War Stories II: Heroism in the Pacific

by Oliver North

  About one o’clock Saturday afternoon, 6 December, the captain called a “general quarters” drill to test his reserve crew. This was his first drill, and I think he was very wise to do that, as it later proved. We went to battle stations and I manned my three-inch gun up on the bow, right below our main battery, the number-one four-inch gun. We went through our drills and the captain was pleased, so we went back to our regular watches.

  There was a wire mesh net that was drawn across the harbor entrance at dusk. It normally wouldn’t open again until dawn. At night we’d make lazy figure eights outside the harbor entrance, sounding with our relatively new sonar. At 3:45 AM on the morning of 7 December, one of the minesweepers, the USS Condor, sighted what they thought was a periscope. We went to “general quarters,” raced over there, and searched for about an hour, but found nothing. And so then we went back on our patrol.

  At daybreak, about six-thirty, just as the harbor was coming alive, the USS Antares was standing off, waiting for the net to open so they could enter Pearl Harbor. And in the wake of the Antares we spotted this sub conning tower, about four feet out of the water, following the Antares, obviously intending to follow the supply ship into the harbor. We went to “general quarters” immediately, and as we raced over to it, a PBY overhead dropped a smoke bomb to mark the position for us. As I manned my gun on the bow, I could see we were coming up pretty fast.

  I’ve got a front-row seat. As we approached it, it looked as though we were on a collision course. Everybody was starting to brace themselves. But at the last minute, the captain veered to port. When he did, the starboard, or right side, raised up a little. Our naval guns could not depress down that far, so when we fired, the first shell, from number-one four-inch gun, went over the conning tower.

  By now we were almost parallel to the sub, and number-three gun on top of the galley deck, on the starboard side, trained on it and fired. We were so close that the fuse didn’t travel far enough to arm, but the projectile put a hole right through the conning tower. It was a relatively small hole, but the sub took on water and started to sink. Obviously it filled up with water pretty quick.

  We thought it was a German U-boat and released four depth charges set for a hundred feet. With the added weight of the water she had taken on, the sub lost her buoyancy and she settled like a rock—in twelve hundred feet of water.

  We stayed at “general quarters,” and the captain gave the order to break out the Springfield rifles. About an hour or so later, two planes came at us from inside the harbor and we could see the “meatballs,” the red suns, painted on their wings. Our new anti-aircraft guns fired at the planes, and that’s really what saved us, because they broke off their attack. We got a splash on one side, a splash on the other side. And that was as close as we came to getting any hits.

  By 8:15, we could see the smoke and explosions ashore. About that time the captain told us that he had received a radio message that “this is no drill.”

  ABOARD USS WARD

  PEARL HARBOR

  7 DECEMBER 1941

  0645 HOURS LOCAL

  After relaying what he had seen up on the bridge, Ken Swedberg busied himself at his gun station. At 0653, Commander Outerbridge transmitted a message to the commandant, 14th Naval District: “WE HAVE ATTACKED, FIRED UPON AND DROPPED DEPTH CHARGES UPON SUBMARINE OPERATING IN DEFENSIVE SEA AREA. STAND BY FOR FURTHER MESSAGES.”

  The crew of the Ward, though all Reservists assigned to an aging destroyer, had been trained well and responded quickly.

  As Ken Swedberg correctly surmised, the four-inch shell fired by the Ward’s number-three turret had not traveled far enough to arm. But even without exploding, the shell had done its damage. The round that hit the conning tower killed the Japanese skipper and the sub took on water. After sinking the Japanese midget sub, the Ward’s crew continued to salvo depth charges into the harbor, assuming correctly that there were probably other submarines in the waters.

