by Craig Nelson
Herron would also say that Walter Short and his wife, Isabel, were insulted by being posted to Hawaii, believing that he deserved a spot in Washington or at the Presidio in San Francisco. Mrs. Short was additionally angered at being taken away from her friends and family to live in the middle of nowhere. Herron concluded, “Following my talks with General Short at the time, he did not ever ask my opinion, or for information, or correspond with me on the subject of command or related problems.”
As news of Japanese attacks in Asia reached a crescendo over the start of 1941, many officers and FBI agents on Oahu, knowing that 155,000 residents were of Japanese ancestry—a third of the population—became convinced that a fifth column lurked behind the scenes in Honolulu, sabotaging the territory and infecting the populace in preparation for Tojo’s invasion. No evidence was ever found. Instead, historian Thurston Clarke theorizes that the fifth column sabotaging American defenses wasn’t Japanese immigrants and their children, but the glories of Hawaii itself: “Cables from the Navy Department might have declared, ‘This dispatch is to be considered a war warning,’ but when their recipients looked out windows and up from breakfast tables, they saw paradise. They rose to soft and flower-scented breezes, ate papaya or mango from backyard trees, and took cool showers, because in a climate that may be the most perfect on earth, many houses lacked water heaters. On weekends, women dressed in loose-fitting muumuus or kimonos, and men wore aloha shirts, a recent invention of a local Japanese tailor, who made them from the colorful silk fabrics used for children’s clothing in Japan. On weekdays, people worked in the mornings and relaxed in the afternoons. After the attack, a captain commanding a field artillery battery at Schofield Barracks told the army board of inquiry, ‘Because it was in the tropics we did very little work in the afternoon. It was just the opposite of a warlike attitude.’ ”
Pearl Harbor itself was then a tourist destination, with each capital ship looking like the industrialized skyline of a small town from the future. So many of them massed in one harbor was thrilling to behold. In the Pacific sun, the navy’s dress whites shone, and while that service’s blues matched the ocean itself, the army’s khaki browns and greens faded into the jungle. James Jones’s From Here to Eternity captures that time, when American officers wore white gloves, gazed over manicured lawns, and presented engraved calling cards, while granting their men “Cinderella liberty”—back aboard by midnight. The 1941 slogan for the city of Honolulu? “A World of Happiness in an Ocean of Peace.” The town had no stoplights; instead, policemen either sat under umbrellas with leis draped across their shoulders flipping Stop levers and Go levers or waved cars through with their gloved hands, while shimmying a hula.
Yet, some signs couldn’t be ignored. “During the spring and summer of 1941 we saw a death ship,” Lawson remembered. “It was a British cruiser, and it had just a makeshift bow they had put on in the Philippines. And the ship stunk to high heaven, because they had had to seal off a couple of frames to make the ship seaworthy, but inside those frames was a whole bunch of their crew dead and rotting, and you could smell it all over the harbor. They were dead from a torpedo they took somewhere in the South Pacific.”
On what would be the last sail of Arizona’s life from late November to December 5, 1941, Japanese subs followed the fleet around the Hawaiian Islands. Lawson: “Long about one o’clock in the morning the general alarm went off—‘Man your battle stations!’ The picket submarines and picket destroyers had detected a bunch of sonar contacts. Every man aboard knew that meant Japanese submarines.” But such reminders of hostilities were all too rare, and the warnings of what was to come seemed so distant. Lieutenant Albert Brower: “We’d have a few beers at the Officers’ Club. Talk would get around to the war in Europe. And we kept patting each other on the back saying that, in case of war, this is the place to be. We have it made! Look at all this water around us, protected by the United States Navy. We have it made.” “Nobody talked about the possibility of war. That was the farthest thing from our minds,” Naval Hospital nurse Lenore Rickert said. “I met my husband, Albert, at that time. He had been a patient in the wars there. We weren’t supposed to go with patients, of course. I remember he was stationed at the marine base right next door to us. So I would go down the road and I would flash my light so he would step out from the bushes, knowing that it was me that was coming.”
