Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

by Ian W. Toll

  ADMIRAL HUSBAND E. KIMMEL, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC), was staggered by the number of things he did not know. He did not know where the enemy aircraft had come from. He did not know where they had gone. Had they been launched from aircraft carriers? Or from Japanese air bases in the Marshall Islands, several thousand miles to the southwest? The latter seemed implausible, given the great range—but if they were carrier-borne aircraft, where had the enemy carriers gone? North, south, west? Were they running for safety, or preparing another airstrike? Above all, had the Sunday morning raid been the opening move in a planned sequence of attacks, perhaps to be followed by troop landings? Was Oahu about to be invaded?

  Kimmel’s CINCPAC headquarters was in a three-story white stucco building with an Art Deco facade, lined with coconut palms and fronted by a neatly kept lawn. His windows offered a panoramic view of the carnage in the harbor. The staff officers were doing what they could to pull themselves together, but the stark reality that the entire Pacific battle force had been knocked out of action had left them stunned and speechless. “Kimmel seemed calm and collected,” recorded Lieutenant Commander Edwin T. Layton, an intelligence officer on the CINCPAC staff. “But he looked shocked by the enormity of the thing that was happening to his command and by the fact that his world was blowing up around him.” As the admiral watched his precious battleships burn, he occasionally muttered, “What a doleful sight!” Officers who had abandoned the stricken ships streamed into the headquarters, their white uniforms stained with fuel oil; many seemed dazed. Although no one was willing to admit it at the time, a heavy pall of fear had settled over the headquarters. Layton recalled that his yeoman’s hands shook visibly as he handed the commander an intelligence log, and Lieutenant Walter J. East stated flatly that “people were frightened and if they say they weren’t, they’re damned liars.”

  In those first desperate hours after the raid, Kimmel’s problem was not so much that he lacked good intelligence about the enemy’s whereabouts. His problem was that his headquarters staff were overwhelmed by reports that were ambiguous, contradictory, garbled, or altogether wrong. His initial instinct (which would prove accurate, but not in time to do anything about it) was that the enemy carriers had approached from the north. A squadron of U.S. Army bombers arriving that morning from the mainland had spotted Japanese planes headed north after the raid, and a radar station at Opana, on northern Oahu, had also tracked aircraft headed northward. But the Japanese raid had destroyed or immobilized most of Oahu’s long-range patrol planes, both army and navy, so the American commanders were unable to launch a proper air search. At 9:42 a.m., Kimmel warned the U.S. carrier Enterprise, at sea about 200 miles west of Oahu, that there was “some indication” of a Japanese carrier force northwest of the island. Within minutes, however, new contact reports pointed south. (In every case, as it would eventually become clear, those reports proved to be U.S. ships misidentified as enemy.) One faulty alert put two Japanese carriers southwest of Barbers Point. The cruiser Minneapolis, which was near the reported coordinates (and had probably been mistaken for the phantom enemy force), attempted to send a dispatch correcting the report. But the ship’s radio operator made a transmission error, with the result that the message went out as “two enemy carriers” instead of “no enemy carriers” in sight. The Enterprise turned east to give chase, and launched fifteen Douglas Dauntless SBD dive-bombers to search the zone southwest of Oahu. Six Curtiss SOC-3 seaplanes were launched from her accompanying cruisers to search north and northeast. Both flights found only American ships, but in some cases the pilots mistook them for enemy ships, adding new layers of confusion to the scene. The CINCPAC diary noted: “The view was held for some time that carriers were both north and south of the island.”

  On Ford Island, those few PBYs that had emerged unscathed from the morning’s raid were ordered into the air. Soon the big amphibians were roaring down the channel between Ford Island and Hospital Point and staggering into the sky. Getting them aloft was a dangerous prospect, because the East Loch (which served as their runway) was littered with wreckage and overlaid with a carpet of heavy sludge oil. Twenty-nine-year-old Lieutenant Thomas H. Moorer, a seaplane pilot (and future chairman of the Joint Chiefs), left a vivid description of what it was like to drive his aircraft down the channel, with the row of burning battleships just off his wingtips, his pontoons bucking violently over the wakes left by the boats, and oily water splashing up onto his windshield, “with the result that I never did see anything until I was well clear of the island. It was a one hundred percent instrument take-off after we got hit with the oil.”

