by Craig Nelson
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“The mood on the mother submarine was calm, as usual,” I-16 midget-sub crewman Kichiji Dewa remembered. “I went to the officers’ mess, which enlisted men like me usually could not enter. We ate a farewell dinner.” Afterward, he and fellow Special Attack crewmen Masaji Yokoyama and Sadamu Uyeda wrote letters to their parents, including hair and fingernail clippings to be used for their interment at Shinto shrines of honor and remembrance. “Forgive this negligent son for not writing these long months,” Uyeda’s letter said. “Though harvest time has come and gone, you must be pressed with work this time of year. We are soon to be dispatched to regions unknown. Should anything happen to me, do not grieve or mourn. Should I fail to write, do not be alarmed, because it means I am well and discharging my duties faithfully. Good-bye.”
They donned their fundoshi undergarment, their leather jacket uniform, and the hachimaki headband of a warrior, with a final gesture of dousing themselves with perfume bought on their last night in Japan so, as Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki explained, they could die “like cherry blossoms falling to the ground.” Carrying warm sweaters, bottles of sake, and a box lunch, the two-man crews followed the catwalk of the surfaced mother ships to their tiny subs, climbed up the side to the conning tower, lowered themselves within, and locked the hatch door. “We must look like high school boys happily going on a picnic,” said another midget crewman, Ensign Hirowo.
The mother ships then released the men to their fates. Lieutenant Commander Hiroshi Hanabusa: “We let go of the clamps. Speaking on the telephone, I wished them success. I hoped that they would return. But Masaji Yokoyama said, ‘If I come back, I’ll come back with a wolf and put the mother submarine in danger.’ So he knew that the Americans would follow them and get the I-16. And right away I began to miss them a little. I was thinking that they would not come back.”
Ensign Sakamaki looked through the periscope at Pearl Harbor’s glittering lights while talking to his commander, Hanabusa, who needed the ensign’s decision on whether he would go forward. The midget’s one gyrocompass had stopped working, and all attempts to repair it had failed. It would be impossible to navigate, but Sakamaki couldn’t imagine missing out on this moment in history, and his crewman, Kiyoshi Inagaki, agreed. “We will go,” Sakamaki declared, then shouted in a cry of courage, “On to Pearl Harbor!”
I-24 submerged, increased engine speed to give her charge a push, and at the correct depth the four clamps holding Sakamaki and Inagaki’s tube to her mother were released. Almost immediately, the broken gyrocompass caused trouble. Instead of coursing level, the midget dipped. Sakamaki even had to turn off his battery-powered electric motor to try to correct it.
Sakamaki now used his periscope to discover he’d been thrown completely off track and was charging away from Pearl Harbor instead of toward it. Try as he might to keep its course true, however, the broken submarine kept turning in circles.
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At around 2100, Mitsuo Fuchida met with his squadron leaders for “a little farewell drink, because we may not all be alive the next day. And I tried to sleep, but I felt that tomorrow will be the day that I would die. And I could not sleep all night.” But in another version of this memory, he told his officers they all needed a good night’s sleep, that he himself would be in bed within the hour: “I slept soundly. I had set up the whole machinery of attack, and it was ready to go. There was no use to worry now.”
Zero pilot Iyozou Fujita: “The night before the attack, I could not sleep. I thought I would die the next day. So I drank six bottles of beer. And I couldn’t get drunk. I couldn’t get sleepy. I did not expect to come back alive, so I put my belongings in order. Finally I wrote a message in my scarf. I wrote something like ‘I will triumph in dignity and in honor.’ [After all,] I was an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy. That means I was a samurai. It meant to act honestly and act fairly as far as fighting was concerned. To do one’s best for victory.” “They did not fear death,” Fuchida said of his men. “Their only fear was that the attack might not be successful and that they would have to return to Japan with their mission unfulfilled.” Pilot Sadamu Komachi said, “We had a mixed feeling of sorrow that we might die the next day. But also a feeling of pride, because we would die with honor.”
On his flagship Nagato anchored in Japan’s Inland Sea, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto played shogi and, just before going to bed, composed a verse:
It is my sole wish to serve the Emperor as His shield
I will not spare my life or honor.