Though their routine chores may have been stultifying, the soldiers and sailors of Oahu were living the life of Mutiny on the Bounty’s Fletcher Christian, with their ironwood trees and breadfruit groves; their warm and hibiscus-kissed breezes; and their light daily rain. West Virginia bugler Richard Fiske: “It was actually my first time to have any distance away from home. I’d just made my eighteenth birthday and I’m thinking about a lot of hula girls in just grass skirts. It had all the enchantment that a person could imagine by reading books. . . . We had ice cream parlors, and a few bars where we could get a cold beer for twenty-five cents. It was a great place. You could go down to Waikiki Beach and you could see the bathing beauties. You could sleep on Waikiki beach and nobody would even bother you.” Their life was evoked by the most popular song in Hawaii four years in a row, the one played by all the local bands of Honolulu, an Oscar winner from the 1937 movie Waikiki Wedding, “Sweet Leilani,” which had turned into a number one hit single for Bing Crosby:
Sweet Leilani, heavenly flower
I dreamed of paradise for two
You are my paradise completed
You are my dream come true.
* * *
I. Stark’s nickname Betty was a joke about Revolutionary War hero John Stark’s wife begun by classmates at Annapolis, though Secretary of War Henry Stimson saw it as more than that, calling Stark “timid and ineffective . . . the weakest one of all.”
PART I
* * *
THE ROADS TO WAR
CHAPTER ONE
* * *
CONCEIVING THE INCONCEIVABLE
One of the world’s most beautiful countries, Japan is so crowded she has developed both a unity of social grace and a national impulse of exceeding kindness to strangers. Those of us who love her and have been treated so well by her find it impossible to imagine her war crimes of World War II, just as after so many decades as allies, it is impossible for most Americans to imagine our two countries at war. It was, in fact, nearly as difficult for Americans to imagine such a thing in 1941, part of the reason that Pearl Harbor came as such a shock. Yet, in the decades leading up to the attack, the one word for the two nations’ history was fraught—and this querulous state began at their first encounter.
On February 3, 1867, four weeks after his father’s sudden death, a teenager named Mutsuhito was crowned emperor of Japan. For centuries, his nation had been governed by a shogunate, a feudal military clique led by the greatest of the nation’s warlords, each of whom employed private armies of samurai constantly warring with each other, with their greatest honor being to die for their master. The shogun ran the country from the city of Edo, while the symbolic head of state, the emperor, resided in the ancient capital of Kyoto, devoting his life to a contemplation of poetry, philosophy, and calligraphy . . . not politics.
In the 1600s, after a string of Catholic missionaries had appeared and tried to convert the citizenry, the shogun decreed sakoku—“closed nation”—a foreign policy pioneered by the Chinese. Beyond a select group of Dutch and Japanese merchants restricted to the island of Dejima, any foreigners trying to enter the country would be executed. Sakoku was the rule of law for 250 years, until 1853, when Mutsuhito was all of one year old, and the commandant of Brooklyn’s New York Naval Shipyard and the father of the American steam navy, Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, appeared in Tokyo Bay with a letter from American president Millard Fillmore, a white flag, the seven cannon-festooned gunboats of the East India Squadron (including his black-pitch-hulled frigate, Susquehanna), and a regiment of US marines. President Fillmore wanted commercial access to Japan to globally strengthen Am
erica’s whaling and merchant businesses, and the president’s letter promised that, if Edo did not revoke sakoku and allow American entry, the United States would destroy the country. With one look at Perry’s boats, which could sail upwind, armed with state-of-the-art Paixhans guns firing explosive shells that could demolish anything along the way, the shogun knew he could not win and signed a treaty acceding to Fillmore’s demands.
In the years that followed, many in Japan refused to accept the forced presence of foreign barbarians, especially a group of young samurai known as shishi—“men of high purpose”—who believed such conditions evidenced a faltering society, a culture that could only be repaired through violent revolution, including the death or expulsion of foreigners, and the downfall of the ruling clique (Mutsuhito’s grandson, Hirohito, will face an almost identical constellation of social forces across the 1930s and 40s). Emperor Komei, Mutsuhito’s father, was thirty-five years old, and in excellent health. Suddenly in January of 1867 he turned grievously ill, dying on the thirtieth. Many of the era’s scholars believe he was poisoned, but it meant the fifteen-year-old Mutsuhito inherited the throne. Riding the revolutionary sentiment streaking through his country, he would turn everything upside down.
