by Craig Nelson
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That afternoon in paradise, Sears, Roebuck Honolulu arrayed Christmas presents around its parking-lot palms, and a sellout crowd cheered for the University of Hawaii football team fighting the Willamette Bearcats. It was such a beautiful day, as so many would later remember.
At around 1400, the FBI’s Japanese translator in Honolulu finished work on an extensive intercepted phone call of December 3 between a Tokyo newspaper writer and Dr. Motokazu Mori, a prominent Honolulu dentist and known Japanese agent. The journalist said, “I received your telegram and was able to grasp the essential points. I would like to have your impressions on the conditions you are observing at present. Are airplanes flying daily?” “Yes,” Mori said, “lots of them fly around,” and added, that the Japanese and Americans in Hawaii were “getting along harmoniously,” but when the reporter asked directly about the US Navy, Mori demurred, saying, “We try to avoid talking about such matters.” The conversation then changed, with Tokyo asking, “What kind of flowers are in bloom in Hawaii at present?” Mori said, “Presently, the flowers in bloom are fewest out of the whole year. However, the hibiscus and the poinsettia are in bloom now.”
General Short’s counterintelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel George Bicknell, thought this transcript was “highly suspicious,” but “both Colonel Fielder and General Short indicated that I was perhaps too ‘intelligence conscious’ and that to them the message seemed to be quite in order, and that it was nothing to be excited about.” Local FBI agent Robert Shivers also found it odd and tried tracking it down, but made no headway. A cable sent to the task force from Tomioka’s Operations Section, however, included, “Telephone contacts made with Japanese and civilian indicate Oahu Island was very calm with no blackout.”
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That afternoon in Washington, most of the staff at the Naval Cryptographic Section had already left for the weekend. One new employee, Mrs. Dorothy Edgers, decided on her own to go through the backlog of Hawaii MAGIC. She came across message after message between Tokyo and its Honolulu embassy concerning barrage balloons, airfield locations, ship movements, antitorpedo nets at Pearl Harbor, and even one report explaining how Japan’s local German spy would transmit last-minute information. She showed the transcripts to Chief Ship’s Clerk H. L. Bryant, but he said he couldn’t get to translating them before leaving at noon, and to let the job wait for Monday. Mrs. Edgers thought the material was so important, though, that she stayed at the office and did the translating herself. That afternoon, the Translation Branch chief, Captain Alvin Kramer, came in to work and Mrs. Edgers showed him her efforts. Kramer criticized her translation and began editing it, but said he had more important things to do. Kramer remembered saying, “This needs a lot of work, Mrs. Edgers. Why don’t you run along now? We’ll finish the editing sometime next week.” She argued with him, insisting that the job was worth finishing today. “You just go home, Mrs. Edgers,” he replied. “We’ll get back to this piece on Monday.”
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Secretary of War Henry Stimson marked the day in his diary with “The news got worse and worse and the atmosphere indicated that something was going to happen.”
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That afternoon, FDR decided he would try to back away from the Hull Note’s tough stance by sending a conciliatory message to Hirohito that he forwarded to Hull, saying, “Shoot this to Grew. I think can go in gray code—saves time—I don’t mind if it gets picked up.” The president’s cable asked the emperor to avoid “tragic possibilities” and continue “the long period of unbroken peace and friendship” between their two nations, years in which Japan and the United States “through the virtues of their peoples and the wisdom of their rulers” both prospered and “substantially helped humanity.” Couldn’t there be a way for all nations sharing the Pacific to live together without fearing “any form of military threat” and with freedom of commerce? FDR asked. The conclusion: “I address myself to Your Majesty at this moment in the fervent hope that Your Majesty may, as I am doing, give thought in this definite emergency to ways of dispelling the dark clouds. I am confident that both of us, for the sake of the peoples not only of our own great countries but for the sake of humanity in neighboring territories, have a sacred duty to restore traditional amity and prevent further death and destruction in the world.”
