D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  On November 27, the Pearl Harbor strike force sailed from its secret anchorages in the southern Kurile Islands. It left with the Emperor’s blessing; and he himself worked closely on the war rescript, which stated, “Our empire has been brought to cross swords with America and Britain” in a war that he, the Emperor, said he had resisted but now considered “unavoidable.”36 And so His Royal Majesty sent his country into a war that would come close to destroying it, claiming, incredibly, that it was peace he really wanted.

  Unaware of the location of the Japanese navy, but expecting an attack somewhere, most likely in Southeast Asia, Washington sent out a war warning to all American commanders in the Pacific. One of them was Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.

  PEARL HARBOR

  On Sunday, December 7, the two Japanese emissaries appeared at Hull’s office with their government’s final reply to his “ultimatum.” Minutes before the meeting, Roosevelt had telephoned Hull with the news that the Japanese were at that very moment bombing Pearl Harbor. The secretary was told to receive the diplomats’ reply and curtly dismiss them. After pretending to examine the document, Hull glared at the two men with undisguised disdain and declared: “In all my fifty years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions—infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any Government on this planet was capable of uttering them.” He then waved the two diplomats to the door.

  Later that day, Nomura, who had not been informed of his government’s plans to attack Pearl Harbor, wrote in his diary: “The report of our surprise attack against Hawaii reached my ears when I returned home from the state department; this might have reached Hull’s ears during our conversation.”37

  The Hawaii attack was carried out with almost flawless resolve by Air Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. It was a daring move. A major base had never been assaulted in daylight by a carrier force, and many high ranking American planners considered Pearl Harbor—the greatest concentration of American military might in the world—impregnable. But Japan had greater carrier strength than any other nation in the world, and the world’s best trained carrier fliers. And its assault planes, armed with the most lethal torpedoes ever developed, were vastly superior to anything America could put in the air at the time. Even so, success depended on the strictest secrecy.

  Yamamoto put to sea a massive task force composed of the Imperial Navy’s six newest and largest carriers, accompanied by battleships, light cruisers, destroyers, fleet submarines, supply ships, and tankers. At sunrise, December 7, 230 miles north of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, the air was alive with the roar of enemy planes. At 7:02 two Army privates manning an experimental radar system reported a large flight of incoming planes, but their superior officer assured them that these were B-17 bombers due in from California on their way to the Philippines.

  Just minutes earlier, the destroyer Ward had attacked a tiny two-man Japanese submarine trying to slip into Pearl Harbor. These were the opening shots of World War II for the United States.

  The Ward’s skipper, Lieutenant William W. Outerbridge, reported the attack but senior commanders were skeptical. There had been false submarine sightings in that same area—even whales had been depth-charged—so they would wait for verification. While they waited, 183 Japanese attack planes homed in on the radio beam of station KGMB in Honolulu, which guided them straight to their target.

  The attack was a total surprise. American cryptanalysts, who had broken Japan’s diplomatic code, but not all its military codes, had warned Washington of an imminent attack, but most indications were that the strike would occur in Southeast Asia, not at Pearl Harbor. The Japanese carrier force had moved from the remote Kurile Islands, north of Japan, across the nearly empty North Pacific, under absolute radio silence, confounding American naval intercept units. As historian David Kahn has written, “code-breaking intelligence did not prevent and could not have prevented Pearl Harbor, because Japan never sent any message to anybody saying anything like ‘We shall attack Pearl Harbor.’” Japan’s ambassadors in Washington had not even been told of the plan. “The real reason for the success of the Pearl Harbor attack lies in the island empire’s hermetic security. Despite the American code-breakers, Japan kept her secret.”38

  Lieutenant Commander Mitsuo Fuchida led the attack from the flagship carrier Akagi. He was thirty-nine years old and a devoted admirer of Adolf Hitler, even to the point—with his trim black mustache—of trying to look like him. When he received orders to launch the strike at dawn, he thought to himself, “Who could be luckier than I?”