Crowned as Meiji, the emperor hired foreign immigrants to build railroads, shipyards, spinning mills, port facilities, and foundries. When each business was up and running, it was sold to a Japanese family. He moved his palace from Kyoto to Edo, renamed that city Tokyo, abolished the feudal land system, and created a government with a constitution, a cabinet, and a legislature. As more and more examples of Western science, business, and culture appeared, the Japanese underwent a cultural upheaval similar to the West’s Enlightenment—the Meiji Restoration. Top-ranking Tokyo students traveled to London to study shipping, to Paris for law, to Germany for medicine, and to the United States for business. Every innovation of the past three hundred years—from lightbulbs to hansom cabs—was immediately imported. While wearing Western clothes and eating Western food, however, Meiji saluted his ancestry by composing one hundred thousand waka verse, one of which would be quoted by his grandson as Hirohito’s most significant stand against fascism:
The seas of the four directions—
all are born of one womb:
why, then, do the wind and waves rise in discord?
Emperor Meiji chose for his tutor the son of a samurai, an admiral who would become a legendary naval hero: Heihachiro Togo. In 1876, Meiji dispatched gunboats to Korea to force it to sign commerce agreements—exactly what Millard Fillmore and Matthew Perry had done to the Japanese in 1853. Japan then won its first two wars back-to-back, against the China of the Qing, and the Russia of the czar. One news item displayed on the bulletin boards of Japanese elementary schools announced, “Japanese troops defeat Chinese at P’yongyang and win a great victory. Chinese corpses were piled up as high as a mountain. Oh, what a grand triumph! Chinka, Chinka, Chinka, Chinka, so stupid and they stinka.”
Across the Pacific at that moment, America had similar feelings. Beginning in the 1850s with settlers from Guangdong hoping to pan their fortune out of California’s gold rush, the American West swelled with Chinese immigrants, peaking when the Transcontinental Railroad imported hordes of manual laborers to work its desert and mountain track. After that great feat was completed in 1869, however, many Americans came to believe that their states were infested with Asian immigrants taking their jobs and engaging in criminal enterprise, a belief that grew into a mass panic known as yellow peril. The San Francisco Chronicle ran stories such as “Brown Asiatics Steal Brains of Whites,” and New-York Tribune editor Horace Greeley—he of “Go west, young man” fame—complained “The Chinese are uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all conception without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the basest order.” An estimated two hundred Asians were lynched by white mobs in the 1870s and 1880s, leading to the colloquialism a Chinaman’s chance—i.e., no chance. Meanwhile, so much of Chinese culture would permeate into America that it became invisible, such as the US Marine Corps slogan gung ho—a version of the Chinese for “work together.”
On May 27, 1905, the Japanese Imperial Navy made history, using its twelve-inch guns imported from England to battle the czar. It would prove a field test of the new battleships’ value and would echo, in detail upon detail, with another historic battle—that of December 7, 1941. Russia and Japan were then competing in imperial designs on China and Korea—Japan wanted natural resources, and Russia yearned for a warm-water Pacific base for both defense and trade, to complement its seasonal port at Vladivostok. Japan offered to settle their quarrels by splitting the difference, giving Russia preeminence in Manchuria if Japan was given free rein in Korea. Moscow, knowing her navy was far more powerful than Tokyo’s, refused, and Tokyo interpreted this bellicosity as a threat. On the night of February 8, 1904, an Imperial Japanese squadron of destroyers launched a surprise attack against the Russian fleet at Manchuria’s Port Arthur. Two days after, Japan declared war, and by May, Japanese army troops were invading the peninsula. Russia massed her own troops across the Trans-Siberian Railway and, on October 15, sent five divisions of her Baltic Fleet around the Cape of Good Hope to Vladivostok through the strait that lay between Korea and Japan—Tsushima.