At 0238 December 7, Tokyo began cabling the last of the fourteen-part message, its conclusion watered down by the army: “The Japanese Government regrets to have to notify hereby the American Government that in view of the attitude of the American Government it cannot but consider that it is impossible to reach an agreement through further negotiations.” MAGIC also intercepted Togo’s pilot cable directing Nomura: “Will the Ambassador please submit to the United States Government (if possible to the Secretary of State) our reply to the United States at 1:00 p.m. on the seventh, your time.”
At that moment in Washington, Secretary of War Henry Stimson went with Navy Secretary Frank Knox “to Secretary Hull’s office at ten thirty in the morning and talked the whole matter over. This was the day on which we knew the Japanese were going to bring their answer, and Mr. Hull said he was certain that the Japanese were planning some deviltry; and we were all wondering where the blow would strike.”
Since Japan’s consulate in Washington had already destroyed two of their three code machines, and since Togo had forbidden the use of American typists for this English document, the staff had been kept working until 3:30 a.m., when they were sent home and told to get some sleep and come back to the office at 9:00 a.m. on Sunday.
That it was a Sunday also meant delays at the cable office handling Togo’s message, which had received part fourteen and the pilot cable, but didn’t get them to the consulate until 11:00 a.m. By that time, though the consul staff had finished with parts one to thirteen, their draft was messy and needed retyping, and on top of that, Tokyo forwarded additional cables filled with corrections and amendments.
Simultaneously, on the other side of the world, Joseph Grew “received a very brief, urgent message from Mr. Hull saying an important message for the Emperor was being then encoded and I should be ready to receive it. A long telegram containing the message was received in the Embassy at 10:30 p.m. The record on the face of the telegram showed it had been received in the Japanese post office at 12 noon. It was, I understand, sent from Washington 9 p.m., which would have meant 11 a.m. Tokyo time, 14 hours difference. So, in other words, the telegram appears to have been delivered to the Japanese post office, which handled telegrams, one hour after its receipt, and they held it up throughout that day. . . .
“I saw the Minister of Foreign Affairs about a quarter past twelve, about 15 minutes after midnight. I showed him the communication and I said that I wished to ask for an audience with the Emperor to present it personally. I did not want any doubt as to getting it in his hands. The Minister began to discuss the matter with me, and I said, ‘I am making a definite application for an audience with the Emperor,’ which is the right of every Ambassador, and Mr. Togo—not Tojo, the Prime Minister, but [Foreign Minister Shigenori] Togo—and the Minister finally said, ‘I will present your request to the Throne.’ ”
At a little after 2:00 a.m., Togo brought Roosevelt’s message to Tojo, and after reading it, the prime minister said, “It’s a good thing the telegram arrived late. If it had come a day or two earlier, we would have had more of a to-do.” Togo then arrived at the Imperial Palace sometime after 3:00 a.m. Hirohito was awake, listening to a short-wave radio. Togo read him Roosevelt’s cable, and then the imperial reply, which the government had already drafted for Hirohito’s signature, and which insisted that peace was the emperor’s “cherished desire.” After hearing all this, Hirohito agreed to sign, saying his reply would “do well.�
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Joseph Grew: “At seven o’clock the next morning, my telephone beside my bed rang, and Mr. Kasa, the private secretary to the minister, said he had been trying to get me ever since five a.m. I said, ‘That is surprising, because the telephone is right beside my bed and it has not rung.’ He said, ‘Please come over as soon as possible to see the minister.’
“I got to the minister’s official residence about seven thirty a.m. He came into his room dressed in formal clothes. Apparently he had been with the emperor, and he had a document in his hand, he slapped it on the table, and he said, ‘This is the emperor’s reply to the president.’ I said, ‘I have asked for an audience in order to present that memorandum, that message, to the emperor personally.’ Mr. Togo merely said—I remember his words—‘I have no wish to stand between you and the Throne,’ but nothing more was said about it. Then he read it, and he asked me to notice especially the last paragraph. He said, ‘In view of the fact the conversations in Washington had made no progress, it had been decided to call them off.’ That did not strike me as very serious. They had been called off before, when the Japanese first went into Indochina, and they had been resumed at a later date. So I said, ‘Well, I am very sorry. I hope we can get them started again.’ ”
At a luncheon five months later on April 6, 1942, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo explained that he and the Japanese government on the whole had great misgivings about going to war, and that if Roosevelt’s telegram had arrived three days earlier, everything would have turned out differently. In his first meeting with General MacArthur during the occupation, however, Hirohito told a very different story, saying that, if he had not approved of Japan’s going to war, the army would have engineered a coup d’état, and he would have been either incarcerated in an asylum or assassinated.
