The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Chapter Ten

  FROM THE DECK OF A SHIP INBOUND FOR PEARL HARBOR, THE FIRST glimpse of Oahu offered a satisfying contrast to the flat tedium of the Pacific. Dramatically steep greenish-brown slopes, alternately sunlit and cast in the shadow of clouds, soared above the horizon. Diamond Head, a jagged headland with the color and texture of corrugated cardboard, rose out of the sea and gradually marched eastward to uncover the long arc of Waikiki Beach and the city of Honolulu. The quartermasters called the bearings as they passed to starboard: the pink edifice of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the Aloha Tower (painted in wartime camouflage), the Punchbowl Crater, Ahua Point. Patrol planes flew low overhead and picket boats drew in close, giving each incoming ship a wary look. The signal tower at Fort Kamehameha demanded and received recognition signals. A tugboat drew aside the antisubmarine nets at the outer entrance to the Pearl Harbor channel, then drew them back across the arriving ship’s wake. The channel was long, straight, and narrow, with surf breaking over coral reefs close aboard to port and starboard, but it was safely dredged to a depth of 40 feet and well marked by buoys.

  Around Hospital Point, the entire panorama opened up: the central basin, Ford Island, the teeming dock complexes and administrative buildings along the East Loch. First-timers who had sailed from the mainland were surprised to find that Pearl Harbor was rather small and snug. The homeport of the mighty Pacific Fleet was nothing to compare with San Diego or San Francisco Bay. The visual effect was heightened by the scale and grandeur of the natural backdrop. To the north and west, scrub growth and palm groves gave way to graceful, undulating sugarcane fields and pasturelands stretching up into green foothills, and the towering ridgelines of the Waianae and Koolau ranges enclosed the horizon in every inland direction.

  Pearl Harbor had seemed somewhat more spacious earlier in the war, but by the summer of 1943 the expanding fleet threatened to fill every available berth and mooring zone, and newly arrived ships inched into an impossibly congested harbor. Destroyers and other smaller vessels were often moored two or three abeam, with gangplanks laid between them. All the seaman’s arts were needed to maneuver a battleship or carrier through the overcrowded channels and roadsteads, around other ships (whether underway or moored), repair and fueling barges, floating dry docks, sunken battleships, and the ubiquitous whaleboats that crossed the channels with bells clanging insistently. Tides, fogs, shoals, wind, and wakes were confounding factors. Collisions or groundings were to be reported immediately, and they could cripple a skipper’s career prospects.

  In mid-1943, following eighteen months of phenomenal exertions, Pearl Harbor had largely recovered from the surprise air raid that had launched the war. Veterans noted that the land around the harbor was noticeably less green than it had been in 1941, because so much native foliage had been uprooted and paved over to make way for new piers, shops, foundries, warehouses, hangars, barracks, tank farms, ammunition depots, antiaircraft batteries, administrative buildings, and windowless bombproof power plants. The clang and rattle of machinery sang out from dawn to dusk, seven days a week. Two new dry docks were under construction at the navy yard, including the enormous Drydock No. 4, more than 1,000 feet long and serviced by a towering 50-ton gantry crane that traveled up and down the neighboring pier on a wide-gauge track. Dredging barges were constantly at work to widen and deepen the channels and anchorages around Ford Island and West Loch. Between 1941 and 1945, thirteen million cubic yards of mud, silt, and sand was excavated from the harbor bottom.

  To the west, construction teams were erecting long warehouses, a railroad spur, and a modern waterfront terminal on the Pearl City Peninsula. Most of Pearl Harbor’s fuel oil and diesel reserves had been pumped into subterranean concrete vaults north of the base, which were linked by pipelines to a huge new concrete fueling pier. Transportation around the base was provided by fifty-eight miles of roads and a narrow-gauge marine railway. Tractors pulled passenger wagons on regular routes, much like a municipal bus system; they were usually crammed to capacity with servicemen and civilian workers.