  The PBY patrol plane that Ken Swedberg had seen from the deck of the USS Ward was being flown by Lieutenant (jg) Bill Tanner, a twenty-four-year-old pilot from San Pedro, California. He was a graduate of USC and had joined the Navy in 1938, had trained in Pensacola, Florida, and had been stationed in San Diego until his squadron had ferried their twelve PBYs to Kaneohe Bay, on the northeast coast of Oahu, earlier that year. Tanner had responded to the radio calls from the Antares and the Condor and was flying over the area where the sub was last sighted. In the gray dawn of the morning, Captain Tanner thought he saw something and banked his plane for another look. His stomach fluttered a little when he spotted the subs—at least two, maybe three of them, in waters below—scarily close to the ships anchored just beyond the anti-submarine net, inside Pearl Harbor. He dropped smoke signal flares into the water where he had spotted the midget subs and then radioed a message to the air base telling of his discovery.

  Tanner turned his PBY around and headed back to the spot where he had dropped the smoke containers. He readied his plane for dropping depth charges on the target to try to sink the enemy subs that he’d discovered in the Hawaiian waters.

  A PBY plane like the one that detected the midget subs.

  CAPTAIN WILLIAM (BILL) TANNER, JR., USN

  Navy Air Recon PBY

  Pearl Harbor Patrol Area

  7 December 1941

  0630 Hours Local

  The PBY was a very slow, cumbersome airplane, but it had great range. It had a crew of eight and two engines, and was a seaplane used for long-range reconnaissance. They flew on patrol about 700 or 800 miles and returned. They were not fighter airplanes; it was strictly reconnaissance, but we had guns if we were attacked.

  On the morning of 7 December, it was our turn to fly patrol, and as a matter of fact, it was the first real patrol that I had flown as a command pilot. I had just been made a patrol commander the week previous. I took off before dawn, along with two other airplanes, one flown by Fred Meyers and another by Tommy Hillis. We flew out of Kaneohe Bay on the north side of the island of Oahu, around Barber’s Point, turned east, and flew south of Pearl Harbor, with the island about two miles offshore. Then we veered slightly to the southeast and followed the line of the islands of Maui and Lanai toward the big island—about a hundred miles—and then we’d turn, and return on a parallel course twenty miles further to sea. That’s what I was supposed to do. The other two airplanes had slightly different patrols, to the north and east of where I was.

  I saw it, and the copilot saw it too—what looked to be a buoy in the water, but a moving buoy. We had never seen anything quite like it. There was no question in our minds that it was an enemy submarine. It looked like it was on a course directly heading toward Pearl Harbor. We looked off to the left and saw the Ward steaming toward the object. We were too close to do anything about arming bombs, so we dropped two smoke signal flares on the object to help the Ward close in on it.

  We turned left to circle and come back and see what was happening, and as I turned the airplane, the Ward was firing at the submarine. From what we could tell, it looked like the first shot went high, and the second shot I thought was high because I saw it splash in the water behind the submarine.

  There was no question that it was an enemy submarine because our subs were not allowed to be submerged in that area, and we were ordered to attack any submerged submarine we sighted in the restricted zone. We completed our circle, came around, and dropped our two depth charges. The Ward followed its gun attack by dropping depth charges as it went over the spot where the submarine was.

  We reported, “SANK ENEMY SUBMARINE ONE MILE SOUTH OF PEARL HARBOR.” We sent it in code, not by voice, back to our headquarters. We had no indication we were at war but we sent it in Morse code, just as we were supposed to. We got an answer from our base that said, “VERIFY YOUR MESSAGE.” And so we did, and our base told us to remain in the area until further notice.

  We circled there for some time. When we didn’t see anything other than what we had already r
eported, Fleet Air Wing One sent us a message to resume patrol.

  ABOARD JAPANESE SPS I-24TOU

  PEARL HARBOR OUTER PERIMETER

  7 DECEMBER 1941

  0650 HOURS LOCAL

  Twenty-three-year-old ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, stripped to just a loincloth, sat at the periscope of his midget submarine. Because he had no radio contact with the other SPS boats, he was unaware that one of them had just been sunk. He panned the periscope around to see if the USS Antares, the supply ship waiting outside the harbor, had been given clearance yet to move inside the bay and on to the docks. If the Antares was moving in that direction, then that would mean the underwater anti-sub net was open and Ensign Sakamaki could maneuver his midget sub, submerged below and behind the Antares, to get inside the harbor next to all the U.S. Navy ships at anchor around Ford Island. Sakamaki’s orders called for him to get inside the harbor and launch his two torpedoes and “sink as many ships as he could,” any way that he could. His orders made aircraft carriers the first priority, then battleships, followed by heavy cruisers. If the American carriers were not there, the Japanese submariners decided that their primary target should be the battleship USS Pennsylvania, the flagship of Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

  It had been more than seven hours since the midget sub had been released from the mother sub some ten miles away, and by now the sulfuric acid gases were building up inside the cramped sub.

