by Craig Nelson
At 0648, Ward’s lookouts spotted a sampan sailing in the restricted area. This was common; local Japanese fishermen knew where the schools were. But what happened next was odd; the sampan took off on a run, and when Ward caught up with her, the Japanese skipper shut down his engines and waved a white flag. Perhaps he had heard the gunfire attacking the submarine earlier and wanted to make sure he wasn’t fired at, but still, it was odd. Ward took the renegade sampan to Honolulu, where she would be dealt with by the Coast Guard. When the Fourteenth Naval District’s chief of staff John B. Earle heard about this, he thought, What is the Ward doing escorting sampans when an enemy submarine is supposedly on the prowl? He now discounted the whole of that day’s warnings.
At 0653, Outerbridge radioed the watch officer of the Fourteenth Naval District, “We have attacked, fired upon, and dropped depth charges upon submarine operating in defensive sea area.” At 0703, Outerbridge “dropped four depth charges on another submarine in the area. . . . We bombed them until we ran out of depth charges and went in and got some more.”
Receiving Ward’s message, Lieutenant Commander Lex Black called War Plans Officer Commander Vincent Murphy, who had coincidentally just gone over the latest procedure to follow if an attack occurred, which was to bring the carriers and their task forces back to Pearl Harbor and execute the appropriate war plans. Murphy told Black, “While I’m finishing dressing, call [headquarters duty officer Harold] Kaminski and see what he’s doing about it and whether or not he’s called Admiral Bloch.” Though Black tried again and again, Kaminski’s line was always busy; when he told Murphy this, the commander said, “All right, you go to the office and start breaking out the charts and positions of the various ships; I’ll dial one more time and then I’ll be over.” Murphy tried, but again the line was still busy, so he called the operator and told him to break in on any conversation “unless it was of supreme importance,” and have Kaminski return Murphy’s call as soon as possible.
Kaminski’s phone was busy, it turned out, because he was overwhelmed. After receiving Ward’s 0653 message at 0712, Kaminski had no doubt “we were in it.” He tried phoning Admiral Bloch’s aide and couldn’t get hold of him, so next he tried the district’s chief of staff, Captain John Earle, at home. Earle was certain it was another false alarm, so told Kaminski to get verification, and then inform Kimmel’s duty officer as well as the district’s operations officer, Commander Charles Momsen. Momsen told Kaminski to send a message to ready-duty destroyer Monaghan to “get under way immediately and contact USS Ward in defensive sea area.”
By 0715, Earle was talking to Bloch, and the two men couldn’t decide if the Ward had actually seen anything or not, so they decided “to await further developments.”
War Plans Officer Vincent Murphy entered his office to a ringing phone. It was Patrol Wing 2’s operations officer, Lieutenant Commander Logan Ramsey, calling from home to report that one of their PBYs had “sunk a submerged submarine one mile off the entrance to Pearl Harbor.” Murphy told Ramsey, “That’s funny, we got the same sort of message from one of the DD’s on the inshore patrol.” Ramsey thought something was up: “You had better get going and I’ll be down at my Operations Center soon.”
Ramsey’s daughter, sixteen-year-old Mary Ann, remembered being woken up that day: “It was quiet on [Ford] island that particular morning because our carriers were at sea. And the next thing I knew, [my dad] was rushing out of our house and into our car and going down to command headquarters. I went into my mother’s bedroom and said, ‘What in the world has happened?’ She said that they’d knocked out a Japanese sub just outside the net of Pearl Harbor.”
Kaminski called Murphy back to give him the details of what had happened on the Ward. Murphy asked, “Have you any previous details or any more details about this attack?” “The message came out of a clear sky,” Kaminski insisted. Murphy decided he’d better call Admiral Kimmel anyway. The admiral was scheduled to play golf with General Short that day and hadn’t yet dressed or shaved, but he said, “I will be right down.”
Husband Kimmel: “Between seven thirty and seven forty, I received information from the staff duty officer of the Ward’s report, the dispatch of the ready-duty destroyer to assist the Ward, and the efforts then under way to obtain a verification of the Ward’s report. I was awaiting such verification at the time of the attack. In my judgment, the effort to obtain confirmation of the reported submarine attack off Pearl Harbor was a proper preliminary to more drastic action in view of the number of such contacts which had not been verified in the past.”
