Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  It took the arrival of an additional twenty-two thousand Japanese to force the battling bastards into the largest surrender in American history. As POWs, between seven thousand and ten thousand then perished on the sixty-five-mile forced death march to prison camps, another of Japan’s notorious war crimes. An American civilian in Luzon studying Filipino anthropology, a full-edged isolationist who played swing tunes on the accordion, got caught by the Japanese and set for execution. His last act was to play, on his accordion, “God Bless America.”

  December 25: Hong Kong surrendered to the Japanese, whose airmen sank Britain’s battleship Prince of Wales and cruiser Repulse. Churchill was flabbergasted: “In all the war I never received a more direct shock. As I turned and twisted in bed the full horror of the news sank in upon me. There were no British or American capital ships in the Indian Ocean or the Pacific except the American survivors of Pearl Harbor who were hastening back to California. Over this vast expanse of waters Japan was supreme and we everywhere were weak and naked.”

  December 28: Borneo surrendered, while off the coast of Java, the Japanese Navy engaged Dutch, British, and American sailors fighting in ancient craft left over from World War I.

  January 22: Mitsuo Fuchida led a squadron of ninety fighters and an equal number of bombers from Akagi, Kaga, Shokaku, and Zuikaku in an attack on Rabaul, the Australian air base on New Britain Island.

  January 31: The Malay Peninsula was now under Japanese control and the assault on Singapore began. Defended by eighty-eight thousand British, Australian, Indian, and Malay soldiers and volunteers, the city fell to the Japanese in two weeks. When Chinese and Indian civilians tried to resist the Imperial Japanese Army, they were immediately executed, their heads left as warnings along the streets. After the conquest, the people of Singapore and Malaya found swinging from their trees the corpses of tortured Englishmen, their mouths stuffed with their severed genitals.

  February 19: Fuchida and his squadron attacked the harbor of Darwin, Australia, destroying dozens of Allied planes and ships and so obliterating the town that it had to be abandoned.

  March 8: Rangoon fell to Japanese ground troops, along with Sulawesi, Bali, and Sumatra. The news from the Philippines was so relentlessly negative, meanwhile, that George Marshall became convinced the Japanese would capture MacArthur, one of America’s great World War I heroes, and parade him through the streets. On March 11, under orders from Washington, MacArthur, his wife, his son, and his officers were evacuated from Corregidor on PT-41, slipping through enemy lines to the Philippines’ southernmost island of Mindanao. As he passed his men, now known as “the battling bastards of Bataan,” “I could feel my face go white,” MacArthur remembered, “feel a sudden, convulsive twitch in the muscles of my face.” After his safe arrival in Alice Springs, Australia, Roosevelt awarded him the Medal of Honor.

  March 9: Java surrendered to the Japanese, who now controlled the entire Netherlands East Indies.

  April 3: Fifty thousand Japanese troops with 150 guns, howitzers, and mortars arrived at Bataan to face seventy-eight thousand starving Americans and Filipinos, three-quarters of them half-dead from malaria. At 1000, a rain of bombs and shells exploded against the Allied front lines. The jungle burst into flame, and the defenders ran pell-mell in retreat. Tanks and infantry, coming in from all directions, poured through. The Japanese commander originally estimated it would take a month to win the territory; instead, Bataan fell in six days.

  The Japanese force-marched their POWs, running out of water, food, and medicine, sixty-five miles through the jungle to prison camps at the peninsula’s base. Ten thousand died along the way, with thousands more subsequently perishing in the camps.

  April 5: Fuchida led an attack on the British port of Colombo, Ceylon, sinking the carrier Hermes, the destroyer Vampire, and two heavy cruisers, Dorsetshire and Cornwall.

  April 29: On his forty-first birthday, the news of one military success after the next was so rapid and so astounding that Hirohito told his closest adviser, “The fruits of victory are tumbling into our mouths too quickly.”

