Aircraft about to take off from one of the Japanese carriers near the Hawaiian islands.
In 1940, both Pearl and Taranto harbors were thought by their warship fleet occupants to be safe and proper anchorages. Both adjoined cities, Honolulu and Taranto, with populations of about 200,000, and both ports were well defended and considered powerful threats to the fleet of any opponent. The U.S. facility and presence at Pearl Harbor was a major impediment to Japan’s designs on Southeast Asia, while the Italian fleet at Taranto threatened the sea lanes that linked Britain with her interests in Gibraltar, Egypt, Singapore, and India.
The British carrier pilots, in their effort to dispose of the Italian fleet at Taranto, had to approach the port from the Mediterranean without being discovered by multitudes of Italian reconnaissance aircraft, and evade the fire of fifty-four enemy warships and twenty-two shore batteries. This they had to accomplish while avoiding the steel cables of more than fifty barrage balloons, and the attentions of several squadrons of Italian fighter planes. The matter of overcoming these barriers to success at Pearl and Taranto was shared by Yamamoto and British Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, respectively, but the course of history compelled Cunningham to act first, in November 1940, and set the historic precedent. For the Japanese Navy to successfully mount a surprise raid on Pearl Harbor, it would first have to assemble a thirty-two-ship task force, including six aircraft carriers, Akagi, Hiryu, Kaga, Shokaku, Soryu, Zuikaku, in the Kurile Islands north of Japan, and proceed undetected some 4,000 miles, without resupply, to within 200 miles of the Hawaiian Islands. From that point the aircraft of its carriers would have to approach and face the defensive fire of shore batteries, the guns of up to sixty-eight warships, and upwards of a hundred enemy fighter planes.
The battleship USS Nevada, damaged in the December 1941 raid by Japanese carrier-borne aircraft;
The shallow harbor at Pearl adjoins the present-day Honolulu airport. The harbor is a basin which surrounds a small airfield facility called Ford Island, and is linked to the sea by a single narrow channel. The eastern side of the harbor was the site of oil storage tanks, drydocks, and a submarine base. On the morning or 7 December 1941, eight battleships of the U.S. fleet, Arizona, California, Maryland, Nevada, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia, lay at anchor southeast of Ford Island. A ninth such vessel, Pennsylvania, was in a nearby drydock.
A metal plaque embedded in the decking of the American battleship USS Missouri commemorating the signing of the formal surrender of Japan the Allied powers in 1945.
The Japanese surrender party aboard the USS Missouri in September, 1945;
Visitors at the USS Arizona war memorial in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii;
The battleship USS Missouri being towed to her new berth alongside Ford Island in Pearl Harbor.
General Douglas MacArthur signing the document of surrender aboard the USS Missouri on 2 September 1945.
Probably the greatest challenge faced by the Japanese in their preparations for the Pearl Harbor strike was that of how to successfully deliver torpedos by aircraft into a shallow basin. The technology of the time, at least prior to the Taranto attack, dictated that a torpedo would virtually always sink to a depth of at least seventy feet before levelling and proceeding to its target. Such weapons would certainly be hopelessly mired in the mud bottom of the target waters. Impressed by the successes of the British Navy in their raid on the Italian fleet the year before, munitions engineers of the Mitsubishi company near Nagasaki labored overtime to perfect a missile with a newly designed stabilizer fin. If properly dropped, the redesigned torpedo would sink less than the forty-foot depth of Pearl Harbor and continue on to the target. By 17 November, 180 of the special weapons had been completed and delivered to the Japanese carriers.
Negotiations in Washington with Japan’s special envoys there, Saburo Kurusu and Kichisaburo Nomura, to resolve the differences between the two nations by diplomatic means, were clearly failing by 22 November when, on orders from the Japanese government, the fleet that would attack Pearl Harbor was being assembled. The Japanese believed that the time for talking had run out and their task force headed east from Hitokappu Bay in the Kuriles toward Hawaii on 25 November. The six carriers, escorted by battleships, heavy cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, observed strict radio silence as they crossed the western Pacific, in the hope that they would reach the area north of the Hawaiian Islands undiscovered.
