by Craig Nelson
USS Argonne crewman Charles Christensen: “I was in my Skivvies—that’s sailor slang for underwear—and putting on my white uniform. Next to my bunk was a small suitcase that I kept my roller skates in. Friends had introduced me to a young Japanese woman the night before. She said she liked roller-skating, so we made a date to go skating. I was supposed to meet her at nine Sunday morning. An explosion slightly shook the ship and I thought, ‘Oh! That was a bad explosion!’ I wondered what had happened. And I opened my porthole and stuck my head out. And, oh, boy, was there ever a fire on Ford Island! I thought, ‘Wow! I’d better go take a look.’ . . .
“Shrapnel was just bouncing all over. . . . I tried to pick up a piece. It was still hot! I dropped it. The only time I got scared was when a high-altitude bomber came over and dropped a bomb. When you look up, you don’t know that the bomb is traveling the same speed as the plane, and you think it’s coming straight down. And I thought my time had come, right then. But where are you going to run? You just have to stand there and watch it. And it misses.
“I just couldn’t believe all of this was happening in this short length of time. With all of these planes coming in, it looked like bees coming back to the hive. There were so many of them in there at one time it was amazing that they didn’t collide.”
In all the horror, there were some remarkable moments. “We had a first-class electrician’s mate on the Worden named Charles Ross, from Baltimore,” John Beasley said. “While in East Asia, Charley had been living with a Japanese girl he called Peachy. Peachy had a brother in the Japanese naval air force. During the Pearl attack, whenever a Japanese plane would come very close, Charley would point at it and say, ‘Don’t shoot that one down—he might be my brother-in-law!’ ”
One example of Kimmel’s command failure in the face of the November 27 war warning was that on nearly every ship in the harbor, only one boiler was kept lit, which meant a strike in the right compartment would destroy electrical power and, in turn, firepower. The thousands of man-hours of drilling at sea, with war games and task forces and gunnery and zigzag and the insistence of the navy for bigger guns and bigger battleships—all of that, in this moment, meant nothing. The most helpless of Pearl Harbor’s ships were those in dry dock. Not only could they not move, but various of their power systems were shut down, meaning nearly the whole of their defenses were out of commission.
In Dry Dock One lay flagship Pennsylvania and two destroyers, Cassin and Downes. Downes took three bombs to the aft; Cassin, two to her stern and two at her superstructure; and Pennsylvania’s hull was collateral-damaged by one of the hits on Cassin. Then at 0906, a bomb crashed through Pennsylvania’s deck, killing twenty-eight men. Medical Corpsman Hank Lachenmayer: “The events about to be related here are still somewhat vague. Perhaps due to the fact that one could and would not imagine them in one’s most horrid and imaginative nightmares.
“We, the band on the Pennsylvania, proceeded to the quarterdeck in preparation for morning colors. At exactly three minutes of eight, looking over toward the naval air station on Ford Island, we could see a group of planes proceeding gently from a high altitude and then leveling off about 150 feet from the ground.
“A plane that looked half like a Stuka and half like one of our own dive-bombers was just leveling off, and I could see the bombs dropping out of its bottom. It was a silver-gray plane with a reddish gold ball or sun painted on its side. I still don’t know how I got my instrument in my case and back to the shelf in the band room, but I must have made Superman’s speed look amateurish. By this time all hands were manning their battle stations, and I proceeded towards mine, stopping on the way to get my gas mask.
“A fire had broken out on the second deck and had to be attended to with haste. The fire was precipitated by the bursting of a five-hundred-pound bomb in the casemate [a warship’s armored chamber for guns] and the main deck. The havoc created by this one bomb hit can never be exaggerated. The one bomb hit pierced the boat deck abreast of No. 7 AA gun and tore through the No. 9 casemate and down to the main deck. All this area exploded with vigor. The marine division suffered the severest losses. First Lieutenant Craig, standing near the three-inch gun, had both legs blown off and received other injuries; he died almost on the spot. Dr. Rall, a lieutenant junior grade, and a pharmacist’s mate were mangled and killed instantly.
