Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  Though the bomber crews had been assigned targets with silhouettes they had memorized, Fuchida repeatedly lectured them on the great benefit to be had by sinking as many ships as possible in Pearl Harbor’s tiny channel. Enough carnage there would make it impossible for the enemy’s fleet to sortie and counterstrike Nagumo’s ships.

  • • •

  The December seas were so heavy that waves swept across the carriers’ decks. In the dark, the black ships crashed through, their only light the blinker lamps for communications at the top of each’s superstructure. Fuchida watched with concern as, whipped by wind and spray, the flight decks tilted beyond ten degrees: “The ships pitched and rolled in the rough sea, kicking up white surf from the predawn blackness of the water. We could hear the waves splashing against the ship with a thunderous noise. Under normal circumstances, no plane would be permitted to take off in such weather. At times waves came over the flight deck, and crews clung desperately to their planes to keep them from going into the sea.

  “Turning to me, Commander Shogo Masuda, the Akagi’s air officer, said, ‘There is a heavy pitch and roll. What do you think about taking off in the dark?’ The sea was rough, and there was a strong wind blowing. The sky was completely dark, and as yet the horizon was not visible. ‘The pitch is greater than the roll,’ I replied. ‘Were this a training flight, the takeoff would be delayed until dawn. But if we coordinate the takeoffs with the pitching, we can launch successfully.’ ”

  The airmen tied hachimakis around their heads emblazoned with Hisshou—“Certain Victory”—before climbing into their cockpits. As Fuchida readied to board his plane, Akagi’s senior maintenance man gave him a special white scarf, saying, “All of the maintenance crew would like to go along to Pearl Harbor. Since we can’t, we want you to take this hachimaki as a symbol that we are with you in spirit.”

  “My plane was in position, its red-and-yellow-striped tail marking it as the commander’s plane,” Fuchida continued. “The carrier turned to port and headed into the northerly wind. The battle flag was now added to the Z flag flying at the masthead. Lighted flying lamps shivered with the vibration of engines as planes completed their warm-up. On the flight deck, a green lamp was waved in a circle to signal, ‘Take off!’ The engine of the foremost fighter plane began to roar. With the ship still pitching and rolling, the plane started its run, slowly at first but with steadily increasing speed. Men lining the flight deck held their breath as the first plane took off successfully just before the ship took a downward pitch. The next plane was already moving forward. There were loud cheers as each plane rose into the air.”

  “The ship was rolling heavily, so the takeoff was postponed for fifteen minutes,” Soryu bomber pilot Tatsuya Otawa remembered. “It seemed like a very long time. Finally we got the signal; the fighter planes took off first. Since we were the second-wave attack unit, we waved our caps and really prayed for their success. Our flight group was very large; over a hundred planes. We were escorted by Zero fighters and so I felt secure.”

  Pilot Haruo Yoshino: “Our fighting spirit was high. There was no question in my mind that we would be successful. We really did not have much fear.”

  As the thrust of the ocean’s roll raised each First Air Fleet carrier’s bow, a plane struggled up and lifted away. “The wind was competing with the roar of the plane engines,” dive-bomber pilot Zenji Abe recalled. “First away from the carrier were nine Zero fighters. The planes were guided by hand lamps in the dark. They moved one by one into position and took off into the black sky.” In the murk just before dawn, it was impossible to see their black-green bodies marked by bright red suns. The pilots climbed to two hundred, four hundred, or five hundred meters, depending on their squadron, and continued to circle overhead until the entire wave was aloft, and then fell into formation behind their leaders.

  “From the decks of the aircraft carriers, plane after plane rose, flashing their silver wings in the sunlight, and soon there were a hundred and more aircraft in the sky,” Iki Kuramoti remembered. “Our Sea Eagles were now moving into a great formation. Our ten years and more of intensive training, during which we had endured many hardships in anticipation of this day—would they now bear fruit? At this thought a thousand emotions filled our hearts as, close to tears, we watched this magnificent sight. One and all, in our hearts, we sent our pleas to the gods, and putting our hands together, we prayed. Meanwhile our Sea Eagles, with the drone of their engines resounding across the heavens like a triumphal song, turned their course toward Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu and set forth on their splendid enterprise.”