On 2 December, Task Force Commander Vice Admiral Chiuchi Nagumo received the coded radio signal from Yamamoto: Nitaka Yama Nabora (Climb Mount Nitaka), authorizing him to commence the attack operation.
By 7 December the force had reached their launch position approximately 200 miles north of the island of Oahu and at 6 am the initial wave of planes rose from the carrier Akagi. In minutes the aircraft—dive-bombers, horizontal bombers, torpedo bombers, and fighters—had launched and were climbing en route to their target. Led by Lieutenant Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, the first wave of 183 rounded Barber’s Point southwest of Pearl at 7:53 am. The calligraphic characters on the hachimaki scarf tied round Fuchida’s leather flying helmet translated as “Certain Victory.” Using the coded phrase “Tora, Tora, Tora” (Tiger, Tiger, Tiger), he alerted the carrier force that his planes had reached the objective and were commencing their attack.
AIR RAID PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NOT A DRILL was the radio message emanating from the command center at Ford Island a few minutes before 8 am as the Japanese torpedo bombers began their strikes on the sleeping ships in the harbor. The first to receive torpedos were a minelayer, a light cruiser, and the battleship Arizona, which was literally blown from the water, her bottom ripped out. California and Oklahoma each took three torpedos, ruining them. Then a fourth torpedo struck Oklahoma, capsizing her. Arizona was hit by a bomb which exploded in her forward magazine, tearing her apart. More than a thousand of her crew died.
1,177 American sailors and Marines were killed on the USS Arizona in the Japanese attack on U.S. Navy ships and facilities at Pearl Harbor. The raid led to the entry of the United States into the Second World War. The memorial straddles the sunken hull of the battleship and is visited by more than one million people annually.
At Ewa, Wheeler, and Hickam airfields, Japanese bombers and fighters appeared while their colleagues were wrecking the U.S. capital ships in Pearl, and began bombing and strafing the parked aircraft exposed on the aprons. American marines and soldiers were strafed as they ran from their barracks at the Hickam base. The attack was followed an hour later by one from a second wave of Japanese carrier aircraft, 167 this time, to further pound the U.S. facilities.
A total of 2,403 military and civilian Americans died in the raids at Pearl and the other U.S. bases on Oahu. Another 1,178 were wounded; 292 American planes were destroyed or damaged, and the eight U.S. battleships in the harbor were sunk or massively damaged.
In the afternoon of 8 December the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, addressed a joint session of the Congress in Washington DC and asked for a declaration of war against the Empire of Japan. Similar declarations against Japan’s Axis allies Germany and Italy followed.
Richard “Mac” McCutcheon was a powder carman in the number two turret aboard the battleship USS West Virginia on 7 December 1941. At just before 8 am, dive-bombing and torpedo aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy appeared over the battleships of the U.S. Navy that lay at anchor in Pearl Harbor near Honolulu, Hawaii. The West Virginia was struck and severely damaged in the attack that followed. Her crew was ordered to abandon ship. Mac McCutcheon jumped into the water and swam for the nearby shore where he found himself but a short distance from the home of a woman who had been witnessing the Japanese aerial attack. She acted quickly when she saw sailors swimming to shore. She gathered clothing from her husband’s closet and began distributing it to Mac and the other seamen who had made their way to the shelter of her home.
In the aftermath of the Japanese raid on the American ships and facilities at Pearl Harbor, it
became clear that the results might have been far more favorable for the Japanese had they been more efficient in the effort.
Certain of the key targets at Pearl, the U.S. Navy machine shops and the large oil storage tank farm were mainly unaffected by the attack, and most significantly, the Japanese failed to block the narrow and shallow single entrance to the harbor. Had they been able to sink a ship in that tiny channel, they would have denied the U.S. Navy access to Pearl for some time. In failing to destroy the machine shops, they allowed essential repair work to begin immediately on the U.S. warships heavily damaged in the raid. The U.S. ships at Pearl that were still seaworthy, and those that had avoided the attack through being elsewhere, were left able to function and fight owing to the fuel available from the intact tank farm.
In time, nearly eighty percent of the U.S. aircraft that had been damaged, seemingly beyond repair, at Pearl and other American airfields in Hawaii were repaired and made fully operational again.
