Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  • • •

  The miracle of muscle and engineering that restored the American fleet at Pearl Harbor would continue on a grand scale in the United States, where a secret group of heroes now began turning the tide of war. The most brilliant of generals, the most inspiring of admirals, and the greatest of battlefield troops would pale in significance to the thousands of American Rosie and Ronnie the Riveters who outproduced both the Axis and the other Allied powers combined, contributing nearly three hundred thousand planes, 2 million trucks, eighty-seven thousand warships, and one hundred thousand tanks to Roosevelt’s arsenal of democracy in 1943. Like all wars, the winners of World War II were the guys with the most ships, guns, and planes; in 1944, Joseph Stalin even proposed a toast to the productivity of the American assembly line.

  Over the last two years of war, Japanese shipyards issued six new fleet carriers, while the United States produced seventeen fleet, ten medium, and eighty-six escort carriers. Wasp, Hornet, Yorktown, and Lexington were all reincarnated, joining Enterprise, Essex, Intrepid, and Bunker Hill in the Pacific, each bristling with five-inch, 40 mm, and 20 mm guns while carrying almost a hundred planes, most crucially a new fighter specifically engineered to beat Zeros: the F6F Hellcat. The Department of Ordnance was finally manufacturing torpedoes that could hit something, and these new eels allowed American subs to launch obliterating assaults on the Japanese merchant marine. Just as Nazi U-boats had crippled Atlantic shipping at the start of the war, now Chester Nimitz’s 150 Pacific wolves destroyed the economy of an island nation by making it incapable of importing or exporting anything at all.

  In response to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the USA would build the mightiest navy in the history of the world—including forty aircraft carriers, twenty-four battleships, and twenty-four thousand planes—powered by 3.3 million sailors and 480,000 marines, while from September 1939 to December 1941, she increased her army troops by 435 percent and then, from 1941 to 1945, another 492 percent, totaling 8,291,336 men in eighty-nine divisions. By July 1944, the Army Air Forces included 2,403,056 men and women at 1,479 airfields in sixteen air forces, eight air divisions, and ninety-one wings . . . and besides “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” these millions of men and women sang, “Let’s remember Pearl Harbor as we go to meet the foe. Let’s remember Pearl Harbor as we did the Alamo.”

  • • •

  In the first week of October, Prime Minister Tojo and Army Chief of General Staff Sugiyama met at the Imperial Palace with Lord Privy Seal Kido. Sugiyama wanted all of the Raiders shot immediately, while Tojo urged leniency, believing that only those guilty of slaughtering innocent civilians should be executed, such guilt to be determined by their “confessions.” Questioned on this point after the war by the International Military Tribunal, Tojo explained, “Since I had known of the humane nature of the Emperor, it would be to his wish that the death penalty be applied to the smallest possible number of prisoners. For this reason, only the three who had killed a schoolchild were to receive the death sentence. I consulted the Emperor regarding this matter, for he was the only authority who could issue the reduction of the sentence. . . . He was very generous.”

  On October 14, twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Dean Hallmark of Robert Lee, Texas, twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant William Farrow of Darlington, South Carolina, and twenty-one-year-old Sergeant Harold Spatz of Lebo, Kansas, were informed that they had been found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to execution. That night, Japanese carpenters nailed together three wooden crosses and three boxes. The crosses had been sunk into the turf of a newly mown field, and each condemned man was ordered to kneel. Twenty feet away, a six-man firing squad was waiting in front of a Shinto altar of burning incense. Warden Tatsuta announced, “Your lives were very short, but your names will remain everlastingly. . . . When you die on the cross, you will be honored as gods.”

  The prisoners’ wrists were tied behind them to the crosses. White cloths were draped over their faces, and then black marks were etched onto them, at the center of each man’s forehead. The first line of Japanese riflemen were ordered to fire. Each shot was accurate. The second line of riflemen was not required to assist. Blood soaked into the newly mown grass.