  • • •

  In Washington, George Marshall was going to work in the Munitions Building after spending the morning on horseback: “On my arrival there Colonel Bratton handed me these intercepts which included the fourteen sections of the Japanese message, and I started reading them through. . . . When I reached the end of the document, the next sheet was the one o’clock message of December 7. That, of course, was indicative to me, and all the others who came into the room, of some very definite action at one o’clock, because that one o’clock was Sunday and was in Washington and involved the Secretary of State, all of which were rather unusual put together.”

  Besides the fact that diplomats meeting officially with each other on a Sunday was out of the ordinary, MAGIC had never produced an order from Japan’s foreign office to its Washington embassy demanding that they meet with American officials at a specific time. This point had “immediately stunned” G-2’s Rufus Bratton, who thought it “was peculiarly worded and the implication was inescapable that it was of vital importance.” Bratton decided that “the Japanese were going to attack some American installation in the Pacific area,” but Hawaii as a target never entered his mind: “Nobody in ONI, nobody in G-2, knew that any major element of the Fleet was in Pearl Harbor on Sunday morning the seventh of December. We all thought they had gone to sea . . . because that was part of the war plan, and they had been given a war warning.”

  The chief of military intelligence, General Sherman Miles, suggested they warn Panama, the West Coast, the Philippines, and Hawaii. Marshall agreed: “I think that I immediately called Admiral Stark on the phone and found he had seen [Japan’s fourteen-part cable], and I proposed a message to our various commanders in the Pacific region, the Philippines, Hawaii, the Caribbean, that is the Panama Canal, and the West Coast, which included Alaska. Admiral Stark felt that we might confuse them because we had given them an alert and now we were adding something more to it.”

  Marshall decided to go ahead on his own. He decided the situation was serious enough to avoid using the phone for security reasons, so instead, he jotted down a note: “Japanese are presenting at one pm 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.” Bratton took the general’s note to the War Department’s Signal Center for delivery; it was received in the Caribbean at 1200, in Manila at 1206, and at the Presidio in San Francisco at 1211, but atmospheric conditions had been blocking cables to Hawaii since 1030, and it could not get through. Lieutenant Colonel Edward French, the Signal Center’s officer in charge, first thought that he should go to the navy, but then decided that using commercial carriers—from Washington to San Francisco via Western Union, and from there to Honolulu via RCA—would be faster. It went out at 1217.

  Meanwhile at the navy, Captains Alvin Kramer and Arthur McCollum each used Togo’s deadline to calculate what 1:00 p.m. eastern standard time would mean across the rest of the world. At his meeting with Stark, McCollum pointed out that 1300 in Washington meant 0730 in Hawaii as well as “very early in the morning in the Far East . . . and that we didn’t know what this signified, but that if an attack were coming, it looked like . . . it was timed for operations out in the Far East and possibly on Hawaii.” But
McCollum later insisted, “Pearl Harbor as such was never mentioned. The feeling that I had, and I think the feeling that most officers there had, was that at or near the outbreak of war with Japan, we could expect a surprise attack on the Fleet.” Many at Navy in Washington believed in one scenario—war would be declared, the Fleet would go to sea, and it would be attacked—a belief so strong that they were shocked to learn, after the attack, that Kimmel and his Fleet were still sitting in Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7.

  • • •

  At 0342 in Hawaii, minesweepers Condor and Crossbill were using their mechanical brooms on patrol around thirteen miles southwest of Pearl Harbor’s entrance buoys when Condor watch officer Ensign R. C. McCloy spotted an oddly shaped white wave about a hundred yards away, moving toward the harbor. He and Quartermaster B. C. Uttrick each gave it a hard look with McCloy’s binoculars, and Uttrick said, “That’s a periscope, sir, and there aren’t supposed to be any subs in the area.” Then the periscope suddenly veered off in a 180, perhaps having spotted Condor.