  But Ensign Sakamaki had more problems inside his tiny sub than the buildup of toxic gases. Ever since they had detached from I-24, the minisub’s gyroscopic compass—his primary means of navigation—had been malfunctioning. He and his crewmate, Petty Officer Kiyoshi Inagaki, had been working for the past several hours to try to repair the gyrocompass but had been unsuccessful. Eager to participate in the attack, they were both growing increasingly anxious that they would not make it inside the harbor before the air attack began, in little more than an hour.

  Sakamaki’s duty was to steer the midget sub, and Inagaki’s job was to operate the ballast and trim valves. Working together, they tried to navigate toward the mouth of the anchorage by recalling the detailed charts of Pearl Harbor that they had memorized while en route across the Pacific from Japan. They, along with the other four midget sub crews, had been required to memorize all the pertinent details and layouts of not just Pearl but four other harbors as well: Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, and perhaps most frightening to the Americans, had they known about it, San Francisco.

  USS MONAGHAN, DD-354

  PEARL HARBOR

  7 DECEMBER 1941

  0755 HOURS LOCAL

  A little more than an hour after the USS Ward sank a sub outside the anchorage, the USS Curtiss, a seaplane tender, and an auxiliary ship, the USS Medusa, also sighted one of the midget subs—this time inside Pearl Harbor. They immediately sent messages to the USS Monaghan, a destroyer that had just gotten under way. But as the Monaghan got up steam to race toward the new contact, the sky was suddenly filled with planes and all hell broke loose around them.

  As Japanese aircraft dropped bombs and torpedoes, strafing the American airfields, barracks, and fleet, only one SPS midget sub penetrated the harbor. It launched a torpedo at the Curtiss, which by now had also been severely damaged after a Japanese plane had crashed into it. Despite fighting fires inside her hull and defending against other aircraft, the crew of the tender replied to the torpedo attack with a salvo of gunfire that scored a direct hit on the sub’s conning tower.

  The underwater missile intended for the tender missed and struck a dock at Pearl City. But the torpedo’s wake alerted lookouts on the USS Monaghan . With anti-aircraft guns blazing at swarming Zeros, the destroyer, belching black smoke to hide it from the aerial attack, charged at the minisub, which then fired its second torpedo at the bow of the oncoming American vessel. The shot went wide, and seconds later, the Monaghan rammed the sub at high speed, crumpling its stern like a discarded cigarette. For good measure, before clearing the blazing harbor, the Monaghan dropped depth charges on the damaged sub. She sank quickly into the mud at the bottom of the anchorage.

  By the time Commander Fuchida’s second wave of aircraft reached Pearl Harbor, the Monaghan had joined the Ward and several other U.S. combatants—including the cruisers Phoenix, St. Louis, and Detroit, and destroyers Tucker, Bagley, Dale, Henley, and Phelps—outside the anchorage. There they joined in the attack on two other SPS midget submersibles—one of which was detected and believed sunk by depth charges after it fired its torpedoes at the USS St. Louis. Though never confirmed, a fourth midget sub was initially presumed to have been sunk about a mile outside the harbor during one of several depth charge attacks by American destroyers that ensued during the afternoon of 7 December and the morning of the following day.

  Yamamoto’s misgivings about the SPS attack were proving to be well founded. But for one of the midget sub skippers, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, the attack would prove to be the most ignominious event of his life.

  ENSIGN KAZUO SAKAMAKI

  Aboard SPS I-24TOU

  Oahu, Hawaii

  8 December 1941

  We were under severe orders to keep our mission secret, so we couldn’t surface or make any noise. Two destroyers were working the area, patrolling. When I approached, they dropped many depth charges. I tried again to pass the patrol and get into the harbor. We were instructed to try to get past the anti-submarine net, and even cut the net if necessary to get into the harbor.