When Kurusu heard about FDR’s cable, he publicly called it “a very clever move on the part of the [American] government” as Hirohito “could hardly say no, nor could he say yes, and that this would cause many headaches in Tokyo and give much food for thought.” However, Imperial Japanese Army General Staff officers, fearing interference with Operation Number One, squelched this détente. When Army General Staff Communications Section’s Major Morio Tomura learned that Roosevelt’s letter to Emperor Showa had arrived at the Tokyo Central Telegraphy Office, he shook his sword to threaten the staff and ordered the office’s director to reduce its urgency to delay the delivery to Ambassador Grew.
The same thing happened with the concluding cable of the fourteen-part message being sent at that moment from Togo to Nomura. The army first insisted that the fourteenth part be delayed until the president’s cable was translated. They also tampered with its transmission, as evidenced by MAGIC; the original fourteen-part cable has its delivery marked “Very Urgent”; the one sent to Nomura was downgraded to “Urgent” and “Very Important.” This meant that when it arrived at the Washington telegraph office in the early morning of December 7, no one called to alert the Japanese embassy, and it was left for later delivery. The original draft also announced the start of war, but the army revised the language until it merely referred to the end of diplomatic talks.
At dinner that evening, Franklin Roosevelt told his thirty-two guests, “This son of man has just sent his final message to the Son of God.” Afterward, Roosevelt was meeting with Harry Hopkins when Commander L. R. Schultz, assistant to FDR’s naval aide, arrived with the MAGIC intercepts of Togo’s fourteen-part memo, with the fourteenth and final part not yet cabled. Roosevelt quickly read through the document and handed it to Hopkins, and when he’d finished, FDR said he interpreted the phrase that Tokyo “cannot accept the [Hull] proposal as a basis of negotiation” as “This means war.” Hopkins agreed, adding, “That since war was undoubtedly going to come at the convenience of the Japanese, it was too bad that we could not strike the first blow and prevent any sort of surprise.”
Roosevelt: “No, we can’t do that. We are a democracy and a peaceful people.” Then according to Schultz, the president “raised his voice” to say, “But we have a good record.”
FDR began to call Harold Stark, but found out he was at the theater and decided not to interrupt with a page since if Stark “left suddenly . . . undue alarm might be caused.”
Rufus Bratton will testify before the army board that he had delivered the intercepts on the night of December 6. But in fact, after about half of the cable had arrived, Bratton “left and went home at about 9 p.m.,” according to his assistant, Carlisle Clyde Dusenbury, who was left behind and assigned with deliveries. Instead, after the cables had been decrypted and translated, Dusenbury went home without delivering them to anyone, since “I did not wish to disturb the usual recipients who were probably at home asleep, as I did not see the implications of immediate hostilities [in the messages].” Judge Advocate General investigator Henry Clausen: “Our civilian government was being fed the most secret information by our military, but the military didn’t do the job properly.”
Air Corps Chief Hap Arnold was at that moment addressing the Thirty-Eighth and Eighty-Eighth Reconnaissance Squadrons, who would be crewing B-17s from California to Clark Field in the Philippines, with their first stop at Hickam Field on Oahu. “War is imminent,” Arnold told them. “You may run into a war during your flight.”
“If we are going into a war, why don’t we have machine guns?” asked Major Truman H. Landon. Hap answered that the service was “trying to get every
gallon of gas they could in the plane and they did not anticipate fighting . . . on that long hop from California to Hawaii.”
At 2000 on December 6, the Honolulu Advertiser was printing its next morning’s Sunday paper when the presses broke down. It never distributed that edition, which included one article on the revolution in warships—“By sea and by air the Navy is in fighting trim. Carrier-based aviation, which has undergone wide development in tactical scope and strategic concept, is destined to play a major role when the signal comes”—and a front-page article with the headline “U.S. Sure Pacific War Not Likely”: “Official Washington believes that the tension over the Far Eastern crisis has been eased slightly, and that now there is a fairly good reason to hope that there will be no major conflict in the Pacific, at least for the next few weeks.”
