by Toland, John
From Washington to Hong Kong it was expected that Japan would probably strike in hours. But in many places “readiness” was merely a word. Few were actually prepared for the brutal reality of war. And not one was yet aware of the detailed, ingenious Japanese plan of attack which was about to be loosed from Pearl Harbor to Singapore.
It had been a bright, warm, pleasant Sunday in Tokyo, but to Otto Tolischus it was “ominously quiet” and everyone in Japan “seemed to be waiting for something.” He spent most of the day at his typewriter working on an article about Ambassador Grew for the New York Times Magazine. The old cry against “foreign barbarians,” he wrote, was being revived now that the Japanese had learned all they could from the Occident about warfare.
… As a result the long-predicted war between the white and yellow races in general, and war between Japan and the United States in particular, has become an imminent possibility, and whether it shall become a grim reality is now the great issue being decided in Tokyo and Washington.
Tolischus read over what he had written. It sounded a little strong, but he decided to let it stand and sent it by messenger to Grew for approval.
It was not the imminence of war but the possible discovery of the secret attacks which concerned Japan’s leaders that Sunday. Just before noon a cable reported that the convoy heading for the Malay Peninsula across the Gulf of Siam had been sighted by a British flying boat. A few minutes later it was learned that an Army fighter pilot had shot down the British plane. But had the flying boat had time to radio back the information?f
Roosevelt’s personal bid for peace—his letter to the Emperor—reached Tokyo at noon; however, a recent general directive would automatically hold it up for ten hours. The previous day Lieutenant Colonel Morio Tomura of the Army General Staff had phoned his friend Tateki Shirao, the censor for the Ministry of Communications, instructing him to delay all foreign cables on an alternating schedule of ten hours one day, five hours the next. Sunday, December 7, happened to be the day scheduled for ten hours.
Ambassador Grew first heard of the message from the daily San Francisco news broadcast but didn’t receive it until ten-thirty in the evening despite its TRIPLE PRIORITY stamp. He was justifiably annoyed. It was fifteen minutes past midnight when Grew, decoded message in hand, arrived at Togo’s official residence. He told the Foreign Minister that he had a personal message from Roosevelt to the Emperor and read it aloud.
Togo promised “to study the document” and “present the matter to the Throne.” As soon as Grew left, Togo phoned Imperial Household Minister Tsuneo Matsudaira and asked if the Emperor could be disturbed at such a late hour. He was told to call Kido, since a message from the President was political, not ceremonial. Togo phoned the Privy Seal at his home in Akasaka. Kido said that under these circumstances His Majesty could be roused “even in the dead of night,” and promised to leave for the Palace at once.
Togo drove to the Prime Minister’s official residence. Does the message contain any concessions? was Tojo’s first question. The answer was no. “Well, then, nothing can be done, can it?” Tojo remarked, but had no objection to Togo taking the letter to the Emperor. Together the two worked out a reply, which amounted to a polite refusal, and Togo got up to leave. “It’s a pity to run around disturbing people in the middle of the night,” he joked.
“It’s a good thing the telegram arrived late,” said Tojo, and he was probably being facetious. “If it had come a day or two earlier we would have had more of a to-do.”
Togo found Kido waiting for him at the Palace. “There’s no use, is there?” said the Privy Seal upon learning what was in the message. “What’s Tojo’s opinion?”
“The same as yours.”
5.
About the time Grew received the Roosevelt telegram, Commander Kramer was at his office in the Navy Department reading the fourteenth part of the message to Hull breaking off negotiations. It was 8 A.M., December 7, in Washington.
The entire fourteen parts were assembled, put in folders, and once more Kramer began his delivery rounds. By 10:20 he was back in his own office. Another important message was on the desk. It was the telegram from Togo to Nomura marked URGENT—VERY IMPORTANT, ordering the admiral to submit the entire message to Hull at 1 P.M.
While it was being put in folders Kramer hastily made a time-zone circle and discovered that 1 P.M. would be 7:30 A.M. in Hawaii. Having spent two years at Pearl Harbor, he knew this was the normal time for the piping of the crew to Sunday breakfast—a very quiet time indeed. Disturbed, he headed down the corridors of the sprawling Navy Building for Admiral Stark’s office.
