The Navy also had planes flying into Oahu airspace while the raid was under way. While 215 miles west of Oahu on her return voyage from Wake, Enterprise flew off (at 0615 and 0637) eighteen SBD Dauntless dive-bombers toward the air stations at Ford Island and Ewa. Like the B-17 crews who stumbled into the Pacific war, the Navy pilots were stunned as they closed the shore to find Oahu under enemy fire. Four of the planes were shot out of the air by Zeros, killing two pilots. American AA fire mistakenly accounted for another. At 0908 14ND radioed to all ships: “Do not fire on our planes coming in”; and, again, at 0921: “To all hands. Reported that enemy ships [sic] has [sic] red dot on bottom of fuselage.”46 (The red rising sun roundel, later called the “meatball” by U.S. servicemen, was actually on the underside of the wings.) One SBD crash-landed at a field on Kauai Island. The remainder found dangerous havens at Ford or Ewa.47 Damage to ground installations at Ford, Ewa, and Kaneohe was heavy.
* * *
Fuchida’s Kate departed Oahu with the rear guard of fighters and, about noon, finding the carriers recovering the last of their aircraft on a northeast heading, successfully caught one of the arresting cables on Akagi. Not every plane before his had been so fortunate. Newly aroused seas had the carriers rolling and pitching. Numerous returning aircraft crashed onto the decks. When Fuchida tallied the casualties from AA fire and landing accidents, he reported 14 dive-bombers and 6 fighters lost from the second wave of 171 aircraft, for a total of 29 lost in both waves, and 74 damaged. “How many did you expect to lose?” he was asked in a postwar interrogation. “About half,” he answered, “and we thought we would lose half our ships.”48 When Fuchida and Genda energetically clasped hands on Akagi’s flight deck it was with relief as well as with elation and triumph.
Fifty-five officers and men had been lost.
* * *
How did the American principals seen earlier on this day first learn of the Japanese air attack? A few minutes before 0800, Ensign Tanner’s 14P1 began to crackle with “frenzied” voice and coded Morse messages, one of which, eventually, was directed to him. Base headquarters at Kaneohe turned his flight of three patrol bombers northwest and north to search between 270 and 360 degrees for Japanese carriers responsible for an attack under way against Oahu. Tanner and his crew found nothing in that sector, but one of the other PBYs in his flight, searching due north, encountered Zero fighters and took a number of hits in the aft fuselage. That bomber, commanded by Ensign Fred Meyer, continued scouting but also came up empty. Tanner later wrote, “I have often thought of the hour-plus warning we had, based on the action with the Jap submarine. I’ve wondered why we didn’t better use that time to mount a defense of the island.”49 The hour-plus of which Tanner wrote would be correct if one counted from Ward’s message at 0653; but not from the time of his own message, which was sent coded at 0715 and was not decoded until 0735. Still, any warning would have helped.
* * *
Ward’s skipper, Lt. Outerbridge, continued to be busy following his famous attack and message. He brought in a sampan that had been found in restricted waters and he made more depth charge attacks on submarine contacts. Ward was still at general quarters when the ship’s executive officer, standing next to Outerbridge on the bridge, pointed toward the harbor and said, “They are making a lot of noise over there this morning, Captain.” Outerbridge replied, “Yes, I guess they are blasting the new road from Pearl to Honolulu.” The Exec said, “Look at those planes. They are coming straight down.” Outerbridge looked, as the Exec added, “Gosh, they are having an attack over there.” Outerbridge said, “They certainly are.”50
* * *
Lt. Comdr. Kaminski was still at his watch officer station in 14ND headquarters when, at approximately 0755, “I heard a plane approaching from the south. I saw it from [the] southerly lanai [porch] of [the] administration building. I could discern the Rising Sun of Japan under the wings. The plane was joined shortly by others with the same insignia on [them]. This plane was flying very low and hedge-hopping, just going over the roof.”51
* * *
At Opana, Privates Lockard and Elliott closed down the radar operation when the return signal from “an unusually large number of planes” reached a distance of about twenty-two miles and became distorted by a back wave off the mountains. Anyway, the truck had arrived to take them down for breakfast at the eighteen-man tent camp nine miles away at Hawailoa. As Elliott remembered it:
About a quarter way away from the camp, we noticed from our truck all of the men from the camp driving very fast in the opposite direction in which we were going. They were going to the [radar] unit. They had their field packs, and helmets, and what not. We still had no indication as to what had happened until we arrived at the camp, when we were told that we had been attacked by the Japanese.52