  The remaining POWs were still held in solitary and for some time had no idea Dean Hallmark, Bill Farrow, and Harold Spatz had been killed. Eventually they were marched into a courtroom, where the judge announced, “The tribunal, acting under the law . . . hereby sentences the defendants to death. . . . but, through the graciousness of His Majesty the Emperor, your sentences are hereby commuted to life imprisonment . . . with special treatment.” When prison trusty Caesar brought the Americans their rations, he sometimes tried to help by hiding notes inside. Later that week, he explained their verdict’s “special treatment”: “If the Americans win the war, you are to be shot, and if the Japanese win the war, you are to be kept as slave labor.”

  • • •

  After Midway, a host of Japan’s naval officers offered to commit suicide. Yamamoto refused, saying, “I take full responsibility. If anyone is to commit hara-kiri because of Midway, it is I.” By now, his navy had lost almost every ace pilot, and his new aircrews were novices, so their strikes accomplished little. In their zeal, they would report one great victory after the next back to Tokyo, which only spurred on the country’s drunken war fever. When Hirohito was told on September 21, 1943, that the Allies were invading New Guinea and that Japanese defenses were ready, he exclaimed, “Being ready to defend isn’t enough. We have to do the attacking!” When told that Saipan would fall, giving the United States a base close enough to bomb Tokyo, Hirohito ordered, “Rise to the challenge; make a tremendous effort; achieve a splendid victory like at the time of the Japan Sea battle [Tsushima].” When Japan, after suffering defeat after defeat, clearly had no hope of victory, Hirohito told his senior statesmen on February 14, 1945, “If we hold out long enough in this war, we may be able to win, but what worries me is whether the nation will be able to endure it until then.”

  In April 1943, Admiral Yamamoto flew to Bougainville (a Solomon island in the north fork of what is now Papua New Guinea) to give an inspirational speech to his men. Radio messages from nearby Japanese bases carried details of his travel plans, which were intercepted by the basement team of HYPO, and Roosevelt ordered, “Get Yamamoto.” After talks with Nimitz and Halsey, it became clear that navy fighters didn’t have the range for the mission. It would have to be done by Hap Arnold’s Army Air Forces.

  On the morning of April 18, 1943, the one-year anniversary of the Doolittle Raid, Isoroku Yamamoto’s plane approached southern Bougainville, escorted by nine Zeros. Eighteen P-38 Lightnings swooped in; fourteen took on the Zeros; the other four attacked the Mitsubishi G4M transport bomber ferrying the admiral. Captain Thomas Lanphier Jr. and his wingman, Rex T. Barber, both strafed the craft with 20 mm cannon and machine guns. The plane exploded in flames and crashed into the jungle.

  Yamamoto’s death shook every member of the Combined Fleet, many of whom saw this as an omen, even the always-optimistic Mitsuo Fuchida, who “believed now that the war was entirely lost.” Two months later, General Sugiyama had to tell his emperor that those same positions in the Solomons were now imperiled. Hirohito replied, “Isn’t there some place where we can strike the United States? . . . When and where on earth are you ever going to put up a good fight? And when are you ever going to fight a decisive battle? . . . After suffering all these defeats, why don’t you study how not to let the Americans keep saying, ‘We won! We won!’ ” Lanphier and Barber, meanwhile, spent the rest of their lives confronting each other in federal court over who deserved credit for the kill.

  Journalist Masuo Kato: “For many years the Japanese people had been taught to believe that their national misfortunes were due to lack of access to raw materials and restrictions on free immigration, which might have relieved the congestion in one of the most congested spots on the face of the earth. The solution, they had been t
old, was to drive out Western imperialism, to become the savior of the oppressed peoples to the south, to establish Asia for the Asiatics, and then reap the just reward of such a policy. The poorest Japanese believed that it was only a matter of time until the advance to the south would result in great wealth to the Japanese nation as a whole and concrete benefits to himself. A number of private companies were created with the purpose of profiting from the South Seas trade, but none of these companies was able to convert its prospects into profits because the area failed to be stabilized as promised. The Co-Prosperity Sphere [would soon be dubbed] in Japan, the Co-Poverty Sphere.”

  Three days after Yamamoto’s assassination, President Roosevelt announced in a radio broadcast, that the Japanese had executed some of their captured Doolittle Raiders. The American public’s reaction was overwhelming. On the day following the news, they bought more war bonds than on any other day of World War II.