  Throughout the Navy Yard and Ford Island, it was broadly assumed that a Japanese invasion was underway. Sailors deprived of their ships felt a peculiar sense of vulnerability, as they had received no training in land fighting. Defenses were hastily organized. On Ford Island, gangs of sailors were set to work digging trenches, filling sandbags, and setting up .30- and .50-caliber machine guns on tripods. Craters left by the Japanese bombs were surrounded with piles of sandbags and converted into foxholes. Rifles were handed out from the back of trucks, generally at random, including thousands of Browning automatic rifles and some thoroughly obsolete bolt-action 1903 Springfields. No one was asked to sign for the weapons they received. “Somebody handed me two hand grenades,” said Seaman Warren G. Harding of the California. “I said: ‘What do I do with them?’ He said: ‘Never mind! Don’t pull this!’ That’s all the instruction I had.” Sailors were seen carrying butcher’s knives and meat cleavers. Navy radioman Joseph Ryan was issued a .30-caliber rifle and ammunition and told, “You guys stay right here on 10-10 dock, and when the Japanese come in, get as many of them as you can before they get you.”

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON WAS RADIO PRIME TIME, when highly rated programs aired simultaneously across America on NBC and CBS network affiliates. Beginning at about 2:30 p.m., news announcers broke in over regular programming to report that Pearl Harbor had been attacked by Japanese aircraft. The scene was much the same all across the nation: families congregated around their big cabinetlike radios and listened breathlessly to the first reports. Children who asked questions were shushed. If the radio’s vacuum tubes burned out, people sat in their cars and listened to their car radios.

  “I had no real sense of where Hawaii was,” recalled a civilian, Scott Leesberg, who heard the news from a ham radio operator in Oberlin, Ohio. “I knew it was in the Pacific.” That was a very common reaction. Pearl Harbor? Oahu? Honolulu? They were not familiar names. Hawaii had been the setting for a few movies in the 1930s, and most Americans at least understood that it was a United States territory located somewhere in the Pacific. Atlases and maps were pulled off the shelves and studied carefully. For the majority of Americans who lived east of the Mississippi, Hawaii was more distant than Europe, where war had been raging for more than two years. But it was American soil, and it was an attack that had sunk American ships and killed American servicemen. The public had seen plenty of newsreel footage of devastated cities, both in Europe and in China. Bombs falling from the sky had seemed a distant nightmare, and further evidence that the ancient civilizations of the world were irredeemably barbaric places, from which the New World must always remain aloof. Now, with terrible suddenness, it seemed at if it could happen here. In neighborhoods all across the country, people stepped out of their homes and looked skyward, as if expecting a fleet of Japanese planes to appear suddenly overhead.

  Children and adolescents, with no direct memory of the Great War, tended to shrug the news off. Some assumed that the United States would simply bomb Japan back; and that Japan, having been taught a proper lesson, would refrain from any further aggression. When it was reported late Sunday afternoon that a Japanese submarine had been sunk off Oahu, ten-year-old James Erickson of Chicago rejoiced, assuming that the war was as good as won and Japan would surrender by the end of the day. Nineteen-year-old Iris Bancroft, also of Chicago, confessed to feeling exhilarated and eve
n elated by the coming of the war. “My life to date had been relatively uneventful. So had my future,” she recalled years later. “Now, suddenly, I knew anything could happen. The new possibilities ahead were impossible to ignore. . . . I felt as if I were the heroine in a romantic movie.” The older generations reacted differently, especially those with sons or nephews of draft age. Pat Vang, nine years old, heard the news over the radio in her father’s grocery store. She asked her father, “Is it real bad, Daddy?” He replied, “Yes baby, very, very bad. A lot of good men will die.”