At 0733, the Honolulu office of RCA finally received General Marshall’s warning. This was 1:03 p.m. in Washington—three minutes past Togo’s deadline—and the First Air Fleet’s first attack wave was at that moment thirty-five miles north of Oahu. The cable was handed to RCA messenger boy Tadao Fuchikami, who mounted his motorbike and took off to make his rounds of deliveries. Since Marshall’s cable wasn’t marked urgent in any way, it was just one of many being delivered to Fort Shafter.
• • •
At the Japanese consulate in Washington, Nomura saw how much his typists had left to finish, so he called Cordell Hull to reschedule the time of their meeting. Since Hull had already read part fourteen through MAGIC and interpreted this as merely a formal announcement of the end of diplomatic talks, he agreed.
• • •
That Sunday morning was especially dreary at the US Army’s Opana radar station hard by Kahuku Point at Oahu’s northern tip. One of six small units deployed at strategic locations across the coastline, the stations’ radarscopes were erratic, having just begun operations two weeks before, but when they worked, they tracked any plane within 150 miles. The six remote units then radioed in their information to the men at Fort Shafter’s information center, who collated it to move small arrows, representing aircraft, across a wood table kitted out as a plotting map.
Lieutenant General Short testified after the war that he considered radar something for training purposes, and never thought it could be real. Indeed, the general did not understand what radar was, or what it was good for, but since the War Department had given him the equipment, he arranged for privates to be trained on it. In one particularly damning example, the Hawaiian Department brass did not mentally coordinate that the radar’s 150-mile radius gave an hour’s warning of approaching enemy planes, while the territory’s main defense against such an enemy, her fighters, required four hours to be readied. The Signal Corps officers in charge of the radar equipment, meanwhile, were more worried about its being overused and worn-out than they were about its being employed to actually spot something. A private who worked at the Fort Shafter information center, Richard Schimmel, summed up the local officers’ opinion of this new technology: “It seemed that if you got in trouble in the army, a radar unit was mostly likely in your future.”
Opana’s trainees that morning, Privates Joseph Lockard and George Elliott, usually found about twenty-five planes during their three hours working the scope, but today, the skies were bare. Before Marshall’s war warning of November 27, their hours had been 0700 to 1600, but as part of his Alert No. 1, General Short had them reassigned to daybreak’s 0400–0700, and to guard against Short’s feared legion of saboteurs, the post included a .45 pistol. All this resulted in Opana’s being the only radar station in Oahu staffed and operating on December 7 at 0700.
The station was remote, with her crew of six bivouacked nine miles away at a little camp in Kawaiola, and daily commuting in by pickup truck. They were originally divvied up into three-man teams, but that morning, the third man assigned wanted to sleep in, and it was decided that two could easily handle a Sunday’s workload. Lockard operated the radarscope, while Elliott did the plotting and the driving.
That morning nothing at all happened, until a little flicker of tiny flashes appeared from the northeast, 130 miles off, at 0645.
At 0654, a superior phoned to say they were relieved of duty and could shut
the scope down. But the truck to carry them back to camp for breakfast hadn’t arrived yet, so the two decided to keep working until it did.
At 0702, Elliott decided he wanted more practice, and started turning the oscilloscope’s dials. Lockard was leaning over him, explaining the radar’s echoes, when suddenly a huge blip appeared, something bigger than either man had ever seen before. It was so remarkable, they assumed that the scope, which regularly broke down, was busted again. Lockard had Elliott get up so he could take over, but soon realized that nothing was wrong; they had spotted “something completely out of the ordinary on the screen . . . an enormous amount of aircraft. It moved at a speed which we knew to be aircraft. It couldn’t be a ship, it was moving too fast. So we called the switchboard operator at the information center.”
Dawn is not slow to rise over the islands of the Pacific. It hits fast, and bright. But as the airmen of the First Air Fleet soared overhead, the skies continued to be dreary and occluded. Fuchida worried about whether his men would be able to find their targets, and when they did, would they be so obscured that they couldn’t be hit. Finally the clouds parted, and directly ahead and below them was a white skirt of ocean surf striking the dark green shore against the mist-draped and saw-toothed mountain range of Oahu. They had reached the island’s northernmost shore, Kahuku Point.
