shift released from duty; graveyard shifts were ordered not to report. Lights were
out in Portland, Oregon, where huge shipbuilding plants were closed, as were the-
aters, and motor traffic halted at 10:30 p.m. In such an atmosphere, rumors flour-
ished, including one that women pilots had taken part in the Pearl Harbor attack. 5
*
The East Coast was primed for action, too, with 40,000 civilian observers called
out to man 1,300 posts in thirteen states and the District of Columbia. The
stations would be manned twenty-four hours daily. At Mitchel Field on New
York’s Long Island, the Air Force sent up combat air patrols and also maintained
a ground alert with interceptor planes spotted on the runways with engines
warmed up and ready to take off. It was, the Air Force said, ready to meet any
enemy. 6 , 7 The specific purpose of these arrangements was to make sure New York didn’t become another Pearl Harbor.
While the 62nd Coast Artillery of Fort Totten, Queens, installed antiaircraft
artillery at various points around the city, police and fire departments agreed upon
a series of air-raid warning signals. Special attention was paid to giving the city’s
800,000 public school pupils sufficient time to reach their homes. 8 , 9 New Yorkers were admonished by radio reports to keep calm. They did. In Washington, Secretary of State Hull issued a warning to the nation to be on the alert for a surprise
attack. But he emphasized that the warning was not connected to current reports
of enemy planes approaching the Eastern Seaboard. 10
Unconfirmed reports of the approach of enemy aircraft triggered the alarm
at the Quonset Naval Base where civilians were evacuated, and officers and men
sent to their Rhode Island battle stations. Boston sources reported “official word”
of the approach of enemy aircraft, and civilian employees there were evacuated
from the Boston Navy Yard. As in New York, schools were evacuated and children
sent home. One assumes that there was a certain joy mixed with apprehension
168 First Week at War: December 8–13, 1941
at this turn of events. At the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company near Boston, its
18,000 employees were evacuated as the Massachusetts Civilian Air Raid Warning
Service manned its high observation towers throughout the region in cooperation
with the Army.
Additional precautionary measures were taken throughout the New York metro-
politan area. New York’s Idlewild Airport was shut down while Coast Guard planes
patrolled the area. The Coast Guard warned of incendiary bombs along New York’s
waterfront, its warehouses filled with millions of dollars of arms and supplies. 11
*
This vast and varied response to the perceived threat was, except as practice, in
vain. The enemy aircraft, so often reported, were never seen and their existence
never confirmed. War and rumors of war are inseparable. Clearly these events
conveyed to large blocks of the U.S. population a heightened appreciation of the
war into which they had now been thrust.
New York City had the jitters. A mysterious Mr. Reilly had telephoned to
report a Japanese-looking man carrying a heavy bag who, walking out of Pennsyl-
vania Station, had declared: “This will take care of the station.” Detectives rushed
FIGURE 16.1 “I Am an American”: a Japanese-American’s grocery store in Oakland, California, December 8, 1941.
Photo by Dorothea Lange. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62–23602.
Tuesday, December 9, 1941 169
to search the station’s baggage rooms for the hypothetical bomb. In the event,
neither the bomb, the Japanese-looking gentleman nor the mysterious Mr. Reilly
could be found. 12
Citizens found varied ways to express their indignation and anger at the Japa-
nese attack. Yonkers was upset. Hedda Bahtsin, a Russian-born antique dealer
there, gathered together all of the objects in the shop bearing a “Made in Japan”
label and proceeded to smash each and every one with an axe and a hammer.