  • • •

  By the fall of 1943, Meder’s constant dysentery, which had left him weak and thin for months, took a severe turn for the worse. On December 1, Lieutenant Robert J. Meder of Cleveland, Ohio, died at the age of twenty-six. The one crewman who always had hope in his heart, who was always so confident they would get out of this all right in the end, had been starved to death.

  “We thought, ‘Well, any of us can die at any time,’ ” Bob Hite said. “ ‘We could all die, and they could do away with us, and nobody would ever know the difference.’ No one knew we were there. It was sort of an eerie feeling.” Hite asked the prison authorities to be given a Bible, and they agreed. The Americans shared it; when Jake DeShazer had his turn, the words came to life, as though they were written just for him. On June 8, 1944, Jake started praying: “Lord, though I am far from home and though I am in prison, I must have forgiveness.” As he thought deeply about the message of the Christ, he was overcome with a tremendous sensation: “My heart was filled with joy. I wouldn’t have traded places with anyone at that time.”

  Jake realized that his sins had been forgiven and that, as a Christian, he, too, would have to forgive. He started treating the sadistic man who guarded him politely, until finally the guard came over and spoke with him through the door. DeShazer asked about his family, and the Japanese man smiled.

  A few mornings later, he saw the guard pacing, his hands folded in prayer. The man later said that he was talking to his mother, who had died when he was a boy. From that moment on, he treated Jake well, never shouting, kicking, or beating him. In fact, “one morning he opened the slot and handed in a boiled sweet potato. I was surprised and thanked him profusely. Later he gave me some batter-fried fish and candy. . . . How easy it was to make a friend out of an enemy because I had just tried.”

  • • •

  In the first four months of the appalling six that it took to win Guadalcanal, the men of the First Marine Division became heroic legends equal to the Spartans at Thermopylae, living on weeds and roots and suffering malarial fevers while killing over twenty thousand Japanese soldiers and holding their territory until victory. Churchill was inspired to say, “Long may the tale be told in the great Republic.” Guadalcanal would also be remembered as the front line where one leatherneck yelled to the other side, “Hirohito eats shit!” and soon came the reply, “Eleanor eats shit!”

  “There was nothing macho about the war at all,” said one marine, E. B. “Sledgehammer” Sledge. “We were a bunch of scared kids who had to do a job. The Japanese fought by a code they thought was right: Bushido. The code of the warrior: no surrender. You don’t really comprehend it until you get out there and fight people who are faced with an absolutely hopeless situation and will not give up. I was afraid so much, day after day, that I got tired of being scared.”

  On the front lines at Peleliu and Okinawa, Sledge watched American soldiers collect souvenirs: hands, ears, and gold teeth from Japanese corpses. “The fierce struggle for survival . . . eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all,” he thought. When Charles Lindbergh came back from New Guinea, one of the questions asked by US customs was “Do you have any bones in your luggage?” Followers of Shinto, believing ancestral remains are sacred, were disgusted to see Life magazine’s story of a thrilled American girl posing with what her boyfriend had brought back home from his tour of duty—a Japanese skull. The followers must have forgotten when Japanese troops invaded Korea and brought back one hundred thousand Korean noses and ears, today buried outside Kyoto in what is known as the Ear Mound.

  This brutality would last for the whole of the war. While the Japanese created a national pun for American—Mei-ri-ken, “misguided dog”—American soldiers in the Pacific invented a new term for when men lost their minds: going Asiatic. Samuel Eliot Morison said the Pacific theater echoed “the primitive days of fighting Indians,” while Harry Truman said it was okay to use nuclear weapons against the Japanese since “when you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast,” while author William Manchester concluded, “War is literally unreasonable. Today’s youth cannot understand it; mine, I suppose, was the last generation to believe audacity in combat is a virtue. And I don’t know why we believed it.”

  Winning Guadalcanal meant a cost of 4,123 American lives, but when the Pacific war’s tide turned, it was nothing less than a tsunami. In November 1943 on Betio in the Tarawa chain, 1,026 marines died fighting over five thousand Japanese for an atoll half the size of New York’s Central Park. In taking the island of Truk on February 16, 1944, Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher lost about thirty planes and had a carrier damaged, while the Japanese lost two light cruisers, four destroyers, two submarines, five auxiliaries, and twenty-four merchant ships.