Flushed with success, Admiral Nagumo’s Fast Carrier Striking Force sailed back to Japan where it was made ready for the action to come in the escalating Pacific War. What occupied Yamamoto’s thoughts in the wake of the Pearl attack, though, was not the recent naval triumph, but rather the fact that not a single American aircraft carrier had been harmed in the execution of his plan.
TURKEY SHOOT
THE TIDE HAD TURNED IN THE PACIFIC theater of World War II by early 1944. By then warships of the U.S. Navy were moving steadily westward in their island-hopping campaign, pounding Japanese shore defenses before landing masses of invading soldiers and marines whose job it was to re-take these islands from the occupying enemy forces. To take some of the strain from the pilots, air crews, and over-worked sailors of the U.S. fleet fast carriers, the Americans urgently needed the island airfields that the Japanese held. The stage was set for the greatest carrier battle in history, the First Battle of the Philippine Sea.
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz was Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and in June his Task Force 58, under the command of Vice-Admiral Marc Mitscher, was sent to attack the Marianas and Bonin Islands. On 15 June, Nimitz’s forces struck at Saipan in the Marianas, some 1,300 miles east of the Philippines and more than 3,000 miles west of Hawaii. Saipan was defended by Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito and his 32,000 soldiers. They were to meet a U.S. force of 127,000 men, two-thirds of them marines from an assemblage of 535 U.S. Navy ships under the direct command of Vice-Admiral Raymond Spruance.
In raids on the Bonins, U.S. Navy carrier-based aircraft destroyed 300 Japanese planes for the loss of twenty-two of their own. The way was then clear for American troops to land on the other beaches of the Marianas, with the support of eight escort carriers and their 170 aircraft. In the Marianas campaign, the large U.S. carriers included the Wasp, Lexington, Hornet, Yorktown, Essex, Bunker Hill, and the Enterprise, as well as the smaller escort carriers Cabot, Cowpens, Bataan, Langley, Belleau Wood, Monterey, San Jacinto, and Princeton.
In the months before the Marianas attacks, the Japanese suffered considerable losses among their most experienced air crew. Training standards for their replacements had fallen and the remaining Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft carriers were not at sea much owing to concern about the possibility of their being sunk by U.S. Navy submarines. Japan’s carrier force in the Marianas included Hiyo, Shokaku, Zuikaku, Junyo, Ryuho, Chitose, Chiyoda, and the newly operational Taiho, the largest, fastest, and most sophisticated of her carrier fleet.
For the Marianas operation the American carriers had 900 aircraft available to launch, half of which were fighters, with 300 being newly-arrived Grumman F6F Hellcats. The Japanese Navy had but 430 aircraft ready for action, in addition to some shore-based naval and air force planes. The Americans had achieved air supremacy over Saipan. Now Vice-Admiral Spruance sought to deny the use of Iwo Jima to the Japanese as a staging platform for reinforcing aircraft coming from the home islands, by sending half of his carrier task group north to bomb Iwo.
Vice-Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa had brought the Japanese fleet to the east of Saipan, and in the morning of 19 June, intended to attack the fifteen fast carriers of the recently formed U.S. Fifth Fleet which was under the overall command of Spruance, who had ordered his two task group divisions to rendezvous with the balance of his fleet, 180 miles west of Tinian. His primary mission was to safeguard the U.S. invasion fleet and the Saipan beachhead, and he chose to maintain a defensive position between Saipan and the approaching Japanese fleet.
The Grumman F6F Hellcat fighter distinguished itself in the historic “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” on 19 June 1944.
Ozawa’s second-in-command, Vice-Admiral Takeo Kurita, planned to hit the American carrier force at a point between his own carriers and the Marianas so his fighters could then refuel and rearm at Japanese bases on Rota and Guam, and then carry out a second attack on the enemy planes as they returned to the U.S. carriers. Both the Americans and the Japanese had sent submarines into the Philippine Sea prior to the events of 19 June. Reconnaissance planes had pinpointed the position of the U.S. ships for Kurita a day earlier, giving him an advantage over Mitscher, who was still uncertain of the enemy fleet position. Mitscher had to protect his ships and did so by mounting constant combat air patrols over the American carriers.