  At 5:30 A.M. the flying crews of the first wave of fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes took off from six carriers that were pitching and rolling in the wind-whipped sea. The strike force climbed into heavy clouds but, “the sky cleared as we moved in on the target, and Pearl Harbor was plainly visible from the northwest valley of the island,” Fuchida later described the attack. “I studied our objective through binoculars. They were there all right, all eight [battleships].”

  JAPANESE BOMBERS OVER PEARL HARBOR (NA).

  To the disappointment of the attackers, the three aircraft carriers of the Pacific Fleet were at sea, one on the West Coast, the other two delivering squardons of planes to Wake and Midway islands. But the seven war wagons lined up along Battleship Row, all but one of the battleships in port, presented Fuchida with a satisfying target. “Notify all planes to launch attacks,” he ordered his radioman. The time was 7:49 A.M.

  “Knowing the Admirals Nagumo and Yamamoto and the General Staff were anxious about the attack, I decided that they should be informed,” Fuchida recalled. “I ordered that the following message be sent to the fleet: ‘We have succeeded in making a surprise attack. Request you relay this report to Tokyo….’

  “The code for a successful surprise attack was ‘Tora, tora, tora.’ … There is a Japanese saying, ‘A tiger (tora) goes out 1,000 ri (2,000 miles) and returns without fail.’”

  Within minutes Fuchida saw towering waterspouts rising alongside the battleships, each of them a small city with upward of 15,000 crew. “Suddenly a colossal explosion occurred in Battleship Row. A huge column of dark red smoke rose to 1,000 feet and a stiff shock wave reached our plane…. Studying Battleship Row through binoculars, I saw that the big explosion had been on the Arizona.”39

  The USS Solace was the only hospital ship at anchor at Pearl Harbor that morning. On board was corpsman James F. Anderson of Fort Worth, Texas:

  I REMEMBER VERY CLEARLY WHAT LOOKED like a dive-bomber coming in over the Arizona and dropping a bomb. I saw that bomb go down through what looked like a stack, and almost instantly it cracked the bottom of the Arizona, blowing the whole bow loose. It rose out of the water and settled. I could see flames, fire, and smoke coming out of that ship, and I saw two men flying through the air and the fire, screaming as they went. Where they ended up I’ll never know….

  Almost immediately we started getting casualties, and from that point on I was very busy in our surgical ward. I remember only one of the men we got was able to tell us his name. The others were all in such critical condition they couldn’t talk at all. They were all very badly burned from the oil and flash burns. The one who gave us his name did not have a single stitch of clothing on. The only thing left was a web belt with his chief’s buckle, his chief-master-at-arms’ badge, and the letters USS Nevada. He survived but he had a very long cut down the top of his head and every time he breathed his scalp would open up and I could see his skull.

  We were using tannic acid for the burns. Every sheet we had in the ward was immediately brown. Many of the men who came in had their ears burned completely off, their noses badly burned, and their fingers bent like candles from the intense heat they had been in. Their bodies were just like hot dogs that had fallen in the fire and burned. All we could do for those poor fellows was give them morphine and pour the tannic acid over
them.

  For forty-eight hours after the assault, launches from the Solace combed the harbor picking up the remains of the bodies that had floated to the surface. “Our corpsmen tried very hard to salvage any part of a human body that could be identified,” Anderson recalls. “We brought these parts back and tried to identify finger prints or teeth or anything of this kind…. The parts were brought to the morgue, where we would clean them of oil and try to identify them.”40

  While Anderson and his fellow corpsmen went about their gruesome business, rescue crews worked frantically to reach sailors trapped in the battleship Oklahoma. which was hit by five aerial torpedoes and overturned.