On Massachusetts Avenue the Japanese were in a state approaching disorder. The cipher staff had returned to work after the farewell party and numerous sake toasts to finish the thirteen parts before midnight, then waited impatiently hour after hour for the final part. Finally at dawn everyone but a duty officer went home. About an hour later a bundle of cables arrived. One was Part Fourteen, sent from Tokyo by both Mackay and RCA and marked VERY IMPORTANT in plain English.
The duty officer called his colleagues, but it was almost 10 A.M. before the cipher crew was back on the job, grumbling about lost sleep. In the meantime First Secretary Okumura was slowly, laboriously tapping away at a typewriter in an attempt to get a clean copy of the message. But he was an amateur typist, and though he had been laboring for two hours, he was far from finished.
It wasn’t until 10:30 that Nomura was reading the decoded instructions to hand the entire message to Hull at 1 P.M. He hadn’t yet read the fourteenth part, which had arrived three and a half hours earlier but was yet to be deciphered. He hastily phoned Hull’s office to set up the appointment. Sorry, was the reply, Secretary Hull had a luncheon engagement. “It is a matter of extreme importance,” the admiral said urgently—and if not Hull, how about his undersecretary? After a pause he was told that Hull himself would be available.
A few minutes later Okumura finally finished his bumbling typing of the first thirteen parts, but the eleven pages of typescript were so full of erasures that he decided it would never do as an official Japanese document. He started to redo the whole thing, this time with the assistance of another amateur typist, a junior interpreter. Despite everything, Okumura felt sure that he could finish the entire document in time for the one o’clock appointment.
When Nomura was calling Hull, young Kramer stepped into Stark’s office. The admiral, who had just returned from a leisurely walk around the grounds and greenhouses of his quarters, was engrossed in the fourteen-part message. While waiting in the outer office, Kramer pointed out to a colleague the possible significance of the one o’clock time with reference to Hawaii.
At last Stark finished the long message and then read the “one o’clock” note. “Why don’t you pick up the telephone and call Admiral Kimmel?” an intelligence man suggested. Stark reached for the phone but decided his “war warning” of November 27 was enough to keep everyone on his toes. Besides, a raid on Pearl Harbor seemed most unlikely. He said he’d rather call the President and dialed the White House. The President’s line was busy.
Even the fourteenth part had failed to alarm Colonel Bratton, but a glance at the “one o’clock” note sent him into “frenzied” action. Convinced that “the Japanese were going to attack some American installation,” he literally ran to his chiefs office. General Miles was at home. So was Marshall. Without going through channels, Bratton phoned Marshall’s quarters just across the Potomac. An orderly, Sergeant Aquirre, said the Chief of Staff had just left for his Sunday horseback ride.
Marshall had risen as usual at 6:30 A.M. but dawdled over breakfast with his wife, their first together in a week. They lived a restful, rather monastic life, since he had already collapsed twice from ill health. “I cannot allow myself to get angry, that would be fatal—it is too exhausting,” he had recently told Mrs. Marshall. “My brain must be kept clear.”
Unaware of the message which had meant “war” to the
President the night before, he was heading at a lively gait toward the government experimental farm, the site of the future Pentagon Building. Ordinarily he rode for about an hour, but this time he took longer while Aquirre was searching for him in vain. By the time Marshall returned home to get the sergeant’s message, it was 10:25. He phoned Bratton, but the latter was so circumspect in explaining the “most important message” that the Chief of Staff didn’t realize its urgency. Marshall showered, sent for his limousine parked across the river at the Munitions Building and wasn’t at his desk until a few minutes after 11 o’clock. He methodically read through the entire message, as unimpressed as Bratton. But, like Bratton, he was jolted by the implications of the “one o’clock” note. Using a yellow pad, he hastily jotted down a dispatch to his Pacific commanders:
The Japanese are presenting at 1 P.M. Eastern Standard Time today what amounts to an ultimatum. Also they are under orders to destroy their code machine immediately.
