by Craig Nelson
Japanese orphans were carted off, as were the adopted Japanese children of Caucasian parents, and transported in trains, with shades drawn so they would not know where they were going, to makeshift camps in the mountains or the desert, fenced in by barbed wire and guard towers. When an inmate needed to visit the outhouse at night, he or she was lit up by a searchlight. Actor George Takei: “I’d just turned five years old, but I still remember that day when my parents dressed my brother, my baby sister, and me. They got us up very early in the morning and dressed us hurriedly. We were in the living room, my brother and I, looking out the window, and we saw two American soldiers, marching up the driveway, with bayonets on their rifles. They stomped up the front porch, banged on the door, and my father answered it. We were literally ordered out of our home at gunpoint.
“My parents told us that we were going on a long vacation to a place called Arkansas. That sounded exotic: Arkansas! A vacation! So when we were put on these trains with armed guards at both ends of each car, being treated like criminals, I thought everyone took their vacations with guards like that.
“We were behind those barbed-wire fences for the duration of the war. There were ten camps altogether. All in the most desolate places. Hellish places. Two on the blistering-hot desert of Arizona, if you can imagine that. We were sent to the swamps of Arkansas. There were others in the wastelands of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado. It was a dark chapter of American history.
“Every morning at school in the barracks we started the day with the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. There was the American flag waving in the middle of the camp, but I could also see the barbed-wire fence with the sentry towers and the machine guns pointed at us from my schoolhouse window as I recited the words “with liberty and justice for all.”
Internee Peter Yoshida: “When we had to leave in such a hurry, and people knew we had to leave, they didn’t come by and ask, ‘How much?’—referring to a price for a property, equipment, tools, etc. Friends, or those we thought were friends, came by with their trucks and asked, ‘What can I have?’—referring to refrigerators and stuff like that. We gave away everything, basically. That hurt my father, I think. He had lots of farm equipment and just had to give it all away.
“We ended up in a holding area in Santa Anita—the racetrack. We had a central toilet and place for washing. When we arrived, we were given sewn sheets. There was hay in the streets, so we basically had to make our own mattress. Some people did this at night and really couldn’t see what they were doing. Later while lying there, they could feel something moving around in their mattress. When they investigated, they found that there were snakes living in there.”
• • •
While the story of Pearl Harbor has a number of heroes, some of the most significant have to date remained unsung. War workers joined enlisted men immediately after Pearl Harbor’s fires were extinguished to begin the business of salvage . . . of saving. A temporary town—Civilian Housing Area III—bloomed into a population of twelve thousand, becoming Hawaii’s third-largest city after Honolulu and Hilo, with its own stadium, post office, theater, police force, and train station. Pearl’s shallow waters, which had lulled Kimmel into thinking he was immune from torpedoes, now meant that his stricken ships had sunk a mere fifteen to twenty feet and then sat there, ready for repair. Kimmel’s replacement, Admiral Chester Nimitz, even claimed that “it was God’s mercy that our fleet was in Pearl Harbor on December 7,” since if Kimmel “had advance notice that the Japanese were coming, he most probably would have tried to intercept them. With the difference in speed between Kimmel’s battleships and the faster Japanese carriers, the former could not have come within rifle range of the enemy’s flattops. As a result, we would have lost many ships in deep water and also thousands more in lives.”
The USS Oklahoma, flipped with its belly exposed, was righted by a fantastical arrangement of cables and winches out of Gulliver’s Travels. And “when the subject of the West Virginia is mentioned to the men who worked on its salvage, they seldom say anything. They just whistle,” reported Robert Trumbull in a series of articles that War Department censors refused to allow the New York Times to publish for forty years:
The engineers decided to use cofferdams, watertight chambers that could be built and attached to the ship. So huge cofferdams were built, their wooden sections braced with steel. They were lowered, bolted to the hull as on other ships, and meeting so as to form one tremendous outwall. . . . Hundreds of tons of Tremie concrete were poured from hoppers into funnels high above the water. This quick-setting cement, which hardens under water, oozed through thick pipes and formed about the West Virginia’s uneven crevasses far below. It hardened and made the cofferdam part of the ship watertight. As the pumps strained to suck out the fouled sea inside, the West Virginia rose, inch by inch. Each new day disclosed a new surface ring of oil and black muck from the harbor bottom marking on the cofferdam the laborious progress of the ship’s flotation. . . . During ensuing repairs, workers located the remains of seventy West Virginia sailors who had been trapped below deck. In one compartment, a calendar was found, the last scratch-off date being 23 December 1941.
