by Craig Nelson
On Sunday morning, Mary Ann woke to a ringing phone. Her father answered and in a shocked voice asked, “Are you sure?” Mary Ann Ramsey: “Within a few minutes, I caught just a glimpse of Dad, dressed in an aloha shirt and slacks, rushing past my bedroom door. He was gone from our carport before I could reach my parents’ room, where I found Mother sitting up in bed, confused. Incredulous, she told me a submarine had been sunk just outside the harbor net, and before she had finished speaking, the first bomb fell. We looked at each other in disbelief.”
Lieutenant Commander Logan Ramsey: “Approximately five or ten minutes after I reached the Command Center, I saw, together with the staff duty officer, a single plane making a dive on Ford Island. The single plane appeared at the time to both the staff duty officer and myself in the light of a young aviator ‘flathatting’ [flying low in a reckless manner], and we both tried to get his number to make a report of the violation of flight rules. He completed his dive, pulled up and away. We were commenting together on the fact that it was going to be difficult to find out who the pilot was when the delayed-action bomb which he had dropped, and which we had not seen drop, detonated, and I told the staff duty officer, ‘Never mind; it’s a Jap.’
“I dashed across the hall into the radio room, ordered a broadcast in plain English on all frequencies, ‘Air Raid, Pearl Harbor. This is No Drill.’ ” Sent out under the name of his commander at Patrol Wing 2, Rear Admiral Patrick Bellinger, some of Ramsey’s radiogram versions were famously printed as “This is Not Drill,” perhaps from a transcription or Morse code error.
The Zuber family was making pork roast for Sunday lunch when Joan saw a rising column of smoke outside. She told her mother, “Look out the window! Please look out the window!” Adolph ordered his wife and daughters to get to the shelter as quickly as they could. As Alice in her nightgown ran down the street with Joan and Peggy in their bathrobes, a Japanese airman fired his machine guns at them. “They’re strafing us!” Alice screamed, and tried using her arms to shield her daughters. A man gestured to the loading dock by the bachelor officers’ quarters and yelled at them to get inside. They hid under tables and behind the kitchen sink. A huge blast shook the whole building. Alice began to pray silently, Dear God, please let my children die instead of being maimed. Then she told her frightened daughters, “Don’t cry. Marines don’t cry. Don’t ruin the morale of the men.” Finally, a man herded them into a truck and drove them to the safety of the dungeon cave.
Military families in the Pacific were well aware of the Imperial Japanese Army’s reputation for raping and murdering women and children. Before medical officer Lieutenant Commander Cecil Riggs sent his wife and German shepherd, Chief, to the cave, he gave her a pistol and said that, faced with any Japanese soldiers, she needed to shoot the dog first and then herself. One military wife told the marine guarding the dungeon that he needed to save some bullets so that “when I am sure my children are dead, then you will shoot me.”
Twelve-year-old Thompson Izawa had biked with his dad that morning to Pearl Harbor where the two were fishing, using tiny shrimp as bait, right next to the USS Utah. “It sounded like the hum of bees swarming,” Thompson said. “Hundreds of airplanes were speeding toward us. They came over the Waianae Range like bees and all hell broke loose. At first, I thought they were making a movie. We saw a torpedo bomber come right overhead—with a long torpedo. I wish I had a machine gun—I could have shot some of those planes down—seriously! They were so low, especially the torpedo bombers. As my dad and I sat there, we heard a high-pitched whistle and then saw the torpedo that slid through the water and blew up the battleship Utah. Not one American gun fired back.
“My dad grabbed me by my earlobe. ‘Get home, boy. We are in big trouble—those are Japanese airplanes!’ I wanted to stay and see the action, but my father took off pedaling for home.”
“When I looked up in the sky, I saw five or six planes starting their descent,” Utah Pharmacist’s Mate 2nd Class Lee Soucy remembered. “Then when the first bombs dropped on the hangars at Ford Island, I thought, ‘Those guys are missing us by a mile.’ It occurred to me and to most of the others that someone had really goofed this time and put live bombs on those planes by mistake. In any event, even after I saw a huge fireball and cloud of black smoke rise from the hangars on Ford Island and heard explosions, it did not occur to me that these were enemy planes. It was too incredible! Simply beyond imagination! ‘What a snafu,’ I moaned.”