A series of attacks by shore-based Japanese planes from Guam began at 10 am and lasted nearly five hours, during which 143 of their aircraft were downed. None of the Japanese planes in these attacks reached the U.S. carriers. In anticipation of further attacks, Admiral Mitscher directed many of his fighters some fifty miles beyond the American carriers where they met and engaged four additional waves of Japanese carrier-based aircraft which suffered grave losses by both U.S. fighter planes and the flak put up from U.S. warships. Of the Japanese striking force, only 100 aircraft returned to their carriers. Fewer than twenty of their planes got through to the American ships, making hits on the carriers Wasp and Bunker Hill, causing but minor damage.
Vice-Admiral Ozawa was using the carrier Taiho as his flagship on 19 June when it was hit by torpedos fired from the U.S. submarine Albacore, causing fuel leaks. Eight hours later, fumes caught fire and a gigantic explosion ripped the great ship apart. She sank with the loss of approximately 1,650 of her 2,150-man crew. Four hours after Taiho was torpedoed, a similar fate befell Shokaku, the victim of another American submarine, the Cavalla. After three hours of explosions and spreading fires, Shokaku went to the bottom of the Philippine Sea. Vice-Admiral Ozawa had moved his flag to the cruiser Haguro.
The next day Ozawa could field but 100 serviceable aircraft. At dusk on 20 June Mitscher launched eighty-five fighters to escort 131 strike planes in an effort to destroy what remained of the Japanese carrier fleet. They attacked and sank Hiyo and damaged Chiyoda and Zuikaku, as well as the battleship Haruna and the cruiser Maya. In the action, the Japanese lost sixty-five aircraft against fourteen for the Americans. However, the U.S. pilots faced a 300-mile flight back to their carriers following the air battles of the 20th, and either a ditching at sea when their fuel ran out, or a treacherous deck landing at night. Mitscher, from his flagship, the Lexington, elected to illuminate the flight decks of his carriers to help his pilots through their ordeal, despite the possibility of alerting enemy submarines to the presence of his ships. Still, eighty of the returning U.S. planes were lost when they were forced to ditch or crash, taking the lives of forty-nine American airmen.
The Imperial Japanese Navy never again met the U.S. Navy in real strength in the remainder of World War Two. The First Battle of the Philippine Sea was the last major carrier-versus-carrier engagement of the war. Going into the battle with inferior numbers of warships, aircraft, and air crews, against a foe that was introducing a new aircraft in the Grumman F6F Hellcat, with superior performance to their own fighters, proved disastrous for Japan. Her air groups were wiped out. The loss of three of her aircraft carriers and hundreds of aircraft and air crew in just two days all but ended her carrier s
triking capability. Japanese carrier forces would never again be a threat. The one-sided two-day air battle would forever be remembered by U.S. Navy pilots and air crew as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.”
“I was closing fast. Then I heard a very loud noise. Imagine being in a galvanized tin shed when someone throws a big handful of rocks against the outside. That is what is sounds and feels like when your plane is hit by machine-gun fire. It certainly got my attention. I looked back and 300 yards behind me was a pair of Zeros and a stream of red tracers coming at me from the 7.7mm machine-gun in the nose of the lead plane.”
—Hamilton McWhorter, former U.S. Navy fighter pilot
Jack Glass served with Air Groups Six and Ten aboard the USS Enterprise in 1944: “On 20 June 1944 the pilots and radiomen of VB-10 were on the alert hoping the Japanese fleet would be found before the end of the day. At about 4:40 pm word came down to the ready room that the Jap fleet had indeed been located about 250 miles away. We were very worried about such a long mission so late in the day. If we somehow made it back to our carriers, it would mean night landings. All of our pilots were qualified for night landings but had made only a few in recent months. Despite the drawbacks we were all eager to take another crack at the Jap fleet. We sure weren’t heroes, but this was what it was all about. With the climb-out and a full bomb load, the SBD [Douglas Dauntless dive-bomber] just wasn’t supposed to make it there and back.
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