  • • •

  In a mere five months, the entire Pacific Ocean west of a line drawn from the Aleutian Islands to Hawaii and Australia had come under the control of Dai Nippon Teikoku. The Japanese Empire stretched six thousand miles from the home islands to Korea and down eastern China to Taiwan and Hong Kong, across today’s Vietnam to Burma, down Malaysia to Singapore, and then across all of Indonesia to most of New Guinea. What Tokyo named the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere spelled the end of Western control over Sarawak, Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Celebes, the Moluccas, western New Guinea, the Solomons, the Philippines, Malaya, Indochina, the Andamans, Guam, Wake, the Gilberts, and the Marshall Islands and included a vast amount of the world’s oil, rice, tin, and rubber. The bucktoothed, nearsighted race of American cartoons had unceasingly defeated England, Australia, and the United States in battle after battle. The tally: 15,000 killed and wounded Japanese; 320,000 killed, wounded, and captured Allied soldiers.

  Originally planned merely to protect Japan’s flank and very much a side show to the main event, her attack on Pearl Harbor was a signal moment in military history. Its victorious element, for the first time in that history, were planes launched from ships carrying explosives. Overnight, battle strategies would be changed forever.

  “What’s going to happen at war is a deep mystery until it happens,” Tennessee sailor Warren Law concluded. “To a degree we didn’t nearly think it was going to happen, we thought that the Japs would be chicken and would back out. That was kind of the general feeling of it, that they just weren’t up to it and they weren’t going to fight, and if they did, we had the misconception that they weren’t worth a hoot. We soon found out how wrong we were on that. They were very good fighters and very good navigators and extremely good tacticians.”

  When news of the success in Hawaii spread across Japan, the nation was exuberant. Politesse, so admired as a national trait, collapsed, as thrilled strangers on the streets spontaneously shook hands. At the great public square before the Imperial Palace, legions gathered to kowtow in thanks to the great leadership of the Emperor Showa, and longtime critics of the China War now wholly reversed course. “Until this very moment, we feared that Japan, hiding behind the beautiful slogan of ‘Building East Asia,’ was bullying the weak,” China scholar Takeuchi Yoshimi announced. Yoshimi said that he and his colleagues now realized that “our Japan was not afraid of the powerful after all. . . . Let us together fight this difficult war.” Poet Kotaro Takamura created a verse:

  Remember December eighth!

  On this day the history of the world was changed.

  The Anglo-Saxon powers

  On this day were driven back on East Asian land and sea.

  It was their Japan that drove them back,

  A tiny country in the Eastern Sea,

  Nippon, the Land of the Gods

  Ruled over by a living God.

  Not everyone was ebullient. Yamamoto’s chief of staff, Rear Admiral Ugaki, wrote in his diary, “It is almost certain that the US, after reorganizing their forces, will come against us in retaliation. . . . Tokyo should be protected from air raids; this is the most important thing to be borne in mind.” Then at a celebratory banquet, Yamamoto presented Fuchida with a ceremonial scroll—a kakemono—written in the admiral’s distinctive calligraphy: “Message of ‘ATTACK!’ reaches my ears from more than three thousand miles away—a message from Hawaii. Thinking of Flight Leader Fuchida’s brilliant action on the early morning of 8 December, so writes Yamamoto Isoroku.” Yet, the most famous reaction of the reluctant admiral to news of his profound victory in Hawaii was “We have awakened a sleeping giant and instilled in him a terrible resolve.”I

  * * *

  I. Much cited, this quote is now in dispute by historians who favor instead a phrase from a letter cited in Agawa by Yamamoto to Taketora Ogata on January 9, 1942: “A military man can scarcely pride himself on
having ‘smitten a sleeping enemy’; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten. I would rather you made your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  * * *

  RESURRECTION

  On the night of December 7, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Army Chief of Staff George Marshall ordered an investigative team headed by Colonel Charles Bundy and Major General Herbert Dargue—with Dargue having been named to replace Short—to fly to Hawaii. But in bad weather over the Sierras, Bundy and Dargue’s plane crashed, and they were killed. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had decided independently that he himself must go to Oahu to see, firsthand, how such a tragedy could have occurred, and what needed now to be done; Knox’s visit would become the first of eight federal investigations of Pearl Harbor.