“I wandered around the dressing station, my eyes not believing what they saw. I gave a drink here and loosened an article of clothing there; there was not much else I could do. Many were badly burned and screamed for relief of pain; they had already received drug injections, and a glass of water to the lips was in many cases the only human assistance possible. Later in the day I assisted in taking the dead off the ship and in bringing on board many rounds of ammunition.”
There was no water pressure to fight the fires that erupted everywhere, but Pennsylvania quickly got her foremast AA machine guns blasting. She was also helped in defense by yard worker George Walters, a crane operator working fifty feet in the air over the dry dock when the Japanese arrived. The dreadnought’s enormous guns were designed to shoot at enemy ships over the horizon line, not fast-moving aircraft over a sailor’s head. The best defense would be other planes but in the wake of the attack, few of these remained. Instead, George Walters marshaled his beast to block low-flying planes while American gunners followed his movements to target against an enemy they couldn’t actually see. A record player in one of the ship’s repair shops was left on to play over and over, during this early-morning nightmare, the rousing melody of Glenn Miller’s “Sunrise Serenade.”
Shaw was having just as much trouble in her floating dry dock to the west. A bad hit around 0912 started a massive fire, which spread toward the forward magazine. In fifteen minutes, it made contact, unleashing a tremendous explosion with a huge ball of fire ballooning into the air. Bits of flaming material arched and snaked across the sky, trailing white streamers of smoke.
At that moment, Downes and Cassin both ordered their men to abandon ship, while in the Curtiss’s transmitter room, four radiomen stayed tethered to their battle phones and transmitters, hearing the nightmare outside, but knowing little of what was happening. Suddenly a hole appeared right in front of James Raines. It was so confusing. Then he realized that the crewman sitting behind him, Benny Schlock, was dead, while Dean Orwick was seriously injured. R. E. Jones came over, and while the two were trying to help Orwick out the door, Jones asked, “My foot’s gone, isn’t it?” Raines nodded, but he assured the man that everything was going to be okay. Later, Raines found out Orwick died, and that his own back had been broken in the explosion.
An officer phoned Admiral Husband Kimmel at home with the news that Japanese planes were attacking his fleet. The admiral was still buttoning his white uniform as he ran out of his house and onto the neighboring lawn of the district’s chief of staff, Captain John Earle, which had a panoramic view of Battleship Row. Mrs. Earle said later that Kimmel stood “in utter disbelief and completely stunned,” his face “as white as the uniform he wore.”
“The sky was full of the enemy,” Kimmel said later. He saw the Arizona “lift out of the water, then sink back down—way down.”
Mrs. Earle saw a battleship capsize and said, “Looks like they’ve got the Oklahoma.”
“Yes, I can see they have,” the admiral numbly responded.
Arriving at his base, Kimmel radioed the Pacific Fleet and CNO Stark that “hostilities with Japan commenced with air raid on Pearl Harbor,” and at 0817, he ordered Patrol Wing 2 to “locate enemy force.” One officer remembered, “I ran over to my offices and I happened to be standing alongside the commander in chief himself, Admiral Kimmel. We were glumly watching the havoc, the carnage that was going on. And suddenly he reached up and tore off his four-star shoulder boards, which indicated his rank and title as commander in chief, Pacific Fleet. He stepped into his adjacent offices and, realizing he was going to lose command, donned two-star rear-admiral shoulder b
oards.”
According to other accounts, at this moment an errant bullet ricocheted against Husband Kimmel’s chest and fell to the floor. He picked it up and said, “I wish it had killed me.”
As vast as Pearl Harbor and her sister military installations then were, in many ways the US Navy was a small town. Sailors might spend an entire thirty-year career aboard one ship; officers would meet as young men at Annapolis, then work together for decades. All were bonded by that special tick of the heart that marks a life of duty. After seeing thousands of his men perish, so many of whom he knew personally, when Admiral Husband Kimmel said he wished that he, too, had died, it couldn’t have been more heartfelt.