  Condor used her blinker light to message, “Sighted submerged submarine on westerly course, speed 9 knots,” to the USS Ward, a destroyer staffed with naval reservists from Minnesota. The message was received by Lieutenant Oscar Goepner, who’d been working inshore patrol on the Ward for over a year but had never gotten a message like this. Goepner woke up his skipper, Lieutenant William Outerbridge; for Outerbridge, December 6 was his first night on his first patrol on his first command. From the class of Annapolis 1927, he had needed fourteen years in the peacetime navy to rise to the level of destroyer commander.

  After the two ships had talked by blinker light, the Ward sounded general quarters, her sailors piling out of their bunks and into their battle stations. For about an hour, the destroyer searched for the white trail with lookouts, and for the submarine’s metallic echo with sonar. William Outerbridge: “We searched for about an hour and didn’t find anything; so I got in contact with [Condor] again and asked, ‘What was the approximate distance and course of the submarine that you sighted?’ and she said, ‘The course was about what we were steering at the time, 020 magnetic, and about a thousand yards from the entrance apparently heading for the entrance.’ Well, I knew then that we had been searching in the wrong direction. We went to westward, and . . . just kept on searching in our area, in the restricted area outside of the buoys.”

  Giving up the search at 0443, Ward released her crew from battle duty; many, including Outerbridge, went back to bed.

  The watch crew manning the antitorpedo net guarding the entrance to Pearl Harbor opened the gate to let Crossbill in at 0447. Since her sister ship Condor was then due in, the gate was left open, but after Condor entered at 0532, the watch crew saw that tug Keosanqua was scheduled to exit at 0615, and decided to leave the gate as it was. In the ensuing chaos, the one crinoline in use under Kimmel—the net keeping full-size submarines and enemy ships from firing torpedoes up the channel—would remain open from 0458 until 0840, giving Japan’s midget subs plenty of opportunity to sneak inside and search for prey.

  • • •

  In all of fifteen minutes, 183 planes of Genda’s first attack wave had launched (with six fails) and now, in the middle of the buzzing cloud of warplanes, at 9,800 feet, were the ten arrowheads of horizontal high-altitude bombers directly commandeered by Mitsuo Fuchida. To their left were Takahashi’s divers, at 11,000 feet; to the right, Murata’s torpedoes, at 9,200 feet; and above them all sped Itaya’s fighters, at 14,100 feet. The high-levels each carried only one bomb, a modified eight-hundred-kilogram, sixteen-inch shell from battleship Nagato. Fuchida was so pessimistic about their chances that he was hoping for a 20 percent hit rate. If the task force then came under American counterattack, the carrier crews would have to switch out the ordnance on all the high-level bombers to torpedoes, but if the US Fleet offered no resistance, they would instead convert torpedo planes to horizontal bombers and launch a third strike on Oahu.

  At 0725 the second attack wave—having been frantically raised to the decks by elevators and then lined up for the runway as quickly as the first wave departed from each of the ships—lifted off; 171 warplanes, with four fails. Zenji Abe: “As we flew, I thought many thoughts. If we could not find the carriers, our secondary targets would be cruisers. I wondered if the special midget submarines had arrived in the harbor. They were to wait until the air attack started. Could we ask a man to have patience like this? I worried that one of our bombs would be dropped by mistake on their back.”

  Watching the sun rise at the horizon so reminded Fuchida of his nation’s emblem that he could only crow, “Oh, glorious dawn for Japan! . . . After the clouds began gradually to brighten below us after the brilliant sun burst into the eastern sky, I opened the cockpit canopy and looked back at the large formation of planes. The wings glittered in the bright morning sunlight. . . . But flying over the clouds, we could not see the surface of the water and, consequently, had no check on our drift. I switched on the radio direction finder to tune in to the Honolulu radio station and soon picked up some light music. By turning the antenna, I found the exact direction from which the broadcast was coming and corrected our course. . . . In tuning the radio a little finer, I heard, along with the music, what seemed to be a weather report. . . . ‘Averaging partly cloudy, with clouds mostly over the mountains. Cloud base at thirty-five thousand feet. Visibility good. Wind north, ten knots.’ What a windfall for us! No matter how careful the planning, a more favorable situation could not have been imagined.”