There the two privates turned over their record of readings to platoon commander 2nd Lt. John Upson. “We were very proud of the reading that we had gotten,” said Elliott. “We brought it back to show it off, so to speak.”53 There is no information in the surviving documents that this writer has found to explain what Upson did with the readings—whether, for instance, he communicated the report to his superior, Capt. W. H. Tetley, or to overall AWS commander Lt. Col. C. A. Powell, both at Schofield Barracks. Lockard said later that, in camp, the men remaining were “looking at the sky,” where, to the south, they could see “black oil smoke,” and that they were aware that Pearl Harbor was being attacked by Japanese aircraft. He turned to Elliott and said, “I bet that is what we saw”—or “something like that.”54
When in 1945 Elliott was asked in the JCC hearings, “Did anybody come to you during that day and ask you to tell them what you saw in the radar at seven o’clock that morning?” he answered, “No sir; only the men at our individual camp that were interested to know just what had gone on.” So all the men there had the information? “Yes, sir; very definitely, sir.” And if anyone had called your camp on the telephone they could have gotten that information from practically anybody there? “Yes, sir.”55 When, later, Lockard was asked, about the information, “When was it first taken notice of officially?” he answered, “It must have been about a week.” Actually, a copy of the radar plot reached CINCPAC on Tuesday the ninth.56
At the Information Center at Fort Shafter, operator Private McDonald was relieved from his switchboard at 0730:
I took this message [from Opana] with me. By the way, it was the first time I ever did that, but I wanted to show the fellows, up at the tent; so they all saw it; and when the planes were coming over there, I began to get a little shaky.… When they started coming down and diving all around I just started running for the nearest pile.57
* * *
Lt. Tyler, who had told Lockard and Elliott “not to worry about it,” stated on 20 December that:
At about 0750 I heard some airplanes outside and looking toward Pearl Harbor saw what I thought to be a navy [sic] practicing dive bombing runs. At a little after 0800, Sergeant Eugene Starry, A[ir]. C[orps]., Wheeler Field called me to tell me that Wheeler Field had been attacked. I immediately had the telephone operator call all men back to duty.… I remained on duty … until about 1615, 8 December 1941, with the exception of rest periods.58
* * *
Lt. Comdr. Ramsay was in his operations office at PatWing 2 on Ford Island when he received a call from the staff duty officer reporting Ensign Tanner’s message from patrol bomber 14P1. He immediately reported in turn to the CINCPAC duty officer, Commander Murphy, and went to the PatWing 2 Command Center, where, together with the staff duty officer, he observed what both thought was a U.S. Navy aircraft diving (“flathatting”) over the southern seaplane ramp on the island. They did not see that the plane had dropped a bomb near the VP-22 hangar until the delayed fuse detonated at 0757. “Never mind: it’s a Jap,” he said, and at 0758 broadcast a voice alert, in the clear on all frequencies, that Samuel Eliot Morison later called “a message that shook the United States as nothing had since the
firing on Fort Sumter”:59
AIR RAID PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NO DRILL.60
The alert was repeated by the signal tower in the navy yard to all ships and stations at 0800.61
* * *
Admiral Bloch, as noted earlier, first became aware of the air attack when “he heard the explosion in close proximity to my house, and that was around 7:55.”62 He went “as fast as I could” to 14ND headquarters, where he sent notice that Oahu had been attacked to Washington, Manila, Guam, and all ships at sea. He then issued the following orders:
Close all Navy Yard gates to traffic. Have Captain of the Yard detail fire parties. Notify Marines to make all men available to assist in fighting fires. Notify Marines to bring in from Salt Lake Camp all available Marines. Notify Yard to flood drydock. Make arrangements for civilian workmen to be rounded up and brought to the Yard to assist in damage control. Notify hospital to establish emergency measures for caring for killed and wounded.63
* * *
Bloch’s opposite number, General Short, heard the first bombs “about 7:55” at his quarters in Fort Shafter. He thought at first that the Navy was conducting exercises about which either he had not been made aware or had forgotten. When some more explosions sounded, he went out on the back porch to have a look—Pearl Harbor was only four statute miles distant—“and about that time the chief of staff [Colonel Phillips, who lived nearby] came running over to my quarters about three minutes after eight, and said he had just received a message from Wheeler or Hickam, or both—I have forgotten which—that it was the real thing.”64