  Five of the eight battleships damaged in the Japanese attack had been repaired and returned to service. Salvage work continued on the Arizona, Oklahoma, and Utah. The reclamation of those wrecked leviathans had been one of the most stupendous challenges ever encountered by engineers, comparable in scale or complexity to the construction of great bridges, dams, or canals. With their hulls ripped open by Japanese aerial torpedoes, several of the great steel ships had come to rest on the harbor floor. To raise and maneuver them into dry docks, where they could be repaired and rebuilt, the salvage teams first had to patch the submerged holes in their sunken hulls, then pump enough water out to raise them to a draft of 35 feet. Thousands of tons of ordnance, weaponry, equipment, and debris had to be removed before the ships could be raised. Noxious and explosive gases built up in the enclosed compartments, posing the constant threat of fire or poisoning.

  Workers who descended into the interiors of the damaged ships wore rubber boots and coveralls and carried portable breathing gear. They lit their way with heavy battle lanterns and communicated with the surface by telephone lines connected to air hoses. Powerful suction blowers ventilated the ships, but as new hatches were opened, hydrogen sulfide gas often rushed out with enough force to blow men off their feet. The ships were flooded with an unspeakable black sludge made up of seawater and fuel oil. Badly decomposed corpses were floated into canvas bags, hoisted to the surface, and transferred into boats by medics wearing facemasks. In the once-refrigerated storerooms, salvage teams found tons of decaying ham hocks and sides of beef that disintegrated when handled. One officer on the salvage detail recalled that removing the rancid meat was “one of the meanest jobs” in the entire enterprise. Eventually they found that high-pressure water hoses shredded the rotten meat into small fragments, and these could be pumped overboard by gasoline-powered suction pumps, “no doubt to the great relish of Hawaiian sea life.”1 Returning to the surface after an expedition into the ship, the salvage workers found themselves swathed head to foot in a black slime that could not be removed except by bathing in diesel fuel.

  As the ships were pumped out, the interior decks and bulkheads remained coated with a greasy film. Scrubbing them clean was a Herculean challenge. High-pressure hoses, run from barges alongside, bombarded the surfaces with saltwater and various hot caustic solutions. The procedure was repeated again and again, sometimes for weeks at a time, until the surfaces felt and appeared clean. Inevitably, the water in Pearl Harbor was so badly polluted by these operations that it could no longer be used in the desalination plants, and water had to be pumped in from other parts of Oahu.

  Salvage operations required immense manpower, and civilian reinforcements were brought in to supplement the Navy Yard’s ranks. The workers were almost all young, unmarried men, drawn to Hawaii by high wages and a desire to be close to the war front. Many were crowded into apartments hastily erected in the Navy Yard. “Civilian Housing Area III” offered all the essential trappings of a small city, including a police force, post office, newspaper, baseball diamonds, movie theaters, and retail services. With a peak wartime population of 12,000, it was Hawaii’s third-largest city (after Honolulu and Hilo).2

  Professional divers, including both naval personnel and civilian contractors, did the difficult and dangerous job of inspecting, measuring, and patching the underwater damage. They mapped the flooded interiors, opened and closed watertight doors, disarmed unexploded ordnance, and removed debris and bodies. They worked in perfect darkness, feeling their way through the sludge-flooded innards of the sunken ships, where electric light was useless because it would only reflect back into the small glass ports on their heavy copper helmets. It was grisly work. Edward C. Raymer, a navy diver who wrote a vivid memoir of his work in the sunken battleships, dreaded colliding with the dead sailors who floated through the flooded compartments. He claims to have sensed the proximity of bodies before coming into contact with them, describing the
intuition as a “strange feeling that I was not alone.”3 In early 1942, while searching for an unexploded Japanese torpedo warhead in the sunken Arizona:

  I reached out to feel my way and touched what seemed to be a large inflated bag floating on the overhead. As I pushed it away, my bare hand plunged through what felt like a mass of rotted sponge. I realized with horror that the “bag” was a body without a head. Gritting my teeth, I shoved the corpse as hard as I could. As it drifted away, its fleshless fingers raked across my rubberized suit, almost as if the dead sailor were reaching out to me in a silent cry for help.4

  Divers took precise measurements of the underwater breaches in the hulls. Timber patches were constructed to fit those dimensions, and the divers returned to mount them over the holes. The patches were never quite watertight, but they were supplemented by sawdust, oakum, wooden plugs, and whatever other suitable materials could be found in the sunken ships, such as mattresses, pillows, and clothing. Water was then pumped out of the patched hull by gasoline-powered suction pumps. Because water always continued to leak into the ship through the makeshift patches, it was necessary to employ hundreds of pumps simultaneously just to keep the water from rising.