  British prime minister Winston Churchill was at Chequers, his official country residence in Buckinghamshire, with two American houseguests—John “Gil” Winant, the U.S. ambassador, and Averell Harriman, the Lend-Lease coordinator. At nine o’clock that evening, the prime minister turned on his portable radio for the BBC news broadcast. Only after several items on the Russian front and the British army in Libya did the broadcaster mention a report of Japanese attacks on American and British targets in the Pacific. Churchill strode down the hall to his office and asked his staff to place a transatlantic radio-telephone call to the White House. In three minutes the connection was successfully made, and the two leaders were on the phone.

  “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?” Churchill asked.

  “It’s quite true,” Roosevelt replied. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.”

  Churchill informed Roosevelt that Japanese troops had landed in Malaya, and promised to go before the House of Commons the following day and ask for a declaration of war. “This certainly simplifies things,” Churchill told the president, and added, “God be with you.”

  The prime minister’s reaction to the news was unequivocal. He rejoiced. “So we had won after all!” Churchill wrote years later, in the now-famous passage of his war memoirs. “England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live. . . . Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.” Since the war in Europe was not going particularly well at that moment, it was a daring prediction; and Churchill’s comment to Roosevelt that Japan’s sudden entry into the war “simplifies things” flew in the face of many perplexing complications. Eighteen months had passed since the fall of France, and Hitler was the seemingly invincible master of continental Europe. In June 1941, 148 divisions of the German Wehrmacht had poured across the Russian border, and by December they had advanced to within artillery range of Moscow. Britain had been at war for more than two years; it had stood alone against Germany for a year; and though it had absorbed the punishment of the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign and escaped, for the moment, the threat of a cross-Channel invasion, there was every risk of a renewed assault in 1942, especially if the Soviet Union should collapse.

  Would Japan attack Russia in the east, freeing Hitler to transfer forces to the west? Would Japan overrun British colonies in Asia—Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Burma, perhaps even India? Would the Axis armies achieve a dreaded link-up in the Middle East? Would the sparsely populated nations of Australia and New Zealand be swallowed up? Perhaps even more alarming, would the United States channel its entire energy into the war against Japan, thereby starving Britain and Russia of tanks, airplanes, transports, weapons, and other vital war matériel?

  Churchill was vividly aware of all of those hazards, and yet he had the absolute conviction that Pearl Harbor, by jolting the United States out of its isolationist lassitude, would secure ultimate victory for the Allies. He recalled the words of Sir Edward Grey, thirty years earlier, concerning the entry of the United States into the First World War. America was like a gigantic furnace, Grey had said: “Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.” With these heartening reflections in mind, Churchill went to bed and “slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”

  IN WASHINGTON, at four in the afternoon, traffic at major intersections was blocked by trucks carrying troops of the District of Columbia National Guard. The telephone system was paralyzed by incoming calls, as members of the public sought news of the attack; additional operators were called in to work, but it was difficult to get a line anywhere, local or long distance. Machine-gun nests had been hastily set up on the front steps and rooftops of public buildings. Marines were called out to guard the Capitol, and uniformed provost marshal guards, wearing steel helmets left over from the First World War era, appeared suddenly outside the War and Navy departments on the corner of Seventeenth Street and Constitution Avenue.

  At the Japanese Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, a large, sullen crowd was gathering on the sidewalk outside the gates. At one point, a man climbed out of a taxi and began throwing bottles at the building. Members of the embassy staff, reported the Philadelphia Inquirer, were seen to carry “baskets of documents into the garden and began setting fire to them.” Masuo Kato, a Japanese journalist, left the complex at about 4 p.m. Looking up to the sky above the roof, he noted that “white puffs were curling upward in the air.” More documents were being burned on the roof. The crowd outside grew uglier, with several men cursing and shouting threats. As Kato made his way outside, the crowd surged toward him menacingly. They did not touch him, but one man said: “You are the last son of a bitch we’re going to let out.” District of Columbia police and an FBI detail soon arrived and restored order.