Short told Phillips to put into effect Alert No. 3. By 0810, with telephone calls to the Army’s four major units, that was done. Because of the manner in which the full alert plans had been written and practiced, every unit down to the company level sprang into action. “We didn’t have to issue a long winded order,” Short said in the following month. “Everybody knew exactly what his job was, because there was no confusion.” The Army’s 24th and 25th Divisions took up battle positions against the possibility of a land invasion. And the AA batteries scrambled for their ammunition.65
* * *
Admiral Kimmel was buttoning on his white uniform at his quarters when Captain Murphy called for a second time, to report that Ward was towing a sampan into Honolulu Harbor. Before Murphy could finish that message, a yeoman interrupted him to say, “There’s a message from the signal tower saying the Japanese are attacking Pearl Harbor and this is no drill.”66 Murphy relayed that message to Kimmel, who bounded out the front door toward the automobile door held open for him by his driver. There would be no golf game as scheduled with General Short this morning. Seeing Captain Earle’s wife standing on her front lawn looking down on Battleship Row, he paused to follow her eyes, first, toward the black oil smoke beginning to rise over the Battle Force, then overhead to the Japanese aircraft with their red roundels flying figure-eight bombing runs across the harbor. Mrs. Earle later told historian Gordon W. Prange that, for that brief wordless moment, Kimmel seemed to be in a state of “utter disbelief and completely stunned.” His face, she said, was “as white as the uniform he wore.”67
drawn by Robert M. Berish for The Rising Sun in the Pacific, courtesy National Historical Center
Within ten minutes Kimmel was in his corner office on the second deck of the submarine base, absorbing information and issuing messages and orders, including these:
At 0816:
FROM THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF TO ALL SHIPS AND STATIONS X HOSTILITIES WITH JAPAN COMMENCED WITH AIR RAID ON PEARL X
At 0817:
FROM CINC TO COMPATWING-2 X LOCATE ENEMY FORCE
At 0832:
FROM CINC TO ALL SHIPS PRESENT PEARL X JAPANESE SUBMARINE IN HARBOR
At 0902:
FROM CINC TO COMTASKFORCE 38 AND 12 AND ALL SHIPS PACIFIC FLT X EXECUTE WPL46 AGAINST JAPAN68
* * *
At Washington, Admiral Stark was talking with Navy Secretary Knox in the latter’s office when a dispatch arrived from Pearl Harbor. It was Lt. Comdr. Ramsey’s terse composition: “Air Raid Pearl Harbor: This Is No Drill.” Knox was disbelieving. “My God!” he barked. “This can’t be true, this must mean the Philippines.” But Stark checked the point of origin on the signal, and said, “No, sir, this is Pearl.”69 Knox then called the President, who was with Harry Hopkins. As Hopkins wrote later that day,
I lunched with the President today at his desk in the Oval Room. We were talking about things far removed from war when at about 1:40 Secretary Knox called and said that they had picked up a radio from Honolulu from the Commander-in-Chief of our forces there advising all our stations that an air raid attack was on and that it was “no drill.”70
For twenty minutes, while awaiting confirmation of the message and additional details, Roosevelt discussed the likelihood of the report being true, as against Hopkins’s belief that “there must be some mistake and that surely Japan would not attack in Honolulu.”71
* * *
Army Secretary Stimson, after an hour and a half meeting with Secretaries Hull and Knox in the secretary of State’s office that broke up at noon, returned home for lunch. His diary entry for that Sunday records:
And just about 2:00 o’clock, while I was sitting at lunch, the President called me up on the telephone and in a rather excited voice asked me, “Have you heard the news?” I said, “Well, I have heard the telegrams which have been coming in about the Japanese advances in the Gulf of Siam.” He said, “Oh, no. I don’t mean that. They have attacked Hawaii. They are now bombing Hawaii.” Well, that was an excitement indeed.72
General Marshall left the office of the Chief of Staff at noon, directly after filing an alert to General Short (copy to Admiral Kimmel), and had his driver take him to his quarters at Fort Myer for lunch. Before leaving, he had asked Col. John R. Deane, secretary of the general staff, to keep the office open and to have some of the commissioned and civilian personnel report for duty. As Deane remembered events six months later:
At about 1:30 P.M. an enlisted man from the Navy rushed into my office out of breath with a pencil note, which was supposed to have been a message from the Navy radio operator at Honolulu and which said, as I recall: “Pearl Harbor attacked. This is no drill.” I immediately telephoned General Marshall at his quarters at Fort Myer.… He directed me to contact Hawaii if possible and verify the message. Before I could do this another and more official message came, indicating the correctness of the first message that had been received. General Marshall was in his office within ten minutes.73
