by Craig Nelson
Some of the men swam down to investigate. Everyone knew that a number of portholes on the ship led to void space, which would be a trap. But when the air started running out, they had no other choice.
The hatch’s reversed hanging meant that one man had to hold the door open while another man swam through the fourteen-inch opening. It took seaman George Murphy three attempts to get out; Mortensen ended up pushing him through the port.
Finally, only two men remained behind in the dispensary: Mortensen and the portly John Austin. Mortensen: “John must have known he had no chance. He did not say a word but moved over the few feet necessary and just reached down and held the port. I looked at his face but cannot describe the look of anguish it contained. It is a look that has never left me.”
Swimming out, Mortensen could see the “golden brown glow above and I knew the surface was up there somewhere. It never occurred to me that the normal color should have been bluish.” The harbor water was now covered with three to four inches of burning oil. The ensign was again shocked when he reached the surface and saw the devastation, since the whole time below, all the men assumed the only ship struck was theirs.
As the swimmers were picked out of the water by a launch, Mortensen realized that he’d lost his pajama bottoms and hat and was now completely naked. A marine working the launch looked him over and thought for a minute. Then without saying a word, he took off his pants and his Skivvies, gave Mortensen his underwear, and put his pants back on.
“We continued pulling men out of the water,” Ensign Herb Rommel later reported. “It was difficult due to the oil making everyone slippery. Men with undershirts could be pulled into boats by grabbing the shoulder piece and sleeve on each side, while men who had stripped were very slippery. It is recommended that men be instructed not to remove undershirts when abandoning ship.”
Mortensen wouldn’t see his Oklahoma roommate until six months later, when he was working on the USS Mackinac in the Samoan harbor of Pago Pago. A motor launch puttered by. “I called out, ‘Morey,’ and he looked up at me and said, ‘I thought you were dead.’ ”
Back on Oklahoma, eleven men were still trapped in the lucky bag, the hold for duffels, overcoats, and other personal items. The only escape would be to swim while holding your breath down five stories and then across the main deck, to where you could rise up to the surface. Russell Davenport made it so far he could feel the main deck’s teak, but couldn’t make it all the way and had to give up and go back.
Boatswain’s Mate 1st Class Howard Aldrich said that, to save air, they needed to stay as quiet as possible, and anyone who could sleep should do that. A few more hours went by, and their one source of light, a lantern, died. Hours passed by in the pitch black. Did anyone even know they were there? Would they all suffocate to death?
Electrician’s Mate Irvin Thessman, at twenty-five, was the oldest of eight men trapped in the aft steering compartment and felt responsible for the other men. They had followed the zed closure protocol as ordered, but it didn’t make their compartment watertight, and the sea began leaking in through the ventilation lines. When they tried to tighten that fitting, it broke, so they stuffed rags into the inlet and covered it with a checkerboard to hold the rags in place.
As the hours passed, they heard tapping, coming from two directions. Using wrenches, hammers, or anything they could get to bang on Oklahoma’s hull or her plumbing, the men caught in the lucky bag and Radio Four were talking to each other in Morse code. One of the men in Radio was Seaman 1st Class James Bounds: “There’s no way you could get out because in our space there was one of those big spring-loaded hatches up above in the carpenters’ shop. So when they dropped that hatch, we were there, unless somebody opened from the topside. Sort of felt like a dark, cold, damp coffin. That’s the only way I can describe it. And it felt like it was sealed, and you were just ready to suffocate.”
The eight sailors trapped in aft steering voted on every decision that might mean life or death. They tried various doors to get out, but each time, a flood of water rushed in. They decided to wait it out, which led to much thinking about their lives. William Beal, age seventeen, couldn’t stop remembering all the mean things he’d done to other people.