  At the White House, where blackout restrictions had not yet taken effect, floodlights suffused the building and grounds in brilliant white light. Traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue slowed to a crawl as drivers stared; they seemed to crane their necks in the hope of catching a glimpse of the president or his men through the windows. Hundreds of spectators had gathered on the sidewalk outside the iron fence. A few men carried children on their shoulders. Police officers and Secret Service agents tried to keep them moving, but more arrived constantly throughout the late afternoon and early evening hours. Eventually they stood three or four deep. Some began to sing: “God Bless America” and “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” About fifty or sixty reporters and photographers were clustered under the portico. One journalist, Merriman Smith, wondered if President Roosevelt “could hear those unrehearsed songs coming spontaneously and from the hearts of the little people across his back lawn.”

  Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, as he entered the White House gate, noted that the crowd was “quiet and serious” and seemed to be “responding to that human instinct to get near the scene of action even if they could see or hear nothing.” Seventy-four-year-old Secretary of War Henry Stimson stepped out of his limousine and (said a witness) “bounded up the steps like a mountain goat.” Glen Perry of the New York Sun recorded: “It was very cold and a light mist somewhat obscured the moon. Lights blazed in the State Department, and clerks just called to duty kept running across the sidewalk past the ancient cannons into the building.”

  Shortly after nightfall, Grace Tully entered the president’s office. He was alone, smoking a cigarette and sifting through the papers on his desk. “Sit down, Grace,” he told her. “I’m going before Congress tomorrow. I’d like to dictate my message. It will be short.” He inhaled deeply and let the smoke out. He began speaking, Tully recalled, “in the same calm tone in which he dictated his mail. Only his diction was a little different as he spoke each word incisively and slowly, carefully specifying each punctuation mark and paragraph.” The speech began: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in world history, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” When he had finished speaking, Tully was sent off to type the draft, which ran to some 500 words. When she brought it back for his review, the president drew a line through the phrase “world history” and wrote “infamy.”

  THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS ROOM, which normally accommodated no more than two dozen people, was jammed with more than
a hundred reporters, cameramen, and photographers. A long line of reporters waited for a turn at each of half a dozen telephones. The floor was littered with cigarette butts and a tangle of black cables running to the cameras and microphones. A battery of klieg lights bathed the scene in a harsh electric glare. The room, observed BBC correspondent Alistair Cooke, “already had that air of tobacco-choked energy that is the Washington odor of panic.” “The press room was a madhouse,” recalled Glen Perry. “Hilmer Baukhage, Fulton Lewis, Ted Wingo and other broadcasters were set up there, typing scripts and then reading them into their microphones with the crowd talking and working in the background.” Roosevelt’s press secretary, Stephen Early, had issued the first of several announcements at 2:30 p.m. Glistening with sweat and squinting into the lights, Early had acknowledged that the navy had suffered “doubtless very heavy losses.” Updates had followed every fifteen or twenty minutes, and each time he arrived with a new statement, the room fell to a hushed silence and the reporters bowed over their notepads. It was the biggest story any journalist in the room had ever covered.

  At about eight o’clock, the members of the cabinet began filtering into the Oval Study. They sat in chairs arranged in a semicircle facing the president’s desk. Behind the desk sat Roosevelt, who had changed into a rumpled dark suit, and was smoking a cigarette. Secretary of State Cordell Hull sat on a Chippendale armchair in front of the desk. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox stood hunched over the president, speaking to him in a low voice. Harry Hopkins, looking pale and gaunt, was the only non-member of the cabinet present. One of Roosevelt’s naval aides briefed the cabinet secretaries on what had happened at Pearl Harbor. According to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, press secretary Early was “rushing back and forth saying, ‘They’ve had another telephone conversation with Admiral “So-and-So.” Things are worse than were reported earlier.’”