* * *
This Sunday as on every Sunday since he first entered the State Department in 1933, Cordell Hull was in his office: first, as planned, to meet with Knox and Stimson; second, as expected since about ten o’clock when he was handed the “one o’clock” Magic decrypt, to receive the Japanese emissaries Nomura and Kurusu. The formal request made by them to have that audience at 1:00 P.M. came by telephone shortly before noon. Hull agreed to remain in his office for that purpose. But shortly after the agreed-upon hour, Nomura called to ask for a postponement until 1:45. The two men entered State’s diplomatic waiting room, in fact, at 2:05, the exact time when Hull received a call from Roosevelt advising him in a “steady but clipped” tone that “there’s a report that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.” Hull asked if the report had been confirmed, and the President answered that it had not. (Stark would telephone in the confirmation to Roosevelt at 2:28, adding that there was damage to the fleet and loss of life.) Hull told Roosevelt that Nomura and Kurusu were waiting outside his office. The President advised him to go ahead and receive them, not to mention that he possessed news about an attack, but to receive their fourteen-part message “formally and coolly and bow them out.”74
Part of the mythology of Pearl Harbor is the explanation commonly given for Nomura’s and Kurusu’s failure to make the deadline imposed on them by Tokyo. The assumption of many is that Japan intended to break off negotiations with the United States as
a substitute for a formal declaration of war, and to do so a half hour prior to the opening of hostilities. Article I of the Second Hague Peace Convention (1907), which Japan had signed, required that hostilities undertaken by one nation against another should not commence “without an explicit warning, in the form of either a reasoned declaration of war or of an ultimatum with conditional declaration of war.”75 Apparently, Japanese Foreign Minister Togo interpreted the fourteen-part response to Hull’s Ten-Point note as meeting the stipulations of the last phrase cited. Roosevelt, too, after reading the first thirteen parts, said, “This means war”; as described above. Thus, according to a widely held belief, Japan’s surprise attack would be considered in that country at least to be “honorable.” The delay in meeting that “half-hour prior” deadline has traditionally been attributed to the tardiness of the Japanese embassy in preparing the fourteen-part message for presentation. Ordered by a dispatch that had followed the pilot message that they “be absolutely sure not to use a typist,” Nomura and Kurusu relied upon an embassy official named Okumura Katsuzo, whose typing skills were at best “hunt and peck.” His slowness at the typewriter, so the story goes, forced the postponement of the presentation until after the attack.
Conservative historians in Japan have promoted this account to support their views, first, that the United States forced their country into war, and, second, that the only factor preventing the onset of hostilities from being entirely honorable was a bumbling embassy staff in Washington. In 1999 those views were challenged by Professor Takeo Iguchi, of the faculty of law and international relations at the International Christian University in Tokyo. Iguchi has turned up papers in the Foreign Ministry archives, as well as the war diary of the Imperial General Staff, which suggest that Japan’s diplomatic and military leaders deliberately retarded the delivery of the fourteen-part message as a means of assuring the success of a surprise attack. A 7 December entry in the war diary notes with satisfaction that “our deceptive diplomacy is steadily proceeding toward success.” The diplomatic documents include an earlier draft of the fourteen-part message, dated 3 December, that more closely tracked the Hague requirement of a warning, in that it stated that Washington “would be held responsible for any and all the consequences that may arise in the future.” But the war diary shows that the Army and Navy staffs objected to that warning and forced the adoption of the weaker, non-threatening language contained in the final message. Professor Iguchi maintains that the delay in presenting the message was also deliberately planned by the military with the cooperation of a pliant Minister Togo. His evidence is the unusual number of “garbles” in the original enciphered text—significantly more than one finds in other diplomatic traffic. (These garbles, it may be noted, seem not to have slowed down the U.S. Navy cryptographers.) Iguchi observed that many leading historians in his country have described the embassy’s fumbling performance as an “ugly blemish” on Japan’s modern history. “But,” in his own view, “the blemish belongs to those who engaged in deliberate deception, or who have failed to ever go into the documentary evidence.”76
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