Pearl Harbor Betrayed

by Michael Gannon

  At the Navy end of Marshall’s telephone line, Stark was in his office, where he had arrived sometime before 10:30, conferring on his copy of the one o’clock message with OpNav’s liaison officer with the State Department, Capt. Roscoe E. Schuirmann, “when General Marshall called me on the phone to ask if I knew of it”:

  I told him I did, and he asked me what I thought about sending the information concerning the time of presentation on to the various commanders in the Pacific. My first answer to him was that we had sent them so much already that I hesitated to send more. I hung up the phone, and not more than a minute later I called him back, stating that there might be some peculiar significance in the Japanese Ambassador calling on Mr. Hull at 1 p.m. and that I would go along with him in sending the information to the Pacific. I asked him if his communications were such that he could get it out quickly because our communications were quite rapid when the occasion demanded it. He replied that he felt they could get it through very quickly. I then asked him to include [in] the dispatch instructions to his people to inform their naval opposites.73

  Stark’s account corresponds to that of Miles’s in these respects. Marshall thereupon drew a piece of scrap paper toward him, picked up a pencil, and wrote out in longhand a message to the commanders in the Philippines, Hawaii, and Panama:

  The Japanese are presenting at 1 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, today, what amounts to an ultimatum. Also they are under orders to destroy their code machine immediately. Just what significance the hour set may have we do not know, but be on alert accordingly. Inform naval authorities of this communication. Marshall.74

  Miles states that when Marshall completed this message, which, it bears mention, contains the first use of the word alert in a Pacific warning since the Marshall-authored alert to General Herron on 17 June 1940, he handed it to Bratton and ordered it taken at once to the WD Signal Center. As Bratton hurried out, Gerow called after him, “Tell them to give first priority to the Philippines if there is a question of priority.” At 11:50 A.M. Bratton had the message in the hands of Col. Edward F. French, the Signal Center director. Because neither French nor his clerk could read Marshall’s handwriting, Bratton read it out while the clerk typed. French said later that he had “never seen [Bratton] more excited.” When Bratton returned to Marshall’s office, he was ordered back to inquire from French how much time it would take to encipher and transmit the dispatches. Returning a second time, Bratton reported, as Miles remembered, that “they would have them encoded in three minutes, on the air in eight, and in the hands of the recipients in (I think) twenty.”75

  From that point Murphy’s Law took hold. French learned that, owing to atmospheric interference, his radio equipment had been out of contact with Honolulu since approximately 11:20 that morning. Not aware that the Navy had offered to send the messages on its more powerful transmitters, and without advising Colonel Bratton of what he was about to do—Miles quotes Bratton as saying that French gave him “no intimation” that all the messages would not go out direct to their addressees76—French decided on his own to send the dispatch intended for General Short by commercial means. In the past he had used the Navy’s transmitters when experiencing problems with his own, but he thought that the message for Short would be delayed in reaching him if it had to be carried from Pearl Harbor to Fort Shafter. Commercial circuits seemed to him the more expeditious route to take. Accordingly, he filed the Hawaii dispatch by teletype with Western Union in Washington at 12:17 P.M. (6:47 A.M. Hawaii time) for overland transmission to RCA (across the street from Western Union and connected by pneumatic tube) in San Francisco. From there RCA, with forty kilowatts of power compared with his own ten kilowatts, transmitted the message by radio to its offices in Honolulu, where it was received at 1:03 P.M. (Washington time, which was three minutes past the one o’clock deadline), 7:33 A.M. in Hawaii, where the attack on Pearl Harbor would begin in twenty-two minutes. From Honolulu the message would have been transmitted by teletype to the Signal Center at Fort Shafter—except that that circuit was not operating at that hour. RCA assigned the message, which carried no priority designation, to a messenger boy named Tadao Fuchikami, who placed the message envelope, along with others, in his pouch and took off by motorcycle on his rounds. The traffic jams and roadblocks that quickly followed the start of the Japanese bombardment at 0755 made it impossible for the messenger to reach Shafter until after the last attacking aircraft had withdrawn. The alert was delivered to the office of the signal officer at 1145. After decryption it reached Short’s office at 1458.77 Short hit the ceiling. Kimmel rolled his copy into a ball.