  In the case of more seriously damaged ships, such as the West Virginia and California, it was deemed necessary to construct a “cofferdam,” or watertight fencelike structure, all the way around the ship. A wall of 8-inch plank was reinforced with steel pilings driven deep into concrete foundations on the harbor floor. According to Homer Wallin, an officer who oversaw the work, the effort amounted to building a “makeshift drydock” on the site of the sunken battleships. It was “a stupendous and hazardous job.”5 Hundreds of tons of concrete was poured into the bottom of the harbor. The cofferdams were erected close aboard the sides of the ships, leaving a gap of about 2 to 3 feet. The hull damage was patched, the ship pumped out and raised, the cofferdam cast free of the pilings, and the entire unwieldy structure coaxed across East Loch into dry dock.

  Presenting an even greater problem was the Oklahoma, which had rolled 150 degrees off the vertical and planted her superstructure into the mud at the bottom of the harbor. Only a portion of her keel and starboard bilge was visible above the surface. Workers and divers entered the ship through airlocks cut into her bottom, and descended into a Stygian labyrinth in which up was down and down was up, the decks overhead and the overheads underfoot. In December 1942, New York Times correspondent Robert Trumbull put on breathing gear and toured the “pitch black fetid boiler room of the capsized battlewagon.”6 The Oklahoma was judged a total loss, apart from her scrap value—but it was necessary to raise and relocate the 29,000-ton ship so that her valuable berthing position could be reclaimed for the fleet. Before she could be floated, she had to be rolled back to an upright position, a process that would require tremendous turning force. Twenty-one high-geared hauling winches were anchored to huge concrete foundations on Ford Island and rigged with high leverage. Heavy steel cables were run from the winches through hauling blocks to pads welded to the bottom of the ship. Each winch supplied 20 tons of pulling power, but even that was not enough. Submarine salvage pontoons were attached to the sunken topside, and compressed air was used to dig the superstructure out of the mud. The winches began taking up strain on the cables on the morning of March 8, 1943. The Oklahoma groaned, creaked, and gradually began to turn. The winches pulled her over at the rate of 3 feet per hour. They pulled for more than two months, until June 16, 1943, when she was upright with a 3-degree list. Another five months of work was needed to patch her hull and float her; finally she was maneuvered into the newly completed Drydock No. 4 on December 28.7

  Rear Admiral William R. Furlong, commandant of the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, enjoyed telling visitors that the battleships West Virginia, California, Tennessee, and Nevada had not just been repaired; they had been rebuilt from the keel up. They were modernized and newly equipped, superior in every respect to the ships that had been blasted, torpedoed, and sunk on December 7, 1941. Of the West Virginia, Admiral Furlong proudly concluded, “We built her new from the inside out. We went right to the bottom, like a dentist drilling out a rotten tooth.”8

  By the second anniversary of Pearl Harbor, only the Arizona remained on the harbor floor. Divers had confirmed that her keel was broken, and the engineers had concluded that the great hull could not be raised intact. Bringing her up in sections was theoretically possible, but the job would be immensely difficult and the cost would far exceed her scrap value. It was decided to leave her where she lay. She lies there still.

  ON AN AVERAGE DAY IN 1943, Honolulu’s honky-tonk Hotel Street district was overrun by 30,000 servicemen and civilian defense workers. Hawaiian traditions of charity and hospitality were strained to the breaking point. After the Battle of Midway, when the little sun-drenched city began to feel itself safe from the enemy, Honolulans grew increasingly annoyed by blackout procedures and other military regulations. Air-raid wardens stopped making their nightly rounds, coils of barbed wire rusted on the beaches, and national guardsmen slept at their posts.