  We rushed the net and cut the wire mesh, trying to enter so we could get to our rendezvous point inside, but it was so hard, impossible to make a good course because my gyrocompass did not work. Then we got caught on the reef. We tried for four hours to try and get moving, but could not.

  The next day, 8 December , just before dawn, we emptied the ballast tanks. I ordered my crewman to abandon ship. At that time, both of us were overwhelmed by the bad air inside the submarine.

  Before I knew it I was floating in the sea, hurt. I cannot be sure, but maybe when we jumped into the water we got injured on the coral. I don’t know. Waves—big waves—pushed me to the island, in front of the American airfield.

  I was unconscious . . . and remembered nothing. I was captured.

  By the night of 7 December, the sole surviving midget sub, piloted by Ensign Sakamaki, was in dire straits. Its gyrocompass inoperable and batteries nearly depleted, the sub drifted east until it ran aground on a coral reef off Bellows Field late that night. Sakamaki and his junior officer, Inagaki, were forced to abandon ship. Before doing so, they set a detonator on an explosive device to keep their sub from falling into American hands. Then they swam for the shore, fewer than a hundred yards from where the sub ran aground. Unfortunately for the hapless Sakamaki, the explosive charge failed to work as advertised and the sub did not self-destruct and sink. Worse still, Inagaki either drowned or committed suicide, and the exhausted Sakamaki, injured from the coral and sick from the poisonous fumes that had filled the submarine, barely made it ashore, where he finally collapsed, unconscious.

  The next thing he recalls is a Colt .45 automatic pistol being held against his head by an American soldier, yelling at him in English to get up. The soldier holding the pistol was Corporal Akui of the Hawaii National Guard. He had just made Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, Imperial Navy, the first Japanese prisoner of war.

  SECOND LIEUTENANT STEVE WEINER, US ARMY

  Bellows Field Communications Shack

  Pearl Harbor

  7–8 December 1941

  Early Sunday morning, just as the attack began, there was a four-engine plane that buzzed our field. Now, Bellows Field is just a short strip, used for gunnery practice for P-40 fighter planes. And when this plane passed over, we thought it was the Navy, but they didn’t have four-engine planes. Moments later, there was a crash. A B-17 trying to land on our strip had overrun our runway and crashed into the ditch at the far end. Those of us that were in the BOQ [Bachelor Officers’ Quarters] got dressed quic
kly, ran down to the plane, and found that the crew was semi-hysterical. They had been shot up—some of them were bleeding, and you could see where the plane had been shot at.

  We asked them, “What do you mean, you were attacked? Who attacked you?”

  And while we were trying to make sense of the situation, a flight of Japanese fighter planes came in and started strafing us, and we all ran for cover. I ran to the operations shack, where there was a space between the floor and the ground. I stayed there until the attackers left.

  After the attack, the armory was opened. None of us had carried arms before, but now we could take whatever we wanted. We each took .45s and M1 rifles, but there was no loose ammunition for the rifles. All they had were bandoliers for the .30-caliber machine guns, but the shells fit the rifles. So we wrapped bandoliers around us.

  We were advised to pair off, dig a foxhole, and be prepared for hand-to-hand combat. By late afternoon I paired off with a young pilot from Texas. He was greener than me, and neither of us had ever fired a gun. So it starts to rain, and it was a miserable time, and we’re sitting commiserating with each other—how it might be our last day on earth. He was sitting on my right, and because it was raining he took out his handkerchief to wipe his rifle, and he fired it across my lap. And I almost became a Pearl Harbor Purple Heart recipient on the first day of the war!

  Later, after dark, we were sitting in the foxhole, and we saw two figures walking toward us from the ocean, about a hundred yards from where we were. When they got close enough, we saw that one was Corporal Akui, who had been stationed at the end of the runway. He was a member of the Hawaiian National Guard, leading a prisoner who was nude, with the exception of a loincloth. The corporal turned him over to us.