  * * *

  Earlier, at 0358, the World War I–vintage flush-deck destroyer Ward (DD-139) received a flashing-light signal from the nearby minesweeper Condor off the channel entrance to Pearl. Condor’s crew had sighted an object that looked like a submarine proceeding to westward. Ward’s skipper, thirty-five-year-old Lt. William W. Outerbridge, set general quarters, slowed to ten knots, and began a sonar search. After an hour of fruitless “pinging,” Outerbridge signaled Condor, asking for verification of the target’s distance and course. Condor replied that the object when sighted was about 1,000 yards from the entrance on a course of 020 magnetic. That was not to westward. Outerbridge asked to be informed of any further sightings, secured from general quarters, and retired to his bunk in the emergency cabin. He sent no report of the sighting to headquarters, Fourteenth Naval District (hereafter 14ND).78

  At 0600, three PBY-5 Catalinas, each fitted with four live Mark-17 325-pound depth bombs with hydrostatic fuses that hung in racks from hard points near both ends of the 104-foot wings, and each bristling with .50-caliber machine guns in the waist blisters and .30-caliber guns in the bows and tunnels, formed up for takeoff on Kaneohe Bay. That morning’s dawn patrol—sunrise was due at 0626—their mission was to scout for Japanese submarines to a distance of 300 nautical miles over the operating area south of Pearl. Group leader that morning was a young ensign named William P. Tanner, from Rossmoor, California. Not only was this his first flight as group leader, it was also his first as a patrol plane commander. But he had gained many hours of seasoning and proficiency flying right seat to Commander Thurston Clark, commanding officer of Patrol Squadron 14. Tanner’s Catalina was marked 14P1. His after-station crew reported that the ladder was in, sea anchors were in, and waist hatches were secure.

  When the three aircraft received clearance for takeoff, Tanner reached overhead and slowly pushed the throttles to the wall. The two fourteen-cylinder, 1,200 horsepower Pratt & Whitney R-1830-82 engines on the wing above his head put out a thunderous din. With so much apparent thrust, it seemed to many novice pilots that the Catalina should fairly leap off the water. But pilots of Tanner’s experience knew that the PBY was, in fact, underpowered, and that the boat’s hull had difficulty breaking the suction and drag of the water’s surface, particularly when it was calm. As power was applied, the nose came up, and Tanner held the elevator control back in his stomach in order to prevent water from spraying into the engines and reducing power. At sixty-five knots the boat was “on the step,” riding on a notch at the base of the V-bottomed float. Then, abruptly, 14P1 broke away and became airborne. Tanner recorded the time as “just after 0600.”79

  Following a signal to the plane captain in the cabane strut to raise the wingtip floats, Tanner began his climb out at 2,450 rpm, thirty-six inches manifold pressure, or 800 feet per minute. At 1,000 feet, he stood on the right rudder pedal and turned the aileron control slightly to starboard. The lumbering Catalina responded and took a compass heading of 220 degrees, which would take Tanner and his crew of seven over the channel entrance to Pearl. There they were to establish the first leg seaward of their assigned search sector. Ensigns Fred Meyer and Tommy Hillis, piloting the other two PBYs, would work on grids to port and starboard. At 2,000 feet, Tanner nosed over into level cruise and reduced power to 2,000 rpm, pulling thirty inches, 110 knots indicated. The nonspecular blue-gray paint scheme of 14P
1 blended in with the surrounding sky as morning twilight gave way to dawn. Looming ahead was the cloverleaf-shaped harbor with its stately array of battlewagons moored snugly to concrete quays.

  When the Catalina had roared past Ford Island, Tanner made a slight turn to southward, took up his assigned heading, and cranked in the autopilot. As the Pacific came up, all crew members went to glasses, Bausch & Lomb 7×50s. “We were a little south of Pearl when we spotted the submarine,” Tanner said years later. It was tailing a target repair ship, USS Antares (AG-10), just arrived off Pearl from Canton and Palmyra with a 500-ton steel barge in tow, standing in to Honolulu harbor, ten miles east. Crewmen aboard Antares sighted a suspicious object 1,500 yards on the starboard quarter. Tanner and his crew made the same sighting from the air, at about the same time, 0630. So did Ward, nearby. “Riding the wake some 200 yards aft,” as Tanner estimated the distance, “with its conning tower barely awash, was this submarine—clearly outside the established sanctuaries [where USN submarines operated].”