Twelve days before, Admiral Kimmel had asked naval war plans officer Rear Admiral Charles McMorris, “What do you think about the prospects of a Japanese air attack?” McMorris had categorically replied, “None, absolutely none.” Now, running into intelligence officer Edwin Layton in the office halls—Layton having been one of the few naval officers in Hawaii who insisted they needed to prepare for just such an attack—McMorris whined, “If it’s any satisfaction to you, you were right and we were wrong.”
• • •
West Virginia’s Ensign Roland Brooks thought he saw an explosion aboard California and set off the alarm for Away Fire and Rescue Party, sending hundreds of men running to the decks. Though Brooks had made a mistake—it wasn’t California but a Ford Island hangar—his mistake saved hundreds of lives, since now arriving overhead were Hiryu torpedo planes led by Lieutenant Heita Matsumura, with their primary targets the American aircraft carriers anchored to the west of Ford Island. Since the flattops, as reported by Yoshikawa, were missing, the squadron instead attacked its secondaries. Pilot Takeshi Maeda: “We saw the water channel and we turned left. And right in front of us was Battleship Row. We aimed at the battleship. Our original order was to hit a California-class battleship, but at the time we didn’t know we hit the West Virginia.”
Marine bugler Richard Fiske had just finished playing for West Virginia’s raising of colors. He and his best friends from high school, Charles Jones and William Finley, had joined the marines together; Finley and Jones were assigned to Arizona, barely a hundred yards away. When the first planes appeared, Fiske was thinking about the girl he was going on a date with later that day in Honolulu. Guessing they were army pilots from Wheeler, Fiske told his friend Stanley Bukowski, “I guess we’re going to have an exercise. We’d better get to our battle stations.” “No, wait,” Bukowski said. “They’re going to drop some dummy torpedoes. Let’s go over to the port side and see them.”
“I saw two objects fall from their craft making a tremendous splash,” Fireman 3rd Class Ed Carstens remembered. “Suddenly I spotted two wakes heading for the ship and surmised they were torpedoes. By the time I got the word torpedoes out of my mouth, they had hit and exploded. . . . I learned later that we had been hit with eight, plus two bomb hits.”
“After they dropped their torpedoes, they would have to climb to clear the superstructure of the battleship,” Fiske said. One flew so close with his canopy open that “we made eye contact, and I’ve dreamed about that son of a gun for more than fifty years.”
Joseph Paul: “I was sleeping in the plotting room. That is the control center for all gunfire systems, especially the main battery of sixteen-inch guns. I was shaken by a tremendous explosion followed by six or more in close succession. The ship began to list badly. I tried to make my way up to topside. I heard water coming in huge amounts above me and the ship began tilting worse and worse. I tried to get back to the plotting room where my friends were, figuring out that I was not going to get out this way. As the water continued to rise, someone at the watertight door yelled, ‘Anyone else?’ I yelled right back, ‘Wait for me!’ He said, ‘Hurry, I have to close the door!’ . . . He managed to help me get through and close the door just in time. We’re now in a sealed compartment with no air or lights. . . . We went into the control center, which was in the next compartment, and climbed up a ladder inside an escape tube that emptied into the conning tower on the bridge. I thought how lucky I was and how smart the designers of the ship were to install such an escape tube.”
In West Virginia’s conning tower, Ensign Victor Delano was looking for someone to help him fight back with two .50-caliber Browning machine guns. He came across a man with no gunnery experience, Mess Attendant Doris Miller. A fullback on the Moore High School football team in his hometown of Waco, Texas—his friends called him Dorie—Miller worked on his dad’s twenty-eight acres of sharecropper before signing up in 1939 at the age of nineteen. The kitchen was the only part of the US Navy where an African-American was allowed to serve, but Miller liked it better than farming in Texas. He was stationed to the West Virginia—known by her crew as WeeVee—in 1940 and became WeeVee’s heavyweight boxing champion, as well as spending a month at Secondary Battery Gunnery School. He was gathering laundry when general quarters struck and ran to his battle station—the midship AA battery—to find it destroyed by torpedoes. Doris Miller’s courage would in time make him a civil rights hero.