On the night of May 26, 1905, Russia’s Second Pacific Squadron entered these narrows, camouflaged by heavy fog. In the dark murk, hospital ship Oryol came across an auxiliary cruiser, and the two vessels signaled their identities to each other, with Oryol helpfully adding that other Russian ships were nearby. But the cruiser was not Russian, but Japanese, and in one of the first uses of wireless radio in a naval clash, the ship cabled her commander and Mutsuhito’s mentor, Admiral Heihachiro Togo, “Enemy is in square 203.” By 0500, the Russians in turn had intercepted the Japanese messages and knew they had been discovered.
Togo would now risk forty ships—nearly the whole of Japan’s navy—in this one-throw-of-the-dice battle. He wrote a message to the naval ministry, which would echo through Japanese military history for its daring confidence and lace of sangfroid: “In response to the warning that enemy ships have been sighted, the Combined Fleet will immediately commence action and attempt to attack and destroy them. Weather today fine but high waves.” At 1355, the admiral ordered a Z flag to rise, which signaled to his crew, “The Empire’s fate depends on the result of this battle. Let every man do his utmost duty.”
If Togo’s first great asset was his nerve, the second was his fleet’s radio, as he described this technological miracle: “Though a heavy fog covered the sea, making it impossible to observe anything at a distance of over five miles, [through radio reports] all the conditions of the enemy were as clear to us, who were thirty or forty miles distant, as though they had been under our very eyes.” A third asset was that the Russians had trawled eighteen thousand miles to war, but hadn’t been able to maintain their ships’ power systems along the way, and their speeds were now greatly reduced, and a fourth was that, because of his attack on Port Arthur, Togo was the world’s only admiral with dreadnought experience in an actual engagement. But perhaps the greatest asset of all for the Japanese was that all of these advantages united into Togo’s perfect execution of one of the great naval strategies of all time, which he executed twice at Tsushima: crossing the T.
For three hours, beginning at 2000, Togo sent twenty-one destroyers and thirty-seven torpedo boats to continually barrage the Russian fleet from every direction. While the enemy’s attentions were focused on defending itself, Togo then turned his battleships, one by one, so they were broadside, facing the front line of Russia’s navy, enabling the whole of Japan’s aquatic arsenal to be used against Russia, while only Russia’s forward guns could be fired against Japan. In a mere ninety minutes, Oslyabya became history’s first armored battleship to be sunk by gunfire alone, with Commander Vladimir Semenoff reporting “The steel plates and superstructu
re on the upper decks were torn to pieces, and the splinters caused many casualties. Iron ladders were crumpled up into rings, guns were literally hurled from their mountings. In addition to this, there was the unusually high temperature and liquid flame of the explosion, which seemed to spread over everything. I actually watched a steel plate catch fire from a burst.”
The six remaining Russian ships were ordered to give up. They raised XGE flags, international codes for surrender, but the Japanese didn’t recognize those and kept firing. The Russians then raised white tablecloths up their flagpoles, but Togo had lost a ship eleven years before to Chinese sailors using a white flag as a ruse, and the Japanese kept firing. Finally, the Russians stopped their motors dead in the water and raised Japanese naval flags up their mastheads to signal their complete and unconditional surrender.
For the first time in modern history, an Asian nation had devastated a European navy. The czar’s flagship was lost, as were all of Russia’s battleships, most of its cruisers and destroyers, and 4,380 sailors. In victory, however, Togo retained his grace. Visiting his counterpart, the gravely wounded Admiral Rozhestvensky, Togo offered a kindness, insisting, “Defeat is a common fate of a soldier. There is nothing to be ashamed of in it. The great point is whether we have performed our duty.” In decades to come, Togo would be so revered that, even among the Japanese immigrants working in Hawaii, a brand of sake was named for the admiral and labeled with his portrait.
Some historians theorize that Russians’ discontent with the Romanov military disaster at Tsushima was a major impetus for their revolution, and the consensus is that, with this one battle, Japan vaulted herself into the league of global powers. However, British historian Geoffrey Regan posited that Tsushima had unforeseen consequences, creating “a legend that was to haunt Japan’s leaders for forty years [when] victory over one of the world’s great powers convinced some Japanese military men that with more ships, and bigger and better ones, similar victories could be won throughout the Pacific. Perhaps no power could resist the Japanese navy, not even Britain and the United States.”