• • •
When navy divers Ed Raymer and Bob “Moon” Mullen arrived to work salvage in Hawaii, they were warned by diving officer Lieutenant H. E. Haynes that “because of the floating oil, sediment, and debris in the water, underwater lights would be useless,” Raymer recalled. “Diving inside the ships would be done in complete and utter darkness. This would require us to develop a keen sense of feel, great manual dexterity with tools, and a high degree of hand-to-brain coordination. Since the navy had no safety precautions for such a situation, we would be required to devise our own.”
Wearing a rubberized suit with thirty-six-pound lead-soled shoes, an eighty-four-pound lead-weighted belt, and a heavy copper helmet with small port window to see, Raymer was tethered to the surface by a lifeline of coupled rubberized telephone wire and air hose. Before submerging, divers familiarized themselves with the general layout of a route from blueprints, while telephone talkers used the details of the ship’s plan to direct the diver on his path. Besides the telephone talker, the only sound Raymer heard was the air pumping into his helmet.
On January 12, 1942, Ed Raymer dove into Arizona: “The dense floating mass of oil blotted out all daylight. I was submerged in total blackness.” The large hatch door was stuck and couldn’t be opened, perhaps because a gasket had melted in the attack. But the door to the trunk hatch opened, and Raymer descended to the third-level deck.
“Suddenly I felt that something was wrong. I tried to suppress the strange feeling that I was not alone. I reached out to feel my way and touched what seemed to be a large insulated bag floating overhead. As I pushed it away, my bare hands plunged through what felt like a mass of rotted sponge. I realized with horror that the ‘bag’ was a body without a head. I fought to choke down the bile that rose in my throat. That bloated torso had once contained viscera, muscle, and tissue. It had been a man.”
As he made his way through the ship, Raymer was confronted again and again by floating bodies that he had to push aside to get through doorways and compartments. “Then, as if someone had thrown a switch, my air supply stopped. ‘What’s wrong with my air supply?’ I yelled. No answer. The topside phone key was depressed, but all I could hear was panic-stricken shouting. I quickly closed the exhaust valve in my helmet before all the air escaped from my helmet and suit. ‘Take in my slack, I’m coming up,’ I yelled, fear rising in my voice.
“Back came a rapid reply: ‘Your lifeline is hung up. Retrace your steps and clear it as quickly as you can.’ I knew the oxygen remaining in my helmet could not sustain life for more than two minutes. By now the air had escaped from my suit, causing the dress to press tightly against my torso, the pressure from the surrounding water flattening it. As the pressure increased, I felt the huge roiling mass of panic surge into my throat. I tried desperately to hold back the growing
anxiety within me. I had seen what terror could do to a man.
“I grabbed the lifeline and started back, pulling hand over hand toward the access trunk. The 196 pounds of diving equipment on my shoulders became an incredible weight. Without buoyancy in my suit, it became a heavy burden dragging me down. I finally felt where a loop in my air hose was caught on the handwheel of a lathe. I cleared my lines and yelled, ‘Take up my slack!’ ‘It’s free,’ someone shouted over the phone. ‘Stay calm. We’ll have you up in a minute.’
The salvage crews next moored their barges to California, where divers had built a cofferdam around the bow and quarterdeck and were closing off all bulkheads and valves, covering damaged manholes and portholes with metal blanks, and filling the ship’s cracks and tears. Shipyard workers removed the above-water conning tower, mainmast, catapults, cranes, anchors, and boats. Dewatering pumps, operating 24-7, then flushed water out of the cofferdam and, just like West Virginia, California began to rise.