The Advertiser wasn’t alone in making the wrong call. For weeks, Hawaii’s newspaper headlines had seesawed back and forth between such “war is imminent” stories as “Kurusu Bluntly Warned Nation Ready for Battle,” “Pacific Zero Hour Near,” “U.S. Army Alerted in Manila—Singapore Mobilizing as War Tension Grows,” and “U.S. Demands Explanations of Japan; Moves Americans Prepare for Any Emergency; Navy Declared Ready,” and such “peace is imminent” articles as “Japan Called Still Hopeful of Making Peace with U.S.,” “Hirohito Holds Power to Stop Japanese Army,” “Further Peace Efforts Urged,” and, on December 6, “New Peace Effort Urged in Tokyo—Joint Commission to Iron Out Deadlock with U.S. Proposal.” The Advertiser had indeed started the week with a November 30 article—“Japanese May Strike over the Weekend”—about expected Asian targets of Japanese aggression.
That December 6, Corporal W. J. Walker was ordered to take three men and create a security checkpoint on the road into the Punchbowl, the crater of an extinct volcano just outside the city of Honolulu. After a long night, he fell asleep until 2:00 a.m. on December 7 when the private on duty called. An important admiral with an entourage of six cars and about ten motorcycles was insisting on an immediate entry. Walker explained his orders; the general, pointing to the bright lights of Pearl Harbor, belittled him with “Corporal, what in the hell do you foot soldiers think the navy is doing down there? . . . We are here to take care of anything the Nips want to start and to protect the army.” Walker said he needed to check everyone’s identification anyway. The admiral, far too important for a security check, cursed and stormed off.
That night, Pearl Harbor’s spanking-new Bloch Recreation Center, which included a gym, a boxing ring, a jukebox, a bowling alley, and a pool hall with 3.2 percent beer, hosted “The Battle of the Bands,” with troupes from the Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Argonne performing swing, ballad, specialty, and jitterbug, including the hits “Take the A Train” and “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.” That night’s contest was an elimination round, pitting capital ship troupes across the whole of the Fleet against each other. For the audience, it was a night of dancing the latest steps until Pennsylvania was declared the winner, when everyone sang the Kate Smith hit “God Bless America.” The Pennsylvania’s triumph meant that she would battle the other finalist, Arizona, for the championship on December 20.
Instead, every member of Arizona’s band would die the following day. Many Pearl Harbor survivors would, for decades, hold vivid and precise memories not so much of December 7 as of December 6, since that was the last moment they were with so many, many friends who would be taken from them.
That night a group from the Arizona had a big champagne blowout at a Halekulani Hotel cottage. A number were too drunk to make it back to their ship, and that’s why they would survive.
Across the glittering hotels and ballrooms of Waikiki Beach that night were fox-trots, ukulele bands, and torches lighting the way to platforms for swing dancing over the sand. Lau Yee Chai, whose owners insisted was “the most beautiful Chinese restaurant in the world,” with its shimmering carp ponds and artificial mountain vista, hosted a festival for the harvest moon. At a Pacific Club dinner party with her lawyer husband, Dorothy Anthony remembered the conversation with two recent arrivals from Harvard Law School: “We all knew war might break out in Asia because all the big newspapermen stopped here on their way back and forth. But that night you couldn’t have gotten anyone at our party to say war would come to Hawaii.”
Wheeler Field pilot Gus Ahola, his roommate, and their girlfriends spent that night drinking coffee, playing a round of cards, and watching home movies. “My God, what a way to spend that evening,” he said, laughing, decades later. After driving his date home, Gus was passing by the great dreadnoughts of Pearl Harbor, twinkling in the yellow light of sodium vapor lamps, when a pilot pulled alongside and honked. The road between Honolulu and Wheeler Field was a narrow two-laner optimistically called the Kamehameha Highway, and as they would do everywhere else in the world, American pilots turned it into a drag strip. Gus: “You’d recognize another guy on that road, toot your horn, and away you’d go.” Arriving at base, Gus took in the vista of Wheeler Field’s glorious aircraft, illuminated by sabotage-preventing searchlights. He remembered thinking that he was part of “the best squadron in the Pacific, with the best training, the best pilots, and the best planes.”