The torpedoes were carried naked below the plane’s fuselage. Their clamps released, they crashed into the water and began to run, their wooden fins jerking away and left behind, the froth of their wakes visible to those about to die. As some ships exploded from torpedoes below, others were set ablaze by machine-gun fire from above, the bullets’ trails bursts of color from arcing tracers.
“The torpedo bombers released their torpedoes, which splashed into the water,” Zero pilot Yoshio Shiga wrote. “The bombers were like dragonflies skimming over the surface of the water. When I saw all this, I knew the attack was going to be successful.” The blurred white splashes of torpedoes hitting the bay, followed by the flurried wakes of their runs, soon filled Pearl Harbor. “It was lovely,” pilot Tatsuya Otawa said. “We were about to change an island of dreams into a living hell.”
Squadron leader Lieutenant Heita Matsumura had specifically ordered the men of his torpedo squadron not to waste their ordnance on the old battleship Utah, which was sitting in a berth usually taken by an aircraft carrier. Utah had been pulled from service and was now used for target practice, her decks shielded in timber to deflect Betty Crocker practice bombs made of flour.
But excited young Japanese airmen on that morning ended up torpedoing everything in their path, perhaps mistaking Utah for a prize due to her location and to what looked like a teak deck. “The Enterprise was slated to tie up next to the Utah,” Northampton marine Ernest Phillips explained. “That’s why the Japanese threw twenty-seven torpedoes into the Utah. Their information said that the Enterprise would be tied right beside it. Apparently their information was pretty good, but it just wasn’t current enough.”
In a bare four minutes, Utah was listing forty degrees. The crew struggled to save her, and each other. They had nothing to fight back with since, as a radio-controlled target ship, Utah’s AA guns were covered in housing, and her machine guns were dismantled.
Can there be a more ignominious death for a sailor than to be bombed and torpedoed while in port? When you are supposed to defend, but instead are defenseless? Carl Johnson decided he could at least dog down the bilge manhole cover and was going to do that when the second strike threw him onto Utah’s deck. The crash broke sixteen of Johnson’s teeth, but he was in such shock that he felt nothing and continued heading toward the bilge. A voice over his head asked, “Where you going?” When Johnson tried to explain about the bilges, the man above said, “Don’t go down there. You will be killed!” This snapped Johnson out of his shock and saved his life.
Mess Attendant 2nd Class Clark Simmons: “Things were breaking loose. Furniture was sliding around. We heard the bugler blow the call for ‘Abandon ship.’ The ship was beginning to list when I was in the captain’s cabin with two officers. We felt the ship lifting and beginning to roll over. We had picked up life jackets, but we didn’t put them on. So, we could squeeze through a porthole about eighteen inches in diameter and jump into the water.
“We all were frightened. We didn’t know what was going on, but we knew the ship was taking water and there was no way to close the watertight doors. And we knew it was just a matter of time before the ship was going to sink.
“In eight minutes [at 0812] the ship was history. She had turned turtle in eight minutes.
“We began to swim toward Ford Island. They were machine-gunning us from two directions. I saw fellows yelling and screaming. I really didn’t know what was going on. I got hit in the head, a shoulder, and a leg. But I got to shore, and a navy medical corpsman gave m
e first aid. Every year, December seventh feels like my birthday. I feel like I was reborn on that day, because it was such a miracle I wasn’t killed.”
Lee Soucy: “After a minute or two below the armored deck, we heard another bugle call, then the bosun’s whistle followed by the boatswain’s chant, ‘Abandon ship. . . . Abandon ship.’ We scampered up the ladder. As I raced toward the open side of the deck, an officer stood by a stack of life preservers and tossed the jackets at us as we ran by. When I reached the open deck, the ship was listing precipitously. I thought about the huge amount of ammunition we had on board and that it would surely blow up soon. I wanted to get away from the ship fast, so I discarded my life jacket. I didn’t want a Mae West slowing me down.
“I was tensely poised for a running dive off the partially exposed hull when the ship lunged again and threw me off-balance. I ended up with my bottom sliding across and down the barnacle-encrusted bottom of the ship. After I bobbed up to the surface of the water to get my bearings, I spotted a motor launch with a coxswain fishing men out of the water with his boat hook. I started to swim toward the launch. After a few strokes, a hail of bullets hit the water a few feet in front of me in line with the launch. As the strafer banked, I noticed the big red insignias on his wingtips. Until then, I really had not known who attacked us. At some point, I had heard someone shout, ‘Where did those Germans come from?’ I quickly decided that a boat full of men would be a more likely strafing target than a lone swimmer, so I changed course and hightailed it for Ford Island.