Trapped right next to them in No. 4 turret’s handling room were thirty men who discovered their only exit was a hatch to the top deck. Getting out would mean holding your breath, pulling yourself thirty feet down to the hatch, swimming across the deck, and up to reach the water’s surface. Like Russell Davenport, some tried and failed and came back, defeated. But one succeeded—a Brooklyn boy named Weisman, remembered by his colleagues for his poor physique—who, reaching the surface, could show the cutting teams of rescuers where to drill. But no one below knew about this. Seaman Stephen Young bet his friend Wilber Hinsperger that their air would run out, and they would suffocate. Hinsperger insisted instead that they would drown.
No one bet they would live.
Outside, teams from Maryland, Widgeon, Rigel, Solace, the Navy Yard, and even Oklahoma herself tapped back encouraging words while trying to figure out as quickly as possible where to cut into the armored hull. The trapped men’s knocks, though, would echo, especially across the hollow of the keel, and every rescuer had a different opinion as to where it was coming from, and where they should drill.
It was a terrible education. They first tried burning through the hull plate with acetylene torches, but the flames ignited the caulking sealant. The first two men they found had been suffocated to death by the burning sealant’s fumes. When they switched to air hammers and drills, the holes they cut to free the trapped sailors also let out the remaining breathable air. The men might drown in the minutes before they could be rescued.
The huge problem in using torches was that they might ignite the great ship’s fuel tanks. Maryland’s Commander E. Kranzfelder: “I obtained a copy of the Oklahoma booklet of plans for use in connection with the cutting of holes in the Oklahoma’s hull. Lines were rigged from the bilge keel at intervals along the bottom; telephone communication was established with the Maryland; an air-supply line was quickly rigged from the Maryland to the Oklahoma. Since, with the exception of the reserve feed bottoms, practically the entire bottom of the Oklahoma consists of oil tanks, considerable care had to be exercised in cutting holes with an oxyacetylene torch in order not to open holes in the bottom which would permit the egress of oil with the attendant fire hazard.”
The trapped men felt the hull over their heads getting hotter and hotter. One insisted it was a form of Japanese torture, but in fact the heat was from the cutting torches of rescue workers. Garlen Eslick and his group were one of the first out: “I don’t know how long it took them, but it seemed like forever. They had three ends cut, and finally they took a sledgehammer and were beating that end towards us. Then they hoisted us up through the openings they had cut.”
James Bounds was now with Thessman’s group in the aft steering compartment: “I could see the light. Somebody reached down and got my arms and pulled me up. Then somebody was pushing me from below. They had to handle us up through these holes with lots of jagged edges.”
Stephen Young pounded out SOS with a dog wrench, until he heard a voice yelling through the bulkhead. Most of the captives had been trapped inside for twenty-eight hours; Russell Davenport remembered swallowing a gulp of water before he was brought up into the sun and air at noon on December 8. Coming out, they were given cigarettes, and oranges. Brought aboard hospital ship Solace, no one who had been entombed wanted to sleep belowdecks.
Nineteen-year-old Herbert Kennedy was saved, but remembered from that moment not freedom, but horror: “There were still bodies floating in water covered in oil, turning white from the salt water. A sight I never want to see again.” George Smith would make it his mission to meet every single one of the Oklahoma’s thirty-two survivors who were rescued on the eighth. Four hundred and twenty-nine did not survive. Their tombstones read UNKNOWN. DECEMBER 7, 1941.
When it appeared that the USS Raleigh would also capsize like Oklahoma, “orders were given for all men not at the guns to jettison all topside weights and to put both airplanes in the water first,” her commanding officer, R. E. Simons, reported. “Both planes were successfully hoisted out by hand power alone and were directed to taxi over to Ford Island and report for duty, along with all the aviation detail on board. The senior doctor was directed to report to the USS Solace, to aid in caring for the injured and wounded from other ships (we had no dead and only a few wounded on this ship). An oxyacetylene outfit and crew were sent over to the capsized USS Utah to cut out any men in the hull. One man was rescued, and this man, as soon as he took a deep breath, insisted on going back to see if he could rescue any of his shipmates.”