In town, the white, green, and khaki rivers of servicemen flowed across the streets and into the pool halls, the bars, and the brothels of Hotel Street. Men on their own and on the prowl have long been a feature of Honolulu’s landscape, from Connecticut whalers during the era of Melville to the immigrant waves of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino plantation workers, to American servicemen in the 1930s. For the great majority—tens of thousands of sailors and soldiers—assignment to Hawaii was tedious. The men complained about their food, the weather, their pay, and their work. It was not yet the “greatest generation”; they were lonely young men away from their families for twenty-four months, with a noticeable rate of suicide. As Japanese spy Yoshikawa had learned, the sailors practiced their maneuvers from Monday to Friday and then returned to berth on the weekends, while soldiers followed nearly an identical schedule with drills. In their time off they came to town to play Skee-Ball and cards, drink beer, buy monkeypod curios, and have their skin tattooed.
Historian Thurston Clarke: “The lonely soldiers paid to embrace Filipino taxi dancers whose heavy eye shadow melted down their faces like tears, and patronized the Hotel Street photographic studios where they paid handsomely for the pleasure of wrapping their arms around girls in grass skirts who clicked on smiles and ignored their whispered pleas for a date. They joined the double lines stretching around the block from houses of prostitution that advertised on matchbooks (‘The Bell Rooms—Give the Bell a Ring!’) and were so efficient that nearby taverns sold tokens good for a screw. Yet, despite the prostitution, then quaintly known as ‘white-slave traffic,’ and despite neighborhoods with forbidding names like Tin Can Alley, Blood Town, Mosquito Flats, and Hell’s Half Acre, and despite the sneak thieves and pimps, there was a certain innocence to Hotel Street, a sense of order and propriety that later vanished from the place. The taxi-dance halls were heavily varnished, barn-like rooms reminiscent of church halls, where liquor was prohibited and dancers forbidden to leave until their mothers or husbands collected them.” Army recruit Bob Kinzler: “We had no contact with the Asian population except through the Japanese lady barbers, and civilians thought we were just a bunch of bums who had enlisted in the military because we couldn’t get real jobs.”
Officers seldom got to enjoy a Saturday night out on the town. Rear Admiral Patrick Bellinger was at home recovering from a serious case of the flu, and Rear Admiral Claude Bloch had spent the afternoon playing golf and the evening reading; he was in bed by eight thirty. Admiral Husband Kimmel was one of many of Hawaii’s leading citizens invited to a stag blowout at the Japanese consulate, but he decided to pass, as did Colonel Bicknell, who remembered Kita’s affairs were “really wet parties, [with] a bottle of scotch at each place and a geisha girl pouring it out.” Instead, Kimmel attended a dinner pa
rty at the Halekulani Hotel. Lieutenant General and Mrs. Short, meanwhile, were at the Schofield Barracks Officers’ Club charity dinner-dance, “Ann Etzler’s Cabaret.” Afterward, as the couple motored by the great might of Pearl Harbor on the way home, Short remarked to intelligence officer Kendall Fielder, “What a target that would make!”
It was common to joke about a Japanese invasion of Hawaii—perhaps because, though no one seemed to take the threat seriously, they knew the threat indeed existed—and each joke made in the days before December 7 was remembered for decades. When Commander Roscoe Good had walked past Battleship Row earlier that afternoon, his thoughts matched Short’s almost word for word: “What a beautiful target that would make.” Mrs. James Chapman, taking in the same vista of the Kamehameha Highway as Gus Ahola, said, “If the Japanese are going to attack Hawaii, this would be the ideal time, for there sits the entire Pacific Fleet at anchor.”
George Bicknell got a call at 2000 from Hawaiian Air Force signal officer Lieutenant Colonel Clay Hoppaugh, asking for help with the B-17s coming in from the mainland: “Will you put station KGMB on the air all night so planes can home in on the signal?” Bicknell was already irritated by the day’s events and so responded harshly, “Why don’t you have KGMB on the air every night and not just on the night we have airplanes flying? You folks have the money to do it.” “We’ll talk that over some other time,” Hoppaugh said. Bicknell did as he was asked, with no explanation to the radio station, which was compensated by the army every time it stayed on the air. Locals noticed, however, that when the luau music played all night, planes landed in the morning.