  Departing Anacostia Naval Air Station outside Washington on December 8 and arriving at Kaneohe on the eleventh, Knox was immediately given a tour by commander “Beauty” Martin, who said his officers and men were “trying to salvage something.” Knox next met with Kimmel at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki; the admiral had offered quarters for the civilian secretary but Knox declined, explaining that due to the “investigative nature of his visit . . . he would not be the guest of any senior officer on Oahu.”

  Knox and his team from Washington were horrified by the incalculable human suffering on their tour of the harbor—the corpses still being pulled from the water, the survivors at Ford Island’s naval hospital “so terribly burned and charred as to be beyond recognition”—and noticed the Hawaiian commanders having many conversations “carried on in whispers” with “much glancing around lest their words be overheard.”

  Kimmel and Short straightforwardly admitted to Knox that they had “regarded an air attack as extremely unlikely because of the great distance which the Japs would have to travel to make the attack and the consequent exposure of such a task force to the superior gun power of the American fleet. Neither the army nor the navy commander expected that an attack would be made by the Japanese while negotiations were still proceeding in Washington.” Knox did, however, find Kimmel’s and Short’s saboteur theories credible, telling FDR, “The activities of the Japanese fifth columnists immediately following the attack, took the form of spreading on the air by radio dozens of confusing and contradictory rumors concerning direction in which the attacking planes departed, as well as the presence in every direction of enemy ships.”

  After preparing his report on the long flight back to Washington, Knox immediately delivered a copy to the White House, and then appeared before the press, saying that “between one hundred and fifty and three hundred planes took part in the attack, too many to have come from a single aircraft carrier,” that “apparently none was land based [and] none was flown by Germans.” He also said that “a rumor that the navy had been forewarned” was just a rumor and false. He concluded, “In the Navy’s gravest hour of peril, the officers and men of the fleet exhibited magnificent courage and resourcefulness,” but that the “services were not on the alert against surprise air attack on Hawaii. This fact calls for a formal investigation, which will be initiated immediately by the president. Further action is, of course, dependent on the facts and recommendations made by the investigating board. We are entitled to know it if (A) there was any error of judgment which contributed to the surprise, (B) if there was any dereliction of duty prior to the attack.”

  In Hawaii after December 7, the FBI and military police took into custody 1,441 Japanese who had dual citizenship, worked for the consulate, were Shinto or Buddhist priests, or who taught the language. One of these was May Namba, who recalled, “[First] there was a curfew; we had to be in by eight o’clock and not leave the house till six. And the Chinese wore ‘I’m Chinese’ buttons. Well, my brother borrowed a Chinese button, and he used to go out at night, but I don’t know whether my mother knew he snuck out, but he always came home safely. There were rumors every day. That we were going to be put in camps, and we thought, ‘Well, we’re citizens. We don’t have to go.’ But that was our firm belief at that time, but things changed, and we were soon rounded up and left for camp.”

  Those 1,441 were less than 1 percent of Hawaii’s Japanese population of 155,000. Washington had ordered Short’s replacement, Delos Emmons, to intern 40,000 Japanese aliens on the island of Molokai, and the Joint Chiefs “suggested” he evacuate Hawaii’s Japanese to mainland detention camps. Emmons ignored both the order and the suggestion, instead recommending on April 6, 1942, that a regiment of Japanese American soldiers be sent to North Africa or Europe where “their physical characteristics will not serve to confuse our other troops.” On May 28, Marshall agreed, eventually creating the One Hundredth Infantry Battalion, whose performance was so impressive that it led to a much larger Japanese American force, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which won 18,143 individual decorations, including 9,486 Purple Hearts—the most highly decorated unit per man in army history. In time, over thirty-three thousand Japanese Americans would fight for the United States in World War II, with nearly eight hundred giving their lives to their country.

  Meanwhile, after the news of Pearl Harbor first reached the American mainland, panic spread across the West Coast. On the morning of December 8, General John DeWitt, the region’s commander of defenses, told reporters that enemy planes had been spotted overhead, that “they were tracked out to sea. Why bombs were not dropped, I do not know. . . . Death and destruction are likely to come to this city at any moment.” Marine-held machine-gun emplacements popped up overnight across the Federal District, and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau urged FDR to have tanks standing by on Pennsylvania Avenue. Roosevelt declined.