• • •
At 0817 on December 7, destroyer Helm plowed through the burning waters and the black smoke to reach the open sea. As she exited the channel, lookouts spotted an odd submarine that had run aground on a reef. The destroyer fired, missed, and the sub dove. At about 0828, men on the Perry spotted an unidentified craft “heading toward the Middle Loch and swinging toward the moorings of Medusa [and] Curtiss” but Perry was moored between Zane and the sub in such a way that Zane couldn’t fire her guns. Perry fired her four-inch cannon; the first shell missed, but the second appeared to strike the sub enough to sink it, and by then Medusa was also firing away. Monaghan’s Gun No. 2 joined in; one of her shells missed and ignited a fire on a derrick barge. Burford then charged toward the sub trying to ram it with “all engines ahead flank speed and full right rudder.” The submarine shot a torpedo at 0840 that breached into the air, heading at Monaghan, but missed, plowing into the bank and throwing up a two-hundred-foot geyser. As Burford passed over the sub, her chief, G. S. Hardon, dropped two cans of depth charges, which both exploded at 0844. It was decided that the enemy had been destroyed.
• • •
In Washington, Navy Secretary Frank Knox’s office received the “Air Raid, Pearl Harbor. This is No Drill” radiogram at around one thirty that afternoon. Knox immediately called the White House, first getting ahold of Harry Hopkins. Like so many officers in Hawaii who couldn’t believe their eyes and ears, Knox and Hopkins were at first certain it had to be wrong, that the attack must have been on Manila. But President Roosevelt’s immediate reaction was to yell, “No!” Secret Service agent Mike Reilly remembered seeing FDR just after he had gotten the news, thrusting forward in his wheelchair to the Oval Office, looking like a prizefighter: “His chin stuck out about two feet in front of his knees and he was the maddest Dutchman I—or anybody—ever saw.”
Before that moment, Hopkins remembered the president had “really thought” the Japanese were capable of doing anything, except something that might explicitly draw the United States into the war; that she would go after more territory in China, Thailand, French Indochina, or even the Soviet Union, but directly attacking the United States? After hearing about the cable, though, “the president thought the report was probably true and thought it was just the kind of unexpected thing the Japanese would do, and that at the very time they were discussing peace in the Pacific, they were plotting to overthrow it.”
Roosevelt called Cordell Hull at State, where, at that moment, Ambassadors Nomura and Kurusu were waiting to present Dispatch No. 907—the fourteen-point cable. Since Togo had ordered that only senior consular staff in Washington could know the details of the dispatch, and since none of those officials knew how to type, the two ambassadors had arrived at Hull’s office at 2:05, missing their 1:00 deadline. The president suggested the secretary make no mention of the attack, but only greet them “formally and coolly and bow them out,” just in case the air raid cable was wrong.
The ambassadors in fact had no idea that their country had launched its war against the world, but “coolly” was not the way of Cordell Hull. After ushering them in at 2:20, the secretary pretended to read the cable. Its fourteen points included that the United States had “resorted to every possible measure to assist the Chongqing regime so as to obstruct the establishment of a general peace between Japan and China,” had “attempted to frustrate Japan’s aspiration to the ideal of common prosperity in cooperation with these regions,” and “may be said to be scheming for the extension of the war” with American demands for Japan’s “wholesale evacuation of troops . . . [which] ignored the actual conditions of China and are calculated to destroy Japan’s position as the stabilizing factor of East Asia.” The Hull Note also ignored “Japan’s sacrifices in the four years of the China affair, menaces the Empire’s existence itself, and disparages its honor and prestige.” The fourteenth point concluded that the Japanese government “cannot but consider that it is impossible to reach an agreement through further negotiations.”
Though he’d already been informed of all of this hours before through MAGIC, Hull’s hands shook with rage at both Tokyo’s duplicity and at his own failures in reaching a diplomatic victory. He finished pretending to scan the pages and turning to the two unsuspecting emissaries, he announced: “I must say that in all my conversations with you, I have never uttered one word of untruth. This is borne out absolutely by the record. In all my fifty years of public service, I’ve never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions—infamous falsehoods and distortion on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them.”