  Fuchida now told his fellow pilots to home in on Honolulu’s KGMB, which meant that the same radio station paid to broadcast all night by the US Army Air Corps for their B-17s coming in from California was simultaneously serving as a homing beacon to bring Japanese squadrons to Pearl Harbor.

  • • •

  Supply ship Antares, towing a barge about a hundred yards to her rear, was waiting just outside Pearl Harbor for an escort pilot to bring her to berth when her skipper, Commander Lawrence Grannis, saw at 0630 “about fifteen hundred yards on starboard quarter” an odd-looking submarine “obviously having depth-control trouble and . . . trying to go down.” He notified Ward, where seaman H. E. Raenbig also saw this odd black object through his binoculars. To Raenbig the thing looked as if it were attached to the tow rope that Antares was using on her barge. He brought it up with helmsman Goepner, who thought it looked like a buoy, but various others on watch became convinced it was the conning tower of a sub trying to position itself behind the barge with the oldest sub trick in the book: following an enemy’s boat into her own harbor to evade detection.

  When Goepner then noticed a navy patrol bomber circling in position overhead, he became convinced his men were right and again rang Outerbridge, then sleeping on a chart-room cot. Quickly throwing a kimono over his pajamas and returning to the deck, Outerbridge thought that, whatever this thing was, it was suspicious: “We didn’t have anything that looked like it in our navy, and they had never seen anything like it. . . . I was convinced it was a submarine. I was convinced it couldn’t be anything else. It must be a submarine and it wasn’t anything that we had, and we also had a message that any submarine operating in the restricted area not operating in the submarine areas and not escorted should be attacked. We had that message; so there was no doubt at all in my mind what to do.”

  At 0640 he again ordered general quarters; shells were broken out, guns loaded, and as Outerbridge called for “all engines ahead full,” the destroyer surged from five to twenty-five knots, running full bore. Overhead, that navy patrol bomber PBY’s pilot, Ensign William Tanner, dropped two smoke pots, marking the submarine’s location. Tanner, however, believing that the sub was an American in distress, was only trying to help. In what would be the first American shots of World War II, when Ward reached within fifty yards of the target, her crew began to fire. Boatswain’s Mate A. Art, the captain of Ward’s No. 1 gun, knew they were too close to use the sights, so he trie
d aiming as he did when he was out rifle hunting. At 0645 Art missed, his shell whistling high and hitting the water far behind the tower. Captain Russell Knapp, on the No. 3 gun housed on Ward’s galley roof, fired thirty seconds later, scoring a hit “at the waterline . . . the junction of the hull and conning tower.” The captain gave four whistle blasts, and Chief Torpedoman W. C. Maskzawilz unrolled four depth charges—bombs inside oil cans with various methods of detonation—off Ward’s stern. Ward sailor Russell Reetz: “Suddenly, it rose out of the water, and I could see it was a sub. I saw not just the periscope but the whole conning tower. And then number three gun fired, and I saw the splash of the water at the waterline of the conning tower as the shell hit. There were 250 pounds of TNT in each depth charge. So that would be 1,000 pounds of TNT exploding. It was so close to the submarine that I’m almost sure there was enough damage to sink it.” Maskzawilz was pleased to report that the enemy sub “seemed to wade right into the first” of four exploding geysers of foam. Rear Admiral T. B. Inglis: “As a result of these attacks, the submarine is believed to have gone down in twelve hundred feet of water. A large amount of oil came to the surface.”

  Ensign William Tanner, overhead in the PBY, now understood what was happening and followed his orders to “depth bomb and sink any submarines found in the defensive sea area without authority.” He reported the strike to Kaneohe Naval Air Station. His report reached Commander Knefler McGinnis, in charge of PatWing (Patrol Wing) 1 at Kaneohe, who decided Tanner had to be wrong.