  One of the thirty-two surviving seamen caught in the doomed ship, which rested upside down at the bottom of the shallow harbor, a part of its massive hull exposed above the water, was nineteen-year-old Stephen Bower Young, a native of Massachusetts. At 9:00 A.M., Monday, December 8, Young and his fellow survivors were pulled from the overturned battlewagon by a Navy yard rescue team. They had been entombed for twenty-four hours. Oil-soaked and almost naked, they were picked by a motor launch from the Solace. “As our launch moved across the harbor, past the sunken West Virginia and the still smoking wreckage of the Arizona, we were too shocked to speak,” Young said later. “It would take time to realize the enormity of that attack on Pearl Harbor. But we all knew that nothing would ever be the same for us. The world had changed. We knew that at the time, we really did.”41

  The Oklahoma lost 415 men at Pearl Harbor, more men than any other ship except the Arizona. That great battlewagon was hit by an armor-piercing bomb that smashed through the ship’s steel deck and landed in its forward magazine, igniting more than one million tons of ammunition. Together the crews of the two stricken battleships accounted for over two thirds of the dead at Pearl Harbor, including, on the Arizona, thirty sets of brothers. These were the only battleships that were not repaired and returned to duty. Today, the Arizona remains where it sank, with 1,177 sailors and Marines entombed in the wreckage, men who died before they knew who or why they were fighting. The volcanic explosion that sank the Arizona killed more human beings than any single explosion in recorded history, a record broken less than four years later by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

  Using heavy electric winches, Navy workers righted Oklahoma and divers removed the remains of over 400 men who had gone down with her. The old battlewagon, however, was too badly damaged to be repaired. After the war, she was sold for scrap. While being towed to the West Coast she took on a list—the same heavy port list she’d taken on December 7, 1941—and sank. Better an honorable ocean grave, her former crew rejoiced, than to be cut up to make razor blades.

  Eight battleships, three light cruisers, three destroyers, and four auxiliary ships were either sunk or damaged in the shattering attack that lasted less than two hours. Arizona and Oklahoma were wrecked beyond repair, and three battleships, West Virginia, California, and Nevada, were put out of action temporarily. The Army and Navy lost 165 aircraft, most of them on the ground. The Navy lost 2,008 men killed and 710 wounded, over twice as many casualties as it sustained in the Spanish-American War and World War I combined. The Army and Marine Corps together lost 327 killed and 433 wounded. Sixty-eight civilians were killed. By comparison, Japan lost five midget submarines and only twenty-nine of the 354 planes launched from its carrier task force, although many others were badly shot up. Pearl Harbor was one of warfare’s most one-sided victories.

  It was also America’s greatest military disaster, but not as the Japanese had hoped, an irretrievable one. The three carriers in the Pacific Fleet, Enterprise, Saratoga, and Lexington—the fleet’s main striking force in the new age of naval aerial warfare that Pearl Harbor helped to inaugurate—were intact and battle-ready. And the Japanese failed to launch an additional attack on Pearl Harbor’s enormous fuel dump, its submarine base, and its naval repair shops. After returning to the Akagi with the first wave of assault planes, while the second wave was still over Pearl Harbor, Mitsuo Fuchida had urged a third strike. But Admiral Nagumo feared that another attack might expose his fleet to the American carriers, whose whereabouts were unknown. It was a major mistake. All the oil supplies for the fleet were in tanks “that were vulnerable to .50 caliber bullets,” said Admiral Chester Nimitz, who took command of the Pacific Fleet after the attack. “Had the Japanese destroyed the oil, it would have prolonged the war another two years.”42 And without fueling or repair facilities, the entire American Pacific Fleet would have had to return to San Diego. Except Arizona and Oklahoma, all of the warships that were sunk or damaged were back in active service within a year. The waters of Pearl Harbor were so shallow that ships were salvaged that would have been lost forever had they been sunk in open seas.

  A NAVY RESCUE CREW STANDS ON THE UPTURNED HULL OF THE OKLAHOMA, PEARL HARBOR (NA).