Nomura and Kurusu bowed and left, speechless and confused; they were then surprised by a group of reporters waiting outside, peppering them with questions on a Sunday. As their embassy’s gates swung open and closed to let their car pass through, policemen formed a cordon to keep an angry and growing American mob from surging inside. Only then were the two admirals told how they had been used by their government. Admiral Yonai had in fact warned his fellow admiral Nomura of exactly this outcome when he’d first left for Washington, saying, “The gang around today are the kind who won’t hesitate to pull the ladder out from under you once they’ve got you to climb up it.” When a Japanese consular staff member told his wife the news of Japan’s attack on Oahu, he concluded, “Oh, it’s terrible! Why did they do such a terrible thing? Japan is doomed.”
Though Cordell Hull would be the first to call the Pearl Harbor attack treacherous, he later came to believe that Nomura and Kurusu’s delay in announcing the end of negotiations was due to “ineptitude” since, for over the next six decades, beginning at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal, Japan would present this incident as an honorable mishap, claiming that her government had tried to follow the terms of the 1907 Hague Convention and give notice before an attack—thirty minutes’ notice, but so be it—and sadly, the incompetence of the consular staff in Washington prevented this warning from arriving in time.
In fact, the Foreign Ministry had drafted a Final Memorandum on December 3 that had far more ominous language than the fourteenth point’s tepid conclusion of “impossible to reach an agreement through further negotiations.” That draft announced that “we are forced to terminate negotiations” and that Washington “would be held responsible for any and all the consequences that may arise in the future.” But during the December 4 liaison conference, the general staffs of the army and the navy rejected that language and insisted on the far milder conclusion that appeared in the radioed cable, language so vague that, of the dozen or so Americans allowed to read MAGIC, only Franklin Roosevelt and Rufus Bratton are recorded as having interpreted it as meaning war. The December 6 Imperial Japanese Army war diary admitted all this with the note: “Our deceptive diplomacy is steadily proceeding toward success.” Additionally, the same Major Morio Tomura of the Army General Staff Communications Section who had delayed Roosevelt’s cable to Hirohito for ten hours had also succeeded in delaying the final transmissions of the fourteen-part cable from Togo to Nomura. But Foreign Minister Togo was not without blame; he used the cable to Nomura to give a delayed notice, instead of directly speaki
ng with Joseph Grew.
• • •
After getting confirmation of the attack, the president called White House press secretary Steve Early at home. Roosevelt and Early had been working together for almost thirty years, and they began an Oval Office tradition of getting ahead of the news. At his home, Early jotted down FDR’s statement, then called the national wire services to brief them, before heading over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
At two thirty, James Roosevelt arrived to help his father in any way he could. He remembered the president’s aura of “extreme calmness—almost a sad, fatalistic, but courageous acceptance of something he had tried to avert but which he feared might be inevitable.” The man told his son simply, “It happened.” The first lady agreed with James, noting her husband’s “deadly calm. . . . I thought that in spite of his anxiety Franklin was way more serene than he had appeared in a long time. I think it was steadying to know finally that the die was cast. One could no longer do anything but face the fact that this country was in a war. . . . I remember when he was told he had polio, he seemed really relieved that he knew the worst that could happen to him.”
Claude Bloch in Hawaii was finally able to reach Harold Stark on the phone that afternoon, but was wary of discussing horrific details on a conversation that could be intercepted. But Stark insisted on knowing everything, so Bloch finished his report and then warned any eavesdroppers, “If any unauthorized person has heard the remarks that I have just made to the chief of naval operations, I beg of you not to repeat them in any way. I call on your patriotic duty as an American citizen.”
Just before leaving for the White House at 3:00 p.m., George Marshall cabled General Douglas MacArthur in Manila to warn, “Hostilities between Japan and the United States . . . have commenced. . . . Carry out tasks assigned in Rainbow Five.”