  After a year of waiting for his legs to heal from jumping into the lifeboat at Midway, Mitsuo Fuchida was appointed air operations officer of the Combined Fleet on April 20, 1944, just in time for the devastating losses at the Battle of the Philippine Sea. In what American forces called “the Marianas Turkey Shoot,” 395 of the Combined Fleet’s 430 planes were taken down, along with carriers Taiho, Soikaku, and Hiyo. Many of Fuchida’s friends from his Imperial Naval Academy days, from Operation Z and from Midway, were killed that month, along with every member of the First Air Fleet, either by enemy fire or suicide. As 1944 drew to its close, Fuchida would become one of the few surviving Japanese airmen from the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  On October 20, 1944, the general who was perhaps the most complicated man in American army history, Douglas MacArthur, rode aboard cruiser Nashville as the first of his two hundred thousand soldiers landed on the east coast of Leyte. In a drenching rain, he came ashore to announce, “People of the Philippines, I have returned. . . . Rally to me. . . . As the lines of battle roll forward to bring you within the zone of operations, rise and strike. Strike at every favorable opportunity. For your homes and hearths, strike! For future generations of your sons and daughters, strike! In the name of your sacred dead, strike!”

  For the next three days, two hundred thousand sailors and pilots from 282 ships fought over one hundred thousand square miles of ocean in history’s biggest naval battle. On October 25, Admiral Thomas Kinkaid used the same tactical maneuver that Admiral Togo employed in his historic win at Tsushima, positioning his fleet at the neck of Surigao Strait to cross Japan’s T. If that weren’t sweet enough revenge for the Americans, of the six dreadnoughts sinking the Japanese navy, five—West Virginia, Tennessee, Maryland, California, and Pennsylvania—had been “destroyed” by Genda’s airmen at Pearl Harbor. At Surigao the Imperial Japanese Navy lost two battleships, three cruisers, and four destroyers, while American losses were one PT boat. For the Battle of Leyte Gulf as a whole, American losses were a light carrier, two escort carriers, and three destroyers. Japan lost four carriers, three battleships, six heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, eight destroyers, and sixty-five thousand men, meaning that the Imperial Japanese Navy had lost its war.

  The closer American forces got to the Japanese home islands, the
more appalling was the carnage. At Iwo Jima, the entire Japanese force of nearly twenty thousand men fought to their deaths, while about seven thousand Americans were killed and nineteen thousand wounded. Of this battle, Navy Secretary James Forrestal said, “I can never again see a United States marine without feeling a reverence.”

  After the loss of Saipan, a Japanese territory since 1919, Hirohito said, “Hell is on us.” Even so, the Japanese armed forces continued to operate with such contempt for the nation’s civilian leaders that Prime Minister Hideki Tojo—simultaneously a general on active duty—wasn’t told about the catastrophic losses at Midway for over a month. Tojo, in the wake of “an unprecedentedly great national crisis,” resigned, and the Imperial Japanese Navy did not tell the new prime minister that the Combined Fleet had been destroyed at Leyte Gulf until after the nation had surrendered.

  It would take five months to win Okinawa, a battle marked by a new tactic: suicide attacks. Fighter pilot Captain Motoharu Okamura is credited with what he called the Hornet Corps—meaning when a hornet stings, he dies, but so does his victim. Much like the midget submarines that had taken part against Pearl Harbor, the MXY7 Ohka (“cherry blossom,” symbol of the young warrior who gives his life for his country) was a small glider with a twenty-six-hundred-pound bomb in the nose and a missile in its tail that was ferried to its target by a mother plane. Ohka crews, known as the Divine Thunderbolt Corps (Jinrai Butai), flew in the ferrying bomber until it was their time, then climbed out of a belly hatch and into their bomb. Simultaneously in the Philippines, navy Zero crews began to use suicide-diving of their own planes into the enemy, calling themselves the Shinpu Tokubetsu Kogekitai (Divine Wind Special Attack Squad). Imperial Japanese Navy airmen now signed a contract saying they were willing volunteers in the Special Attack Corps. About one in thirty-three suicide bombers successfully sank their targets, and it’s believed that their use extended the war into 1945.