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Sublieutenant Iyozou Fujita was a fighter pilot aboard carrier Soryu who assumed that December 6, 1941, would be his last night on earth. He woke up around 0330 on the seventh, put on fresh clothing, and slipped a picture of his dead parents into his jacket pocket. He felt as though he could do no more to be ready to die; that the course of his life was now entirely in the hands of fate.
Unanimously, the pilots of Operation Z assumed they would never see Japan again. Before readying their planes, they prepared small envelopes with farewell letters, hair strands and nail clippings, so their families would have something of their departed hero to cremate. Many had “thousand-stitch” belts, a good-luck charm created by wives, mothers, or sisters who had stood on street curbs asking strangers to add a stitch apiece as a prayer for luck . . . and for battle victorious.
The pilots gathered at the portable Shinto shrines with ceramic sake decanters, candlesticks, and a miniature carved wooden temple with scrolls of prayers hanging from the eaves, which Japan provided on each of its warships. The abbreviated ceremony was a silent prayer, two handclaps, and a brisk bow, ending in ritual shots of sake.
Carrying his leather goggles, quilted jacket, and a helmet lined in rabbit fur to protect from the chill of high-altitude flying, Akagi dive-bomber pilot and squadron leader Lieutenant Zenji Abe prayed to the Shinto spirits of fortune, and then said to himself, “I am going now.” He remembered, “I put a photo of my wife holding my six-month-old son in my uniform’s inner pocket. . . . On that day, it didn’t feel like we were going to war. I didn’t feel fear, or such excitement as ‘I’m going to beat the Americans!’ Instead, I thought, ‘It’s just like an exercise.’ I was calm, and all I cared was to follow orders.”
In the dining halls that morning, instead of their standard fare of salted mackerel with rice and barley, they shared a ceremonial meal of sekihan—boiled rice with baby red beans. The kitchen gave each man a bento box lunch for his mission—rice ball, pickled plums, biscuit, chocolate, and amphetamines—and the airmen then assembled in their briefing rooms. Ironically, Japanese navy pilots so loved Clark Gable in the movie Hell Divers that they referred to themselves by the American term hell diver.
Yamamoto did not believe in suicide missions, but Lieutenant Fusata Iida, commander of nine Mitsubishi A6M5 Zero fighters in the second attack wave from Soryu, did. He told his men that if he ran out of fuel or was about to be captured by the enemy, “I would find a target on the ground and crash into it.” Pilot Iyozou Fujita: “He was very clear about this. And when he said that, everyone said okay, then we will do that, too.”
After a few hours of sleep, Mitsuo Fuchida leaped out of bed at 0500, pulled on his red-dyed undergarments and shirt, then slipped on his flying suit. He and Murata had decided to wear these red clothes so that, if they were wounded, the blood wouldn’t be visible to demoralize their men.
One officer was feeling optimistic, having spent the night listening to Hawaiian radio station KGMB and hearing no clues that the Americans knew what was to come. At breakfast, he said, “Honolulu sleeps.”
“How do you know?” Fuchida asked.
“The Honolulu radio plays soft music. Everything is fine.”
At an hour before dawn, as the task force approached its launch point, Nagumo told Genda, “I have brought the task force successfully to the point of attack. From now on the burden is on your shoulders and the rest of the flying group.”
Genda replied, “Admiral, I am sure the airmen will succeed.”
At 0530, cruisers Chikuma and Tone each catapulted a floatplane to scout Pearl Harbor and Lahaina Roads, then report back details of the Americans’ ship locations, as well as the weather and the wind. Though the scouts could be spotted by US patrols and their reporting would mean a break in radio silence, Nagumo and Genda had decided it was worth the risk.
The Akagi was in charge of signaling the crews with a set of combat pennants. They now hung half-mast, meaning “Get ready.” Raised to the top and then briskly dropped would mean “Launch and attack.”