  After a series of incidents of mob violence against anyone who looked Asian (both physical attacks and the ransacking of homes and businesses), the first lady felt compelled to point out in her nationally syndicated newspaper column that not every person of Japanese descent living in America was a traitor or a spy. The Los Angeles Times replied, “When she starts bemoaning the plight of the treacherous snakes we call Japanese, with apologies to all snakes, she has reached the point where she should be forced to retire from public life.” On the twenty-fifth, that newspaper’s headline was “L.A. Area Raided! Jap Planes Peril Santa Monica, Seal Beach, El Segundo, Redondo, Long Beach, Hermosa, Signal Hill.”

  • • •

  On December 16, the army relieved Generals Short and Martin and the navy relieved Admiral Kimmel. Short was replaced on the next day by the Army Air Force’s Lieutenant General Delos Emmons, while, after seventeen hours of flying from San Diego, Chester Nimitz replaced Kimmel on Christmas Day. But when Kimmel, Short, and Martin were cashiered, the press made note that their counterparts in the Philippines—Hart, MacArthur, and Brereton—weren’t similarly relieved of duty and demanded answers, as did various members of Congress. Roosevelt created an executive commission headed by Supreme Court justice Owen Roberts, whose reputation had been forged in the Teapot Dome scandal. Roberts’s commission determined that “the effective causes for the success of the attack” were Kimmel’s and Short’s “errors of judgment,” errors so grave that they could only be judged “dereliction of duty” in not adequately reacting to the various cables warning of trouble, culminating with the war warning of November 27. The Roberts Commission blamed Washington for “causes contributory to the success of the Japanese,” including Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark’s addenda cables that Japanese aggression would be focused not on Hawaii but on the Far East, and George Marshall’s lack of responsiveness to Short’s cable that he was on anti-sabotage alert, as well as the delay in getting Marshall’s last-minute warning to Oahu.

  When the Roberts findings were publicly released at the end of January 1942, they included a few vague comments about Japanese American saboteurs operating in Hawaii. Picked up by the press, this small mention triggered a ren
ewed outburst of paranoia. On February 12, national columnist Walter Lippmann wrote, “The Pacific Coast is in imminent danger of a combined attack from within and from without. . . . The Japanese navy has been reconnoitering the coast more or less continuously. The Pacific Coast is officially a combat zone; some part of it may at any moment be a battlefield. Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield. And nobody ought to be on a battlefield who has no good reason for being there.”

  Congressmen from Oregon, Washington, and California wrote the White House demanding “immediate evacuation of all persons of Japanese lineage.” Their great supporter was the alarmist local army chief, General John DeWitt, who insisted that national security urgently required alien internment. FDR’s Justice Department tried to calm things down, and a range of Washington insiders, from J. Edgar Hoover to Eleanor Roosevelt, made clear their opposition, but both Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Knox agreed with DeWitt, as did the attorney general of California, Earl Warren, who argued that, if the United States did not incarcerate tens of thousands of Japanese Americans in camps, the nation risked a massive surprise attack from within. A memo from Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy summed up the paranoia: “If it is a question of the safety of the country and the Constitution . . . why, the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”

  Roosevelt finally decided that, if relocation and internment were the considered judgments of American military leaders, he would not stand in their way and issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, allowing military commanders to determine territories “from which any or all persons may be excluded,” notably those of “Foreign Enemy Ancestry.” As Attorney General Francis Biddle noted, across US history “the Constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime president.” On March 2, DeWitt’s Western Defense Command issued a proclamation certifying the western halves of California, Oregon, and Washington and the southern third of Arizona as military areas, with all persons of Japanese descent needing to be excised. On March 18, FDR established the War Relocation Authority, headed by Milton Eisenhower, Dwight’s brother. Over 110,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of them US citizens, were sent to “relocation centers” in California, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Texas, and Arkansas.