  Going off autopilot, Tanner called for mixture at auto rich, forty-three inches, and 2,400 rpm. With that, he pushed over into glide attack mode and descended at 140 knots to 100 feet off the deck. When he neared the optimum point of release, he slowed to near-stalling speed and ordered a crewman in the tunnel to drop two smoke pots to mark the sub’s position. These released, Tanner kicked left rudder, pulled into a climbing turn, and looked aft. “The USS Ward was nearby but we didn’t have immediate radio contact with her.… I guess the Ward spotted it [the submarine] about the same time we did because she started bearing down hard.”

  On board Ward, Lt. (jg) Oscar W. Goepner, who had the deck, roused Outerbridge: “Captain, come on the bridge!” When Outerbridge scanned the moving object that Goepner and the helmsman had sighted, he pronounced it probably to be the conning tower of a submarine, but, as he put it in May 1945, “we didn’t have anything that looked like it in our Navy, and they [Goepner and the helmsman] had never seen anything like it.” The tower belonged to one of the Japanese midgets. Outerbridge set general quarters, ordered speed increased from five to twenty-five knots, and directed guns 1 and 3 manned and readied. At a range of 100 yards a shot from No. 1 gun passed directly over the midget’s strange-looking conning tower. After closing to 500 yards, the No. 3 gun scored a direct hit at the waterline junction of the tower and hull. The submarine was observed to heel over to starboard and start to sink. Passing over the position, Outerbridge dropped four depth charges.

  Tanner and his crew above observed this action, and, sometime between the gun action and the depth charges, employed weapons of their own. “We made as tight a turn as we could,” Tanner said, “and bracketed the sub with our own depth charges. But now, with the Ward closing and firing, we pulled up and watched her launch four depth charges from the fantail.”80 A patch of oil came up to cover the surface where the midget was found. Tanner sent an action report to the PatWing 2 command center on Ford Island.

  Tanner and Outerbridge had fired the first shots in the Battle of Pearl Harbor. Acting under orders from Admiral Kimmel (who was acting in violation of his orders from Admiral Stark), Tanner and Outerbridge had not waited for the enemy to “commit the first overt act” but had skillfully taken the initiatives expected of them.

  At 0653 Outerbridge sent a voice message in the clear to 14ND: “We have attacked, fired upon, and dropped depth charges upon submarine operating in defensive sea area.”81 The message was received by Lt. Oliver H. Underkofler, who was on loudspeaker watch at 14ND communications. At 0712, after a delay of nineteen minutes, Underkofler handed the message to Lt. Comdr. Harold Kaminski, district watch officer. Realizing the importance of the dispatch, Kaminski dialed the number of the CINCPAC duty officer, Comdr. Vincent Murphy, assistant in war plans to Soc McMorris. The call was taken by Murphy’s assistant, Lt. Comdr. R. B. Black, who passed the message on to Murphy, who was in his quarters dressing. Murphy directed Black to call Kaminski back to find out what he was doing about the report, and whether he had reported the action to 14ND commandant Admiral Bloch. But Kaminski’s line was busy and remained so. It was tied up because the watch officer was attempting to reach Bloch’s aide, and, failing there, Bloch’s chief of staff, Capt. John B. Earle, whom he reached after “quite a while.” “Around 0720” he also reached 14ND war plans officer Commander Charles B. Momsen.

  Earle directed Kaminski to signal the ready-duty destroyer USS Monaghan (DD-354) and “send her out at once” to investigate. (In his testimony before the Roberts Commission the following month, Kaminski stated that he sent out the Monaghan on his “own responsibility”—“I had instructions, yes, to use my own judgment”—before he talked with Earle. Murphy testified that it was Bloch who had ordered out the ready-duty destroyer and had ordered the standby destroyer to get up steam.) Earle telephoned Bloch at his quarters and notified him of the situation. Earle’s impression was “that it was just another one of these false reports which had been coming in off and on … for a period of a year … but this seemed to be a little bit more serious. Apparently there had been an actual attack made.” Bloch reacted in much the same way: “My thought was, Is it a correct report or is it another false report? Because we had got them before. I said, ‘Find out about it.’” That order was given to Momsen, who lived next door to Bloch. Neither Bloch nor Momsen notified the Army, the latter saying, “It was a naval matter.” Momsen went to 14ND headquarters to seek verification, but no further word was heard from him, and no messages to Ward are recorded on the radio log. Bloch later stated, “I did not hear anything until I heard the explosion in close proximity to my house, and that was around 7:55.”82

