admiral Halsey, who had assumed command of the Pacific Fleet, ordered the carrier to Long Beach, California, taking the damaged Northampton with it. With the closing of Pearl Harbor, America's defenses shrank back to the West Coast, leaving the United States with the terrible dilemma of fighting a war in the Atlantic while it tried to rebuild its Pacific Fleet. Pearl Harbor would not be reopened until April 1942.14 Unfortunately, that was exactly when Yamamoto arrived with the Japanese Combined Fleet.
The Reality
The warning phone calls by Stark and Marshall were never made. Later, it was discovered that the transoceanic cable had been tapped by the Japanese.15 USS Enterprise was delayed by two days of bad weather, which resulted in her being 200 miles west of Oahu on the morning of the attack. The state of the Hawaiian Air Force was as presented, including both the navy and the army aircraft on four-hour alert. However, the unintentional benefit of this was that while most of the aircraft were lost, the pilots survived the day. Nevada was ordered not to sortie, and grounded herself at Hospital Point, where she sank.
Pearl Harbor survived as a forward striking base for the Pacific Fleet, which, stripped of its old battleships, was re-formed around fast carrier groups. The alternatives played out here show that only the changing of the mind-set of the army and navy commanders, both in Hawaii and in Washington, D.C., could have changed the historical outcome of December 7, 1941.
Bibliography
Arakaki, Leatrice R., and Kuborn, John R., 7 December 1941: The Air Force Story (Pacific Air Forces, Office of History, Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, 1991).
Clausen, Henry C, and Lee, Bruce, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement (Crown Publishers, New York, 1992).
Cressman, Robert J., and Wenger, J. Michael, Steady Nerves and Stout Hearts: The Enterprise (CV6)Air Group and Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941 (Pictorial Histories Publishing Co., Missoula, 1989).
Goldstein, Donald M., and Dillon, (Catherine V. (eds.), The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside the Japanese Plans (Brassey's [U.S.], Washington, DC, 1993).
Lord, Walter, Day of Infamy (Henry Holt, New York, 1957).
Prange, Gordon W.; Goldstein, Donald M.; and Dillon, Katherine V, December 7, 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1988).
, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1981).
Taussig, Captain Joseph K., Jr., “A Tactical View of Pearl Harbor,” in Still-well, Paul (ed.), Air Raid Pearl Harbor: Recollections of a Day of Infamy (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1981).
Notes
1. Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V Dillon (eds.), The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside the Japanese Plans (Brassey's [U.S.], Washington, D.C,, 1993), 100-101.
2. Lieutenant Commander Kramer was assigned to ONI with duty at the translation section, Communications Division. They were responsible for the decoding and translating of the Japanese Purple code. Gordon Prange, Donald M. Goldstein, and Katherine V Dillon, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1981), 19.
3. Admiral Harold R. Stark,Commanding the Fleet (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1953), 140–42.
4. I have adopted Arakaki and Kubom's term “Hawaiian Air Force” to refer to those Army Air Force units under the command of Major General Martin and to differentiate them from Army Air Force, Army Air Corps, and Air Force Combat Command units that were either under Lieutenant General Short's Hawaiian Department or in transit from the mainland to the Philippines. Leatrice R. Arakaki and John R. Kuborn, 7 December 1941: The Air Force Story (Pacific Air Forces, Office of History, Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii), viii.
5. Ibid., 151.
6. Prange, Goldstein, and Dillon, op.cit., 187.
*7. Col. Rufus S. Bratton, “Too Late the Warning,” Journal of Military History vol. 19, no. 1, January 1955, 107–108.
*8. Adm. Mitsuo Fuchida, The Emperor's Samurai (Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1975), 89.
9. U.S. Army, Annex A, “Lessons of the Pearl Harbor Attack,” Army Field Manual FM 100-5, Operations. August 1949.
10. The battleships of the Pacific Fleet were in the midst of receiving additional antiaircraft guns when the Japanese attacked. The fleet modernization program called for adding four quadruple mounts of either sixteen 1.1 -inch machine guns or sixteen 3-inch antiaircraft guns (depending on their availability) to the battleships. On December 7 the Pennsylvania was having hers installed, and the Arizona was to receive hers in early 1942. Norman Friedman (ed.), USS Arizona (BB-39) (Leeward Publications, Annapolis, 1978).
*11. John P. Ryan, The Fighting Sailor: The Biography of Admiral William F. Halsey (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1987), 87–89.
12. In April 1941 the 58th Bombardment Squadron received its first twelve A-20 light bombers to replace the obsolete B-18 Bolos it was flying. The arrival of these new aircraf
t was the reason the squadron was transferred from Bellows to Hickam Field. Arakaki and Kubom, op.cit., 51 and 151.
*13. Francis G. Cavendish, The History of the Pacific War (Triangle Press, Columbus, Ohio, 1968), 200–204.
*14. The Nevada was fully loaded with ammunition and fuel for a week of maneuvers scheduled to begin on December 8. Because her back was broken and the shell and powder was on board, navy salvagers had to cut her apart and remove the ammunition round by round. It was determined that to blow her up would cause massive collateral damage in the harbor. In addition she sank in the narrowest part of the channel between the outer entrance and the entrance to West Loch. The fleet's main ammunition depot was located a half mile away at West Loch. Ensign Taussig later wrote that “thousands of 14-inch and 16-inch projectiles, each with two bags ... of powder, were out there in plain sight. The Nevada, alone, had 1,440 14-inch shells at West Loch . . . and 2,800 seventy-pound bags of smokeless powder. The explosion [of this] would have rattled the windows in Topeka, Kansas, but, more important for the Japanese, it would have been the kind of solar plexus punch that would have guaranteed that the stunned U.S. Navy would not quickly be back on its feet.” It was therefore too dangerous to attempt to clear the channel by blowing up the Nevada and risking the accidental detonation of the ammunition dump. The four-month recovery effort proved to be the greatest challenge faced by navy salvagers during the war. Capt. Joseph K. Taussig, Jr., “A Tactical View of Pearl Harbor,” in Paul Stillwell (ed.), Air Raid Pearl Harbor: Recollections of a Day of Infamy (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1981), 140.