Just what significance the hour set may have we do not know, but be on the alert accordingly.
He phoned Stark. “What do you think about sending the information concerning the time of presentation to the Pacific commanders?”
“We’ve sent them so much already, I hesitate to send any more. A new one will be merely confusing.”
Marshall hung up. Moments later the phone rang.
“George,” Stark began in a concerned voice, “there might be some peculiar significance in the Japanese ambassador calling on Hull at one P.M. I’ll go along with you in sending that information to the Pacific.” He offered the Navy’s transmission facilities, which, he said, were very fast in emergencies.
“No, thanks, Betty, I feel I can get it through quickly enough.”
“George, will you include instructions to your people to inform their naval opposites?”
Marshall said he would, and added a sentence to that effect on the yellow sheet. He marked it “First Priority—Secret,” and ordered it rushed to the Message Center for transmission to the Panama Canal, the Philippines, Hawaii and San Francisco, in that order of priority. Concerned about time, he sent an officer several times to find out how long it would take to deliver the message. “It’s already in the works. Will take maybe thirty to forty minutes to be delivered” was the reassuring answer from Colonel Edward French, chief of Traffic Operations. Marshall didn’t consider using the direct scrambler telephone, since it could be easily tapped and the Japanese might deduce that their “unbreakable” code had been broken.
The message was enciphered and a few minutes after 12 noon in Washington, the commanders in San Francisco, the Panama Canal and the Philippines were warned. But Hawaii could not be raised because of atmospheric conditions. There was still, of course, the Navy’s direct radio communications to Hawaii, but for some reason Colonel French eschewed the “very fast” facilities of the rival service for Western Union, which didn’t have a direct line to Honolulu. The message wasn’t even marked “Urgent.”
The Combined Fleet, at anchor off the beautiful little islet Hashirajima, was on the alert, ready to sail from the Inland Sea to the aid of Kido Butai if necessary. Yamamoto had already issued his final order, an exact duplicate of Admiral Togo’s message at Tsushima.
On Nagato there was a calm sense of watchful waiting. The earlier concern about the discovery of the Malay convoy was obviously groundless. As usual Yamamoto played Japanese chess with Commander Yasuji Watanabe. His mind was on the match and he won three of the five games. Afterward both men bathed and returned to the staff room. Then Yamamoto retired to his own cabin, where he composed a waka, a thirty-one-syllable poem:
It is my sole wish to serve the Emperor as His shield
I will not spare my honor or my life.
There were, in fact, two Japanese forces approaching Pearl Harbor. The second was a fleet of submarines. Eleven boats had taken the great-circle route and were converging on Oahu—four northeast of the island and seven in the channel between Oahu and Molokai. Nine others had come from the Marshalls and seven of these were lying just south of Oahu while the other two were nearing Maui to discover if the American fleet could possibly be at Lahaina.
Five other submarines, the Special Attack Unit, had surfaced under cover of darkness and had silently approached Pearl Harbor from the southwest. Each carried piggyback a midget two-man submarine seventy-nine feet long, which could travel at the remarkable speed of 20 knots submerged. The midgets were to steal into the channel, lie in wait off Battleship Row until the air attack started, then surface and launch their twin torpedoes at some capital ship. At first Yamamoto had canceled the raid on the grounds that it was suicidal. He finally relented when assured that every attempt would be made to recover the crews.
Just before 11 P.M., December 6, local time, the mother ships had stopped about eight miles off Pearl Harbor, and the tricky launching process began. Those on the decks of the submarines could see bright lights along the shore and even pick out neon signs on Waikiki Beach. Across the water came faint sounds of jazz. Minutes later four of the midgets were launched, but the fifth’s gyrocompass would not work. It could not be repaired, but the two-man crew insisted on carrying out their mission. They climbed into their tiny boat. The mother ship dived, the securing clamps were cast off, and the midget started slowly for Pearl Harbor.