  Not many visiting servicemen had a good word to say about the city. “The men, almost without exception, detested Honolulu,” wrote the sailor and memoirist Theodore C. Mason.9 It was jaded, expensive, and desperately overcrowded. Samuel Hynes, a marine aviator, called it “another crowded Navy town, much like Pensacola or San Diego, full of sunlight and sailors and bad liquor.” One of his fellow pilots, a Texan, pronounced it “Nothin’ but Amarillo with a beach.”10 Oahu was nicknamed the “Rock,” and the consensus verdict (according to Paradise of the Pacific, a popular local monthly magazine) was that there were “just too damn many people of all descriptions on this damn rock, and something ought to be done.”11

  Overcrowded buses and overpriced taxis brought the crowds of white-and-khaki-clad men to the Army-Navy YMCA, where they poured out onto the street and went looking for any kind of amusement. The heart of the vice district ran along Hotel Street from the “Y” to the river, a neighborhood of brash neon, booming jukeboxes, and peeling paint, where dirty sidewalks were lined with dismal bars, brightly lit penny arcades, and tawdry souvenir shops. An odor of stale beer and rotten fish wafted through the street. The beer was cold, but cocktails were watered down and overpriced, and insolent bartenders pestered the men to drink up and order another or else make space for the next paying customer. Burly Hawaiian bouncers kept the peace, but at the first sign of real trouble the shore patrol and military police were called in to knock heads and haul the malefactors away. Men stood in long lines for hot dogs, popcorn, ice cream, Coca-Cola, tattoos, massages, haircuts, pinball machines, shooting galleries, baseball batting cages, pool tables, and photos with a hula dancer. Fifteen cents would buy a bowl of sai min—pork and noodles—but a customer had to eat on his feet while being jostled on the crowded sidewalk, and some maintained that the “pork” was actually dog meat. Barefoot Asian boys aged six to twelve offered shoeshines for a quarter, shouting, “Hi, Pal!” and “Shine, Mac!”12 On a typical afternoon, one officer remembered, Hotel Street was filled with “white hats of sailors on leave as far as you could see.”13

  For Hawaii’s retail and business sector, the war was a gold rush. Between 1941 and 1943, 8,000 new businesses were established in the islands, and retail trade increased by $22 million, more than 75 percent. Rents skyrocketed, real estate prices surged, and bank deposits increased by fivefold. The editors of Paradise of the Pacific noted in May 1944 that “there were 288 restaurants here in 1939, and there are now 630, but it’s still practically impossible to get a meal without standing in line.”14 The territorial economy had long been dominated by a haole (Caucasian) elite, but the war was especially kind to owners of retail businesses and restaurants, many of whom were ethnically Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Filipino.

  Local civilian and military authorities had agreed to tolerate a regulated sex trade for the duration of the war. In 1943, fifteen brothels employed 260 prostitutes in Honolulu’s red l
ight district.15 Known as “cathouses” or “bell rooms” (“Give the bell a ring”), the establishments were scattered along Hotel, River, and North Beretania Streets, with discreetly lettered signs identifying them as (for example) the “Bungalow,” the “Rex,” the “Ritz,” the “Anchor,” the “Bronx,” or the “Rainbow Hotel.” On a typical afternoon when the fleet was in port, long lines of servicemen stretched down the stairways and out onto the sidewalks; the wait was often an hour or more. Each customer paid three dollars and was ushered into a small cubicle with a single cot. “Chop-chop,” one such man recalls being told by the Chinese madam; he had better undress quickly because his three dollars had bought him only three minutes with “Missie Fuck-Fuck.” As the woman entered, a timer was set. When it rang three minutes later, the encounter had ended whether the man had ejaculated or not, and the woman stood up and left the room.

  The experience was altogether cheerless and degrading—“A guy might as well use a dead fish,” one marine remarked afterward16—but the Honolulu brothels never lacked for customers. By one estimate, they sustained a wartime average of 250,000 customers per month. Each woman saw between fifty and a hundred men per day and earned about $25,000 per year. The madams earned as much as $150,000 each year. Local officialdom took a close interest in the enterprise, for reasons both venal and hygienic. The Honolulu Police Department registered each prostitute as an “entertainer” and expected to collect a share of her earnings; the standard bribe was reportedly fifty dollars per woman per month.17 In turn, the vice squad acted as enforcers for the madams by intimidating, beating, or deporting their disobedient girls. Army and navy doctors examined each woman weekly, and outgoing customers were required to visit adjacent “prophylactic stations” for examination and treatment.18