“I reached the beach exhausted, and as I tried to catch my breath, another pharmacist’s mate, Gordon Sumner, from the Utah, stumbled out of the water. I remember how elated I was to see him. There is no doubt in my mind that bewilderment, if not misery, loves company.”
Though he knew the ship was capsizing, Chief Watertender Peter Tomich, a Slavic immigrant, stayed below, making sure the boilers were secure and that all of his crew had evacuated. Finally, it was Tomich’s turn to leave. It was too late. He was trapped. Peter Tomich was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor and joined at least fifty-three other men, either trapped in the overturn like Tomich or strafed by Japanese machine guns, who died on Utah.
• • •
Having gone to bed at eleven the night before, General Walter Short and his wife were eating breakfast and reading the Sunday newspaper that morning with nothing more on the calendar that day than the general’s twice-a-month golf game with Admiral Husband Kimmel. Hearing the roar of propeller planes and rocketing explosions—the sound of torpedo strikes against Utah and Helena—Short strolled to his back porch for a look. He then ran as fast as possible to his office. Even so, he couldn’t see the explosions, only the rising pillars of smoke. One of the first men he found on the base was intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel George Bicknell. Short asked, “What’s going on out there?”
“I’m not sure, General,” Bicknell said, “but I just saw two battleships sunk.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Short erupted.
At about 0803, after chief of staff Colonel Walter Phillips told Short “that it was the real thing,” Short “immediately told him to put into effect Alert No. 3. That’s all the order we needed. And by 8:10 that had been given.” His troops were now to switch from defending against saboteurs to defending against an armed invasion. His Alert No. 1 had been so directed at the enemy from within that it handicapped his army in fighting the enemy from without. Alert No. 3 also meant that Short and his command staff evacuated to the army’s underground post at Aliamanu Crater.
Axis spy Takeo Yoshikawa was having breakfast when the first bombs fell. He and Kita rushed to the consulate to destroy their codebooks and classified documents. The spy remembered smoke “pouring out of the chimney.”
A mere five hundred yards away from Robert Littmann’s Oglala, Third Torpedo Attack Unit commander Lieutenant Takashi Nagai released a torpedo. Oglala’s crew watched its wake as the missile charged straight at them. Then, as they all expected to die, nothing happened. The torpedo had plummeted under Oglala’s fifteen-and-a-half-foot draft to hit her moored neighbor, Helena. Helena exploded on her starboard in a blast so strong it blew out some of Oglala’s plates. Nagai rose over the two ships’ superstructures so his rear gunner could strafe the decks with his machine gun. “The plane’s canopy was open, and the pilot was hanging his head over the side to look at us,” Oglala’s Robert Hudson said. “On his approach, we saw red flashes from his wings. I thought that it was a drill and that the flashes were from a camera taking pictures of the harbor. When the bullets started ricocheting off the bulkhead around us, I knew the plane was not there to take our picture. Looking out from the steel sheets after the plane had passed, I saw a man dressed only in tennis shorts come running down the dock, yelling for volunteers to man a destroyer. He had a tennis racket in his hand, so I assumed he was a junior officer. It was truly a nightmare to see shipmates from both the Oglala and Helena, in anger and frustration, throwing potatoes and wrenches at low-flying planes.” One master sergeant was seen following the Zeros on his bicycle, shooting at them with a pistol.
Robert Littmann had thrown on his uniform and raced to his ship. On the same road to Pearl Harbor, Arizona’s Ensign Malcolm was driving hell for leather with Captain D. C. Emerson. When the speedometer hit eighty, the captain calmly said, “Slow down, kid; let’s wait’ll we get to Pearl to be killed.”
By the time Littmann reached her, Oglala was already capsized, dead in the water, but at least none of her men were lost. His wife and daughter watched the horror from their living-room window. Thirteen-year-old Peggy Littmann would forever remember the bodies flying. They reminded Helena’s Ensign David King of the circus, when cannons shot clowns through the air. This time was different, he thought; no one would land, happily, in a safety net.
Even after taking a torpedo hit and losing all of her power, the first American ship to fire back against the Japanese was Helena. Belowdecks, Warren Thompson found himself in shock and flailing about in the pitch black. Suddenly a light came straight at him; it was three men, with their hair on fire. The emergency bought Thompson back to the present, and he quickly found a blanket and used it to smother their flames.