The salvage work required five thousand individual dives totaling twenty thousand hours underwater, and though these men couldn’t bring the dead back to life, through a miracle of muscle and engineering, they restored almost everything else with such speed, and such fury, that the material effects of Japan’s attacks were almost wholly reversed in a matter of months. By December 20, less than two weeks after the attack, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee were back in service. Nevada was restored by the end of 1942; California at the end of 1943; Oglala, Downes, and Cassin were sailing by February 1944; West Virginia on July 4, 1944. The Arizona’s five-inch antiaircraft guns were salvaged to defend Oahu. If any more enemy planes appeared, the Arizona’s own guns would help bring them down.
A few months after the attack, “we gathered on the barge to watch as a strange-looking ship sailed by on her way around Ford Island making a triumphant sweep through the anchorages to show the fleet she was proudly sailing for home,” Ed Raymer said. “The strange ship was the destroyer USS Shaw [seen in cataclysmic eruption on this book’s cover]. Regardless of how she appeared, all the assembled divers express a sense of pride in our country as we watch the first heavily damaged ship sailed back to America under her own power, knowing she would be able to fight once more.”
Shaw was back on full duty by the following autumn. In all of the destruction at Pearl Harbor, only three ships were judged to be beyond the astonishing feats of America’s salvage crews, but they would live on in a new way.
• • •
At nearly three million square miles, Dai Nippon Teikoku, the Great Empire of Japan, was now a colossus even more vast than the Third Reich, covering one-seventh of the surface of the earth and uniting most of urban China with Hong Kong, Formosa, the Philippines, French Indochina, British Burma and Malaya, the Dutch Spice Islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Java, and Celebes, the Kuriles, the Bonins, Ryukyus, Marianas, Carolines, Palau, Marshalls, Gilberts, northern New Guinea, two Aleutians, and almost all of the Solomons. And at every encounter over the first months starting with December 7, the Japanese triumphed. When IJA troops invaded Britain’s Crown Colony of Hong Kong on the morning of December 8 and the garrison surrendered on the twenty-fifth, the Japanese reported 2,754 casualties; the British, 11,848. After the siege of Singapore, 85,000 British troops surrendered to 30,000 Japanese in a mere seven days, with the battle for Malaya ending on February 15 after 138,708 British were killed, wounded, and captured, versus 9,824 Japanese.
Hawaii now found herself on the front lines of the Pacific war, with enemy submarines over the last two weeks of December repeatedly shelling her towns. Japanese wolf subs brought down the Matson freighter Lahaina eight hundred miles from Oahu on December 11, then sank oiler Neches on January 23 and army transport Royal T. Frank on January 28.
On the other side of the world, believing that war was distant and tourists near, the Eastern Seaboard towns of New York City, Atlantic City, and Miami refused Washington’s call for blackouts. Their bright lights could be seen ten miles from shore, where U-boats gathered nightly to bring down American merchant trade. In twelve hours one January night, the Nazis sank eight ships, including three tankers. On April 10, a surfaced Nazi sub used her deck gun to sink Gulfamerica as the tourists of Jacksonville Beach, Florida, watched in horror. “All the vacationers had seen an impressive special performance at Roosevelt’s expense,” Commander Reinhard Hardegen triumphantly wrote. “A burning tanker, artillery fire, the silhouette of a U-boat—how often had all of that been seen in America?” The same spectacle assaulted the sunbathers of Virginia Beach, Virginia, when two American freighters were torpedoed in broad daylight on June 15. By July, Nazi forces had sunk 4.7 million tons of Allied shipping. “The U-boat attack was our worst evil,” Churchill wrote, “the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war.”
Back in the Pacific, on March 3, 1942, two Kawanishi H8K1 Type 2 flying boats, each with four 550-pound bombs, lifted off from bases in the Marshalls, refueled from two submarines at French Frigate Shoals—islands located about halfway between Midway and Kauai—for Operation K: the third strike against Pearl Harbor. At the end of 1941, those same subs had launched Yokosuka E14Y1 folding-wing biplanes from their waterproof deck hangars to survey Oahu’s recovery efforts, and now they would be targeted. The enemy flying boats were caught by Kauai radar on March 4, just after midnight. Though the Japanese air crews radioed “surprise attack successful,” overcast skies meant they missed their targets entirely, dropping bombs on Oahu’s Mount Tantalus and into the ocean, causing no harm. The Americans assumed they were carrier based and, besides sending out four P-40s to attack them, sent five torpedo-armed PBYs to attack their ships, but the Japanese airmen, once again, escaped unharmed.