  In the meantime, Commander Murphy received a call at his office from Lt. Comdr. Logan Ramsey, operations officer of PatWing 2, who reported receipt of a signal from patrol aircraft 14P1, “to the effect that a submarine had been sunk in the Defensive Sea Area” one mile off the entrance. Murphy now called Admiral Kimmel. The time was “about 7:30.” Eighteen minutes had passed since Ward’s message was placed in the hands of Kaminski. Kimmel, who had not yet shaved, dressed, or breakfasted, said, “I will be right down.” He testified in the following month that “I was telephoned at my quarters that an attack had been made on a submarine near Pearl Harbor. We have had many reports of submarines in this area. I was not at all certain that this was a real attack.”83

  But it was, and the sunken submarine had tipped off Pearl Harbor that an attack was afoot—just as Fuchida had feared. In the twenty minutes remaining, however, no one went to full alert. And the Army was never notified.84

  NINE

  THIS IS NO DRILL

  Our air force … achieved a great success unprecedented in history by the Pearl Harbor attack.… This success is owing to the Imperial Navy’s hard training for more than twenty years.… Nothing could hold back our Imperial Navy, which kept silent for a long time. But once it arose it never hesitated to dare to do the most difficult thing on this earth. Oh, how powerful is the Imperial Navy!

  Commander Sanagi Sadamu

  Operations Section, Japanese Naval Staff

  Diary entry for 8 December 1941

  Kimmel was unaware of it, as was Short, as was every other commander or senior staffer in the two services who was capable of doing anything about it, but one of the Army’s mobile radar (AWS) stations picked up the incoming Japanese air fleet and reported it to the Army’s Information Center at Fort Shafter. On 7 December, the six radar stations positioned around Oahu shut down operations at 0700, which was just over a half hour after sunrise, the predicted danger period.1 There is no document found by this writer to indicate that the Japanese knew that General Short’s radar stations stood down at that hour on Sundays, or that they even knew that Oahu was equipped with this detection technology. Even Kimmel did not know that Short’s radar screens went dark on schedule at 0700 that morning.2 It was only luck, it appears, that led the Japanese aircraft to approach the island just “over” the radar—with
one notable exception.

  That exception was the long-range mobile station at Opana, near Kahuku Point, 230 feet above sea level, at the northern tip of Oahu. Until 25 November there had not been a radar set at the site, but on that date an SCR-270B training set at Schofield Barracks was relocated there.3 On the morning of 7 December, the two Army privates operating the radar equipment at Opana decided to keep the five-inch diameter oscilloscope on power after the normal 0700 shutdown hour. “We figured that we might as well play around,” said Joseph Lockard, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the more experienced of the two, “because the truck had not come in yet to take us back for chow.” He was about to hand the controls over to the “new man,” George Elliott, from Chicago, so that he could get some training in, when an anomaly—“it looked like two main pulses”—appeared on the scope. He looked at the clock. The time was 0702.

  At first, he thought there might be something wrong with the equipment, but “finally decided that it must be a flight of some sort.” He asked Elliott to start plotting the jagged vertical lines both on the Record of Readings and on an overlay chart with a mileage radius rule and grid lines running true north imprinted on transparent paper. Position: five degrees northeast of azimuth. Range: 136 miles. By the time the range reached 132 miles, Lockard decided that this was “the largest group [of aircraft] I had ever seen on the oscilloscope,” and he directed Elliott to use the direct-line telephone for a sighting call to the Information Center at Fort Shafter.4

  The telephone operator at the center, Private Joseph McDonald, wrote down the message, including the information that the scope image seemed to have been generated by “an unusually large number of planes.” McDonald told Elliott that he was the only person in the center: taking advantage of their first day off in a month, the seven or eight plotters had packed up and left promptly at 0700. Elliott asked him to look around for anyone who could handle this information. He was speaking “in a very nervous tone of voice.” Against regulations, McDonald left his switchboard and did find someone, an Air Corps fighter pilot named Lt. Kermit Tyler, who was sitting at the plotting table with “nothing to do,” waiting to be relieved at 0800.5 A four-year veteran, Tyler had been sent to the center to be trained as a “pursuit officer.” His responsibilities, once oriented, were to assist the center controller in directing Army planes to intercept enemy planes. This was his second day: his first tour was on the preceding Wednesday, and he still did not know what all his duties were.6 At Opana Lockard grabbed the phone and asked McDonald to put Tyler on. “I gave him all the information that we had—the direction, the mileage, the apparent size of whatever it was.” Tyler’s reply was, “I told him not to worry about it.”