By 0755, the .30- and .50-caliber machine guns of USS Tautog and Hulbert, moored at the island’s submarine base, were firing even though Tautog, having just returned from a forty-five-day patrol, had only a quarter of her crew aboard. Within three minutes, an aircraft estimated to be 150 feet to the stern of Tautog exploded in flames, and later in the attack the subs’ guns brought down at least one more enemy plane.
USS Breese’s Horace Warden: “The plane we had shot down landed right near us in the water. The pilot was still alive, so they got a whaleboat to go rescue him. Apparently he made a move, put his hand under his vest or something, and so they killed him and then didn’t have a live pilot to question. The sailor who shot him was told that he was going to get court-martialed. But later that all was quashed and there was no court-martial.”
Oiler Ramapo was in the middle of ferrying brand-new PT boats to the Philippines. Ensign Niles Ball gave orders to fight back by running the air compressors, firing up the power of their .50-caliber machine-gun turrets. PT-26, sitting on the dock waiting to be raised aloft onto the tanker, was empty on gas for her compressors. So that crew yanked off the hoses, and one man pushed the turret while another triggered the guns. One of the grand old men of the navy, Commander Duncan Curry, stood on the Ramapo bridge, firing away at enemy planes with a .45, sobbing uncontrollably.
A Japanese high-altitude bomb fell to the south end of Ford Island, missing its target, the concussion making Lieutenant (jg) Howell M. Forgy, chaplain of heavy cruiser New Orleans, imagine a tug was nudging his ship. New Orleans was having her engine fixed, and Forgy, a hearty six-foot-two athlete from Philadelphia, was still in his bunk, contemplating the sermon he was to deliver at church that morning. Next Forgy heard something that sounded like a kid “run
ning a stick along one of those white picket fences back home.” This was followed by the shriek of the bosun’s pipe and the uproarious clang of the ship’s general alarm. The chaplain “wondered why the officer of the deck could never get it through his head the fact that the general alarm was not to be tested on Sundays,” and when he next heard, “All hands to battle stations! All hands to battle stations! This is no drill! This is no drill,” he thought it “must be some admiral’s clever idea of how to make an off-hour general quarters drill for the fleet realistic.”
Edward Sowman explained that both New Orleans “and her sister ship the USS San Francisco were tied up across the dock from each other in the navy shipyard when the Japanese made their first attack. Both cruisers were undergoing machinery repairs and were taking all utilities from the dock, which included water, air, electricity, etc. Our antiaircraft battery had begun firing immediately after being manned, but suddenly all power from the dock was cut off and the gunners had to go to local control. This meant they would aim and fire from the mount itself without any additional assistance. At the same time it meant that the ammunition hoist would not operate, and on-deck ammunition was in limited supply.” Between a gunner’s mate shouting, “Get those goddamn lines down the hatch to the magazine!”—and Lieutenant Edwin Woodhead ordering the men, “Get over by that ammunition hoist, grab those five-inch shells [each weighed just under a hundred pounds], and get them to the guns!”—the cruiser’s men formed into ammo trains to hoist shells from their magazine storage belowdecks through their handling quarters to their batteries above. While one faction of gunners raised and lowered the guns with hand cranks to follow a target, another loaded, fired, and cleared them by hand, both groups having to dodge strafer fire and shrapnel.
Chaplain Forgy’s battle station was sick bay, which meant he had to force his way down the ladders against a tide of marines rushing up to the deck to their eight .50-caliber machine guns and their nine eight-inch and eight five-inch antiaircraft batteries. He saw a “tiny Filipino messboy, who weighed little more than a shell, hoist it to his shoulder, stagger a few steps, and grunt as he started the long, tortuous trip up two flights of ladders to the quarterdeck.” Forgy wanted to help defend the ship, but as he explained, “A chaplain cannot fire a gun or take material part in a battle,” so the man of God would instead become an epochal figure in Pearl Harbor history. Lieutenant Woodhead: “I heard a voice behind me saying, ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.’ I turned and saw Chaplain Forgy walking toward me along the line of men. He was patting the men on the back and making that remark to cheer them and keep them going. I know it helped me a lot, too.” In 1942, this memory would inspire Frank Loesser to write “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” one of the great anthems that inspired Americans to win the war.