  It was the first attack by a foreign power on American territory since the War of 1812 and the nation reacted with a deep desire for revenge. The attack on Pearl Harbor “shook the United States as nothing had since the firing on Fort Sumter,” wrote Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, the Navy’s semiofficial historian.43 Republicans and Democrats, interventionists and isolationists, labor and capital, closed ranks in a solid phalanx, and a nation of nearly 140 million people moved from peace to war with a unity it had never known before in time of crisis. Shortly after noon on December 8, President Roosevelt appeared before a joint session of the Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Japan. Congress responded with only a single dissenting vote.

  Yamamoto’s surprise attack had backfired. It committed an aroused America to a fight to the finish with Japan, ending in the war’s opening hour all hope that Japan’s leaders might have had for a short, sharp conflict and a negotiated peace. On hearing of the sinking of the American battle fleet at Pearl Harbor, the former president of Tokyo Imperial University whispered to a colleague in the dining hall, “This means that Japan is sunk too.”44

  But that was not the mood at the Imperial Palace. When told that the Hawaii attack was a complete success, the Emperor put on his military uniform and all that day was “in a splendid mood,” one of his aides noted in his diary.45

  At the White House, the atmosphere was not as somber as one would have expected. The President, said his chief aide, Harry Hopkins, was both shocked and relieved by the attack on Pearl Harbor. For well over a year, Roosevelt’s secret fear was that the Japanese would avoid a war with America, that they would not attack Hawaii or the Philippines—American possessions—but would “move on Thailand, French Indo-China, make further inroads on China itself and possibly attack the Malay Straits…. This,” said Hopkins, “would have left the President with the very difficult problem of protecting our national interests.” To stop the Japanese he would have had to ask Congress for a declaration of war. But the members would have been unlikely to give him this, short of an attack on American soil. “Hence his great relief,” Hopkins recalled, that Japan had struck directly at the United States. “In spite of the disaster of Pearl Harbor … it completely solidified the American people and made the war upon Japan inevitable.”46

  On December 11, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, a decision that might have been more calamitous for its cause than its invasion of Russia the previous June. “Now it is impossible for us to lose the war!’ Adolf Hitler told his skeptical generals. “We now have an ally who has never been vanquished in three thousand years.”47

  Hitler had long considered war with the United States inevitable and had been pressing Japan to come into the fight on the Axis side. He even proposed a surprise U-boat attack on the American Navy in port, a plan his admirals considered preposterous. One reason Hitler had not taken on the Americans earlier was because he lacked the large surface navy he thought essential to achieve total victory. But with Japan in the fight, he would have its aircraft carriers and battleships, along with his own U-boats, to deal with the United States—a combatant forced to rely o
n the seas to get both its ground and air forces into the fight.48

  Fascist Italy declared war on the United States hours after Hitler’s announcement. The wars in Europe and Asia became one gigantic world war, an unprecedented global conflagration.

  The French correspondent Robert Guillain was under internment in Tokyo when the newspapers hit the streets announcing the attack on Pearl Harbor. He watched people’s reactions as they read the papers they hurriedly bought from bell-ringing vendors:

  THEY TOOK A FEW STEPS, THEN suddenly stopped to read more carefully; the heads lowered, then recoiled. When they looked up their faces were again inscrutable, transformed into masks of seeming indifference. Not a word to the vendor, nor to each other….

  I knew them well enough to understand their reaction…. They had instigated the war and yet they did not want it. Out of bravado, and to imitate their leaders, they had talked constantly about it, but they had not believed it would happen. What? A new war? For it was now added, superimposed, on the China war that had dragged on for three and a half years. And this time what an enemy: America! … The America which the Japanese for a quarter of a century had thought of as the champion of modern civilization, the ever-admired, ever-imitated model….

  Japan was at war with terrifying America.49

  On the afternoon of December 7, Private James Jones, later the author of the novel From Here to Eternity, was being transported with his unit from Schofield Barracks to Pearl City. As the line of trucks passed Pearl Harbor, with smoke columns rising “as far as the eye could see,” he recalls thinking “that none of our lives would ever be the same, that a social, even a cultural watershed had been crossed which we could never go back over, and I wondered how many of us would survive to see the end results. I wondered if I would. I had just turned twenty, the month before.”50