Placing the large pile of shards in his show window, he explained them with a sign
declaring: “This is our stock of Jap goods.” 13
In Seattle, a crowd of a thousand shared Bahtsin’s emotions. But he had only
destroyed his own property. The Seattle mob, for a mob it was, streaming through
the city’s downtown, hurled rocks, bottles and tin cans at some thirty shop win-
dows that were illuminating the surrounding darkness of the blackout. A rock
smashed the window of a small jewelry store. Into it rushed a young man who
triumphantly emerged holding high not jewels but the offending light bulb. The
crowd then turned to looting, throwing some of the merchandise into the streets
while other items disappeared into the pockets of the rioters. The outnumbered
police were totally unable to control or direct the movements of the mob. When
the crowd finally subsided, Seattle’s downtown was missing merchandise and lit-
tered with broken glass; but not a single light remained shining. 14
Los Angeles was the home of the largest Japanese community in the coun-
try. If the city’s response was more peaceable than Seattle’s, its treatment of its
Japanese businesses was peremptory. Officers of the Treasury Department, the
Federal Reserve Bank, the FBI, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office moved in to shut
down all Japanese banks, department stores, produce houses, and saloons in Little
Tokyo. Only a few drug stores and markets remained open. The doors of the
Yokahama Specie Bank and the Sumitomo Bank, both Japanese owned, were
padlocked. The two Japanese newspapers were also shut down, and No Parking
signs were scattered throughout Little Tokyo to prevent gatherings of curiosity
seekers who might turn hostile or even violent. The inhabitants of Little Tokyo
for the moment were bereft of their stores, shops, markets, indeed of the necessities
and conveniences of daily life, and were left to ponder their fate during a new and
adverse dispensation. 15
In such an atmosphere, it was not only Japanese Americans who suffered. In
San Francisco, Mrs. Marie Sayre was shot by a guard when the car in which she
was a passenger did not heed the guard’s signal to stop. 16
America at War: Causes for Concern
By Tuesday, December 9, the smoke of battle had cleared and the Japanese Navy
broadcast its claims of victory. It claimed the sinking of two battleships, the
31,800-ton
West Virginia and the 28,000-ton Oklahoma. This report was true,
as was the report of damage to four other battleships. Japan also claimed the
destruction of some 300 U.S. aircraft in Hawaii and the Philippines. This also
was a fact. What was not true was the claim that a Japanese submarine had sunk
an American aircraft carrier off Honolulu. It was the great good fortune of the
170 First Week at War: December 8–13, 1941
Americans, and a great disappointment to the Japanese, that the American car-
rier f leet had been at sea, safely distant from the destruction at Pearl Harbor. 17
The U.S. Navy was tight-lipped in its assessment of the damage it had suffered.
It announced that one old battleship had capsized. That was the Arizona , which
remains in Pearl Harbor today
as a monument to the events of the date of infamy.
It also announced that a destroyer had blown up; that was the USS Cassin. Several other smaller ships were damaged. This was far from a complete accounting of the
twenty-two U.S. Navy vessels sunk or severely damaged. The same communiqué
admitted “a large number of planes” destroyed in the attack and a toll of 3,000
casualties divided equally between the dead and the wounded.
The Japanese news agency Domei was quick to claim “magnificent early gains”
that would give Japan domination over the Pacific. Any forces that the United
States could bring to bear, it added, would be “utterly inadequate” to achieve any
success in an encounter with the Japanese fleet, which it announced, correctly, had
suffered no losses. 18
In all its history, the United States had never endured such a defeat. In fact, in
the era of the modern battleship, it had never lost one. In December 1941, the
navies of the world still counted their strength in the big-gun, heavily armored
behemoths of the battleship line. Naval strategists concerned themselves with
the balance of battleship power, harking back to the day when the battleships of
the Royal Navy and the German High Seas thunderously clashed at Jutland. In
this reckoning the U.S. Navy had seventeen battleships prior to the Pearl Harbor
attack, and the Japanese twelve. If only six U.S. battleships had been sunk or dis-
abled at Pearl Harbor—and they were—the Japanese fleet would gain numerical
superiority over the U.S. Navy. 19
What was not appreciated that day in December 1941 was how quickly the
battleship would be relegated to a secondary role in the immense naval battles
about to take place. The great age of the aircraft carrier and its attendant task force
was dawning.
*
It was natural that passions should be aroused in Washington. A reporter asked
Senator Tom Connelly of Texas if it was true that he had “given unshirted hell”
to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox at the last evening’s White House confer-
ence. The wary senator would neither confirm nor deny, but he did ask a ques-
tion: “Where were our airplanes and patrols in Honolulu? Up in Baguio?” In
translation the snide reference was to a popular Philippine resort area. 20
Senators David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, Chairman of the Senate Naval
Affairs Committee, and Representative Carl Vinson of Georgia, Chairman of the
House Naval Affairs Committee, called on the Navy Department for a detailed
investigation of the Hawaiian disaster. In any such investigation the burden would
undoubtedly fall upon Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. 21
*
Meanwhile, the conf lict was spreading across the globe. As Churchill had long
said it would, Britain immediately declared war on Japan. Japanese planes raided
Tuesday, December 9, 1941 171
Hong Kong’s mainland Kowloon enclave. Further attacks were imminent but
the Hong Kong garrison remained confident that the situation was “develop-
ing according to anticipations.” 22 The British were also reported as mopping up Japanese landings in Malaya, another front where British optimism would soon
evaporate. Japanese had by now taken over Thailand and captured and disarmed
the U.S. Marine guard at the Peiping Embassy. 23
America at War: A Massive Response
The response of the American people to the Pearl Harbor attack was best exem-
plified by the immense wave of recruits that surged into the recruiting stations
of all of the services across the whole country. New York was typical. Outside
the recruiting stations were long lines of those who had spent the night waiting
for the doors to open. It was hours earlier than usual when indeed they did and
they stayed open until long past normal closing hours. The Navy had to call
for additional physicians to conduct examinations and applications for commis-
sions were being received at five times the normal rate, indeed at the rate of one
every four minutes. The mood of the crowd was one of cheery confidence best
expressed by this sentiment: “The Japs asked for it and they’re going to get it.”