Victor Delano thought the right thing to do at that moment was for Miller to pass him the ammo, and he would shoot the guns. Doris Miller thought the right thing to do was for each of them to take a gun and let the Japs have it. Doris Miller: “It wasn’t hard. I just pulled the trigger and she worked fine. I had watched the others with these guns. I guess I fired her for about fifteen minutes. I think I got one of those Jap planes. They were diving pretty close to us.” Delano later said that this was the only time he’d seen Miller smile since the day he’d won a boxing match.
Lieutenant Claude V. Ricketts: “The captain had a serious abdominal wound, a large piece of metal or other similar object apparently having passed through his abdomen. Leak, chief pharmacist’s mate, arrived with a first-aid kit and dressed the wound as best he could. We put the captain on a cot and moved him under shelter just aft of the conning tower. He remained here during the second air attack. We had no stretcher but we obtained a wooden ladder about eight feet long and put the captain on it and lashed him to it and tied a line on each corner intending to lower him over the port or starboard side of the conning tower down to the boat deck. By that time however a serious oil fire had started, apparently in the galley, and heavy black smoke poured up over the bridge and boat deck forward. The boat deck had to be evacuated, so we could not lower the captain there. Neither could we lower him aft of the bridge because it was covered with fire. By this time the fire had spread to the life-jacket stowage under the after part of the bridge, and flames were coming up through the bomb hole in the port side of the flag bridge deck.”
Nearly disemboweled and in great suffering, Captain Bennion ordered everyone to forget about him and save themselves. They succeeded in getting him to the safety of the bridge, but soon after, he died.
Marine bugler Richard Fiske had joined the rescuers, pouring buckets of sand on men who were on fire. The next day, he would have to play taps for his captain’s burial.
Signalman Gene Merrill: “I volunteered to join the ten-hand rescue party to go below and rescue those wounded by the torpedoes. I have no idea how many we rescued. With no instructions, each of us used his own discretion. My modus operandi was to quickly examine the body for signs of life. If none was apparent, I moved on to the next one. However, questionable cases I rescued. . . . I stayed below until the flooding salt water and oil forced me to evacuate. When I emerged to the topside, the battle was over. The ship was sitting on the bottom with the port listed as burning. . . . The motor launch took us across the channel to the submarine base, where we boarded a flatbed truck that took us to the receiving-station barracks. I went into one of the buildings that seemed to be overrun with women wearing Red Cross armbands. I was naked as a newborn chicken, covered with oil, and practically surrounded by these women. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve been greatly embarrassed, but in this situation, not at all. None of th
ese ‘angels of mercy’ seemed to pay me any attention. Under normal circumstances, I might’ve been insulted.”
Lieutenant Commander T. T. Beattie, West Virginia’s navigator: “Just then the USS Arizona’s forward magazines blew up with a tremendous explosion, and large sheets of flame shot skyward, and I began to wonder about our own magazines and whether they were being flooded. I got hold of a chief turret captain to check immediately on the magazines and to flood them if they were not flooded at this time. Large sheets of flame and several fires started aft. Burning fuel oil from the USS Arizona floated down on the stern of the ship [then] a large oil fire swept from the USS Arizona down the port side of the USS West Virginia. We had no water on board as the fire mains and machinery were out of commission, and we were unable to do any firefighting at all. I got into a motor launch to go to the stern of the ship to investigate the fire. The smoke was so heavy that I could not see aft of the bridge. As I got into the boat, a sheet of flame swept on top of us and we barely managed to get free of the fire. I realized then that the ship was lost.”