Carrier deck crews had already spent an hour checking the planes in their hangars, bringing them up to the deck, and towing the fighters and bombers into position. Engines rattled to life as mechanics went over them one last time.
Hiryu’s Commander Amagai had the interfering pieces of paper removed from each plane’s wireless, a safety precaution he’d taken during the voyage to ensure radio silence.
At 0550, 220 miles north of Oahu, these great queens of the seas raised their thrusts to twenty-four knots and turned their decks to port to face into an onrushing eastern wind. The air was glorious for flying, but the water was tough, with the ships battered by long and high swells at their bows.
Japanese aerial technology was at that time the envy of the world. Named for the final number in the year of their birth, 2600 (1940), the Mitsubishi A6M Reisen (Zero) fighter was already legendary for its quickness and nimble handling. They were not sturdy—the fuel tanks couldn’t self-seal, meaning a bullet could ignite the plane—but they were otherwise superior in every way to what Americans flew in the opening years of the war. Their top speed of 310 mph and their two 20 mm cannon in the wings and two 7.7 mm machine guns in the cowling created a lethal weapon. With the belts loaded in series to maximize accuracy and damage—two armor-piercing shells; a tracer; two armor-piercing shells; a tracer; two armor-piercing shells; and an incendiary—they could pierce gas tanks, cowlings, truck engines, and ignite fires.
Even Japan’s Aichi D3A dive-bomber (called “Val” by the Allies), with its top speed of 240 mph and its three 7.7 mm machine guns, could put up a serious battle against most of the Allies’ fighter planes after it had released its ordnance. Dive-bombers were assigned airfield targets in the first wave and naval targets in the second. They would then join the Zeros in strafing with their two 7.7 mm forward-mounted guns in the fuselage and their 7.7 mm machine gun in the rear cockpit, each loaded with five hundred rounds.
The Nakajima B5N (known by the Allies as “Kate”) would be employed against Oahu as both high-altitude horizontal bombers and as low-skimming torpedo planes. Operated by a three-man crew of pilot, bombardier, and ra
dioman, Kates could reach 235 mph with a range of 1,237 miles and sported a 7.7 mm machine gun in the back of its cockpit, hand-operated on a flexible mount and fed from ninety-seven-round magazines. Many Kates additionally had two more machine guns in their wings, and depending on the assignment, the B5N could drop one 800-kilogram torpedo or bomb, or two 550-pounders, or six 293-pounders.
Genda and Fuchida planned a three-tier aerial attack. First, D3A dive-bombers and A6M Reisen fighters would strike American air bases at Ford Island, Ewa, Kaneohe, Wheeler, and Hickam, to annihilate the Americans’ defenses. The D3As would also swoop in to decimate assorted other key naval targets, while Zeros would strafe before and mop up after.
On Battleship Row—where the ships of the Pacific Fleet would be docked in pairs as well as singly, their dark silhouettes at sunrise lit only by their anchor lights—a squadron of B5N torpedo pilots would slow their cruise to a near stall, dropping to a bare minimum altitude of twenty-five feet to release their custom torpedoes at the first, outer ring of ships. The queens of Pearl with their armored decks, as well as the ships moored to the inside, would be destroyed by horizontal-bombing B5Ns dropping their modified naval shells.
Fuchida would himself lead the first attack wave of fifty horizontal planes under his direct command, with forty torpedo bombers led by Murata, fifty-four dive-bombers led by Takahashi, and forty-five Zero fighters under Itaya. Commandeering the second wave was Fuchida’s assistant, Zuikaku’s Lieutenant Commander Shiegkazu Shimazaki, a man unusually expert at torpedo, dive, and horizontal attacks. He would directly oversee fifty-four horizontals, accompanied by eighty-one dive-bombers under Takeshige Egusa and thirty-six fighters led by Lieutenant Saburo Shindo. Eighteen of Shimazaki’s high-level planes were ferrying two 250-kilogram bombs, and the other thirty-six had one bomb of 250 kilograms, and six of 60 kilograms each (one kilogram equals 2.2 pounds). Those with multiple explosives were assigned to drop one at a time, in pairs, or all at once, depending on the size and allure of the target.