PART III
* * *
VICTORY
CHAPTER ELEVEN
* * *
VENGEANCE
The Pearl Harbor attack set in motion a series of events that rippled across the Pacific. If the Holocaust defined evil for the Americans of World War II, December 7 was the embodiment of malignant treachery and their response would be, as historian John Dower has called it, a war without mercy, a series of such savage, gruesome, and inexorable battles so unlike the “band of brothers” memorialized in Europe that it would be known by Norman Mailer as the naked and the dead.
Between the eyewitness accounts of Japanese airmen gloating while killing Americans, the destruction of Oklahoma, and the massive deaths on Arizona, most Pearl Harbor survivors had one overwhelming feeling: rage. An Oklahoma gunner’s mate said there was “a deep, powerful thirst for revenge on the part of every enlisted man,” while Pat Morgan said, “We were all consumed with an urge to do something violent.” Kathy Cooper felt “an utter feeling of horror, helplessness, and anger, consuming anger. If a Japanese pilot had walked into the house, I would have tried to kill him.” After replacing Husband Kimmel as commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, William Halsey announced that the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell and urged his men, “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.”
The very first American response to December 7, however, was a little-known military quid pro quo that was just as unexpected, just as tactically brilliant, just as symbolic, and just as devastating to an enemy’s confidence as Pearl Harbor had been. It started with the men of the Seventeenth Bombardment Group, Army Air crews spending their daylight hours circling repeatedly in their Mitchell B-25s over the same strips of America’s West Coast, searching for enemy subs. Then “I got a call from Major Ski York, who was Group Ops, to meet him at Wright-Patterson airfield,” Group Officer Davey Jones remembered. “Ski and I climbed to the very top of one of the hangars there, to get away from everybody else.” When he got back, Jones called his men together in his hotel suite to report, “Captain York wanted me to talk to you and see how many of you would volunteer for a special mission. It’s dangerous, important, and interesting.” Hearing this, twenty-four-year old bombardier Bob Bourgeois thought, “Dangerous is a pret
ty bad word when you’re talking about airplanes.”
“He said, ‘Some of you fellows are going to get killed. How many of you will volunteer?’ ” thirty-year-old bombardier Jacob DeShazer remembered. “Well, I thought, ‘Boy, I don’t want to do that.’ We went around and he said, ‘Would you go? Would you go? Would you go?’ And they all said, ‘Yes.’ I was right down at the end of the line, so because all the others said they’d go, I said I would, too.”
The commanders selected 140 pilots, copilots, navigators, bombardiers, and gunners, who were then sent to Eglin Air Corps Proving Ground just outside Pensacola, Florida. “The reason Eglin was chosen,” said ops officer Ski York, “was because it had about seven or eight satellite fields out in the swamps and the woods, and it was pretty secure from prying eyes.” Strange modifications had been made to their B-25 bombers. The radios were gone, black broomsticks were attached to the tail (imitating .50-caliber guns), deicer boots had been added to the wings, a 160-gallon rubber fuel bag was the crawl space between the tail gunner and the cockpit, ten five-gallon cans of gas took up the crewmen’s storage space, and the bomb bays were stocked with a 225-gallon leakproof tank. “Special five-hundred-pound demolition bombs were provided by the Ordnance Department,” the commander noted. “These bombs were loaded with an explosive mixture containing 50 percent TNT and 50 percent amatol. They were all armed with a one-tenth-of-a-second nose fuse and a one-fortieth-of-a-second specially prepared tail fuse. The one-tenth-of-a-second nose fuse was provided in case the tail fuse failed. Eleven-second-delay tail fuses were available to replace the one-fortieth-of-a-second tail fuse in case weather conditions made extremely low bombing necessary. The Chemical Warfare Service provided special 500 incendiary clusters, each containing 128 incendiary bombs. A special load of .50-caliber ammunition was employed. This load carried groups of one tracer, two armor-piercing, and three explosive bullets.”