Kido Butai was racing full steam at 24 knots toward the launching point, two hundred miles north of Pearl Harbor. The men were at general quarters; the gun crews ready to fire at anything in sight. The pilots and crews had been routed from their bunks at 3:30 A.M., December 7, Hawaiian time. They had already written last letters and left in their lockers fingernail clippings and snips of hair for their families. They put on clean mawashi (loincloths) and “thousand-stitch” belts.g For breakfast they were served an extra treat, red rice and tai, a red snapper eaten at times of celebration.
The ships were rolling so badly that some waves swept onto the decks of the carriers. Because of this, the torpedo pilots were told they could not go in the first attack but must wait for the second, when it would be completely light. To no avail the pilots grumbled that after all their hard training they could take off in the predawn murk, no matter how rough the seas were.
Nagumo was still concerned about Lahaina, despite reassurance from a submarine on the spot and a message from Combined Fleet that the Pacific Fleet, except for the carriers, was at Pearl Harbor. He ordered search planes to make a last-minute reconnaissance. An hour before first light Chikuma and Tone—the two heavy cruisers leading the fleet, and only 150 miles from Pearl Harbor—each catapulted a pair of seaplanes into the light wind. Two of the planes started for Lahaina, two for Pearl Harbor. Their instructions were to get to their destinations half an hour before the attack and radio back reports on clouds, the speed and direction of the wind, and most important, where the Pacific Fleet really was.
Some 6,600 miles to the west, a large convoy was closing in on the Malay Peninsula in three sections. The main force, fourteen ships, headed for Singora. To its left, three ships approached Pattani. Farther to the left, another three transports were bound for Kota Bharu; they were the first to reach their destination, and at midnight, Tokyo time, they dropped anchor just off the city. There was a moon, but fortunately for the invaders it was covered by clouds. There was little pitch and roll, and everything augured well for an easy landing. Then, at 1:15 A.M., the transports’ naval escort began bombarding the coast, the signal for the landing.
The war in the Pacific had started by mistake. It was only 5:45 A.M. in Hawaii. Originally Genda and Commander Miyo of the Navy General Staff had agreed to hit Pearl Harbor just before dawn. But so many pilots complained of the hazard in taking off in pitch-dark that at the last moment Genda delayed the first strike by about two hours. Miyo had not learned of this until several days after Kido Butai left Hitokappu Bay and took it upon himself to remain silent because a change in schedule at that stage might not reach all commands. He accepted the entire re
sponsibility for his decision and did not even tell Vice Admiral Ito that an attack might very well come in the Malay Peninsula ahead of time. “I was resigned to leave our fate to Heaven.”
And so the Kota Bharu force began the war between East and West, between white and yellow, two hours and fifteen minutes before the first bombs were scheduled to drop on Hawaii. The question was: Would the British report the attack in time to alert Pearl Harbor?
At the first shot of war the carriers of Kido Butai had just slipped across the launching point and were not quite two hundred miles north of Pearl Harbor. The first faint light of day glimmered in the east. Pilots and flight crews strapped themselves into their planes; motors roared. In the sky were patches of clouds. Long heavy swells rolled the ships from 12 to 15 degrees. Maneuvers were usually canceled when swells exceeded 5 degrees, but today there could be no postponement.
Admiral Kusaka ordered the Z flag raised above Akagi. This was an exact copy of the one Togo had used at Tsushima, but in the intervening years it had become an ordinary tactical signal. Kusaka was sure that every man in the Striking Force would realize its symbolic significance, but several staff officers, including Genda, protested when they saw it go up. It would cause confusion. Reluctantly Kusaka revoked the command and ordered another flag raised that vaguely resembled Togo’s signal.
The minute the sailors on Kaga saw the Z flag they excitedly hoisted their own. It was going to be another Tsushima! Then, inexplicably, Akagi’s flag fluttered down, and with it some of their enthusiasm.
On the decks of the six carriers, the planes of the first wave were lined up, with forty-three fighter planes in the van, followed by forty-nine high-level and fifty-one dive bombers, and forty torpedo planes in the rear—at the last moment it was decided to let them risk takeoff in the predawn gloom.