They were, it was often said, anxious for “a crack at the Japs.” Faced with 2,000
eager prospective recruits, in an attempt to manage the crowd, Navy recruiters
ordered a thousand men home to return later; but no one wanted to leave, and
the order was soon rescinded. In Houston, the long waiting lines held all ages
from schoolboys with books under their arms to veterans of the World War and
even of the Spanish-American War. The crowd was portrayed as “seething with
anger and determination to help their nation defend its shores and to beat down
the Empire of the Rising Sun.” In Scranton, Pennsylvania, Mayor-elect John F.
O’Brien was one of the first in line at the Navy recruiting office. “No old Navy
man can take this sitting down,” he said. In New Haven, Connecticut, volunteers
included Alan Bartholemy, captain of the 1941 Yale football team, and Chapman
W. Schanandoah, an Onondaga Indian whose tribe was one of the Six Nations of
the Iroquois Confederacy that had opposed Selective Service.
Earl Garvin of Houston was an ex-Marine with twenty years’ service who
brought sixteen medals to the recruiting station “to prove he had what it takes.”
Major John D. O’Lilly sent Garvin’s application to Washington assuring him that
it would receive prompt action. In San Antonio, Travis Cotton had been exempted
from the draft. “I waive the exemption,” he told the recruiter. “Put me on the
first train to Tokyo.” And Horace W. Crouch of Fort Worth, a vermin extermi-
nator applying for a Navy aviation post, remarked: “I want to exterminate some
Germans,” a sentiment unusual on a day when all eyes and hearts were focused
on Japan. 24 , 25
None were more eager to serve than the 250 convicts at the Utah State Peni-
tentiary who petitioned Governor Herbert H. Maw for a release enabling them
to enlist in the U.S. armed forces against Japan. 26 At the other end of the scale was Texas Representative Lyndon B. Johnson, who had recently been nosed out
in a race for a U.S. Senate seat by Senator W. Lee O’Daniel. Johnson, a Lieutenant
172 First Week at War: December 8–13, 1941
Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve, wrote the President with a copy to the
Secretary of the Navy, “urgently requesting my Commander In Chief to assign
me to active duty with a fleet.”
“I am a member,” he said, “of the U.S. Naval Reserve. When I vote to send
your boy to war, I will leave my seat to go with him.” 27 It was a testament to the times that the long lines at the recruiting stations did not include women. That
would await another generation. But women rushed to volunteer and crowds
besieged the New York headquarters of the American Red Cross and of the Office
of Civilian Defense, which was described as a “madhouse.” The roles assigned to
women were traditional. The Red Cross established six new sewing units and a
nursing service. For the more adventurous, there was a Motor Corps. 28
Other assurances of feminine dedication to the cause included the resolution
adopted by the faculty of Vassar College:
We, the president and th
e members of the faculty of Vassar College, in a
deep sense of the gravity of the national crisis, reaffirm our loyalty to the
country and pledge our unstinted support through the course declared by
Congress. Insofar as our skills and our special training may prove useful,
we wish to offer them to the service of the nation as a whole. 29
Similar sentiments were expressed by the Portland Advisory Council for Negroes
in a letter to the President by Dr. DeNorval Unthank, assuring him that its mem-
bers would carry out his least and greatest command. The letter went on to
express complete confidence in the present safety and in the ultimate victory of
the nation. 30
Such sentiments crossed religious lines. The annual report of the President to
New York’s Congregation Emanu-El was delivered by Vice President Sydney B.
Herman in the absence of its president, Lewis L. Strauss, who was on active duty
with the Navy. The report asserted confidence in the religious truths upon which
the country was founded, truths which neither men nor nations could destroy. 31
Joining in the almost unanimous wave of national opinion, the forces of iso-
lationism did not engage in recriminations or accusations. If not its titular reader,
Charles A. Lindbergh had been the most public face and strident voice of isola-
tionism. He issued this statement from the America First Committee headquarters
in Chicago:
We have been stepping close to war for many months. Now it has come
and we must meet it as united Americans regardless of our attitude in the
past toward the policy our government has followed.
Whether or not that policy has been wise, our country has been attacked
by force of arms and by force of arms we must retaliate. Our own defenses
and our own military position have already been neglected too long. We
must turn every effort to building the greatest and most efficient Army,
Navy and Air Force in the world. When American soldiers go to war it
must be with the best equipment that modern skill can design and that
modern industry can build. 32
Tuesday, December 9, 1941 173
General R. E. Wood, America First’s national chairman, pledged its support to
the nation:
This committee was organized to oppose America’s involvement in Euro-
Crucible of a Generation Page 27