By Japan’s home islands, the Pacific was gray with a bare hint of green, and the First Air Fleet’s journey across the ocean’s frigid north had been especially hard, as Japan’s temperate climate is similar to the American Carolinas, with capital Tokyo sharing the same latitude as Nashville, Tennessee. Now below the Japanese attackers were golf-course-green lands touched by a Windex-blue ocean; skimming over Oahu’s sugarcane, torpedo bomber Heita Matsumura smelled the odors of caramel and mown lawn while feeling “the warm air of an unending summer land.” Bomber pilot Toshio Hashimoto was so charmed by the beautiful jungle and tiny houses that he pulled out his camera to take souvenir pictures. Zero pilot Yoshio Shiga fondly remembered when he’d been in Honolulu for a 1934 training cruise. The wonderful memory crashed against the feelings he was having now, and it was upsetting.
• • •
West Virginia bugler Richard Fiske: “Just before I was sounding reveille, this was around six, a little after six it was, we saw this floatplane come over, similar to one of our [Grumman Goose] JRFs. But nobody paid any attention to it. And it just circled Pearl Harbor, it circled a couple of times and then went back up north.” It was the Kido Butai’s reconnaissance, which radioed a target report at 0735—“Enemy formation at anchor; nine battleships, one heavy cruiser, six light cruisers, are in the harbor”—and the weather at 0738: “Wind direction from eighty degrees, speed fourteen meters, clearance over enemy fleet seventeen hundred meters, cloud density seven.” The other floatplane, meanwhile, radioed, “The enemy fleet is not in Lahaina anchorage.”
• • •
At Opana, Elliott went to the plotting table to set the position of the giant blip they saw on the radar—137 miles north, three degrees east—and at 0706, strapped on the headphones to report their findings to Fort Shafter. The line was dead, since at precisely 0700, everyone at the information center had quit work for breakfast. So when Elliott followed protocol and then used the phone, he was connected to the information center’s switchboard, operated at that moment by Private Joseph McDonald. Elliott told McDonald, “There’s a large number of planes coming in from the north, three degrees east.” Since McDonald thought he was alone, he wrote down the message and looked to the big clock in the plotting room to get the time right. There he saw that one man was still on duty, Lieutenant Kermit Tyler, and so gave him the message, with the comment that he’d never gotten a report like this before.
Kermit Tyler was a pilot with no training as a pursuit officer and one day of experience at the information center who had been ordered to remain until 0800 even though the operation was closed and even though “I did not know what my duties were. I just was told to be there and told to maintain that work.” Tyler had only recently learned of the existence of radar, and his duties were “to assist the controller in ordering planes to intercept enemy planes or supposed enemy planes, after the planes got in the air.” He assumed Lockard and Elliott’s discovery was nothing, so McDonald went back to his switchboard and called Opana. Lockard picked up this time and excitedly reported that the blips had grown in size and were moving fast. He calculated that it was at least fifty planes coming in over Oahu at 180 miles an hour. McDonald told him that Lieutenant Tyler had insisted there was nothing to worry about, but Lockard said he had to talk directly to Tyler, since he’d never seen anything like this before.
While Tyler was listening to Elliott’s report, he remembered that Halsey’s Enterprise task force was out on assignment, so if the scope wasn’t malfunctioning, the blip must be navy planes. Then “I happened to have the radio on and I heard Hawaiian music,” he later recalled. “Well, this told me that some B-17s were coming in, ’cause a bomber-pilot friend of mine who’d flown B-17s over there said the only time they operated the radio station after midnight was when the B-17s were coming in.”
Tyler insisted to Lockard that there was nothing to worry about.
In one way, Tyler was correct, as Landon’s B-17s from California were arriving a mere five degrees off Opana’s data. Like many other officers in Hawaii that morning, Tyler was quick to discount an alarm, and just as the navy hadn’t told the army about its suspicious submarines, so now the army wouldn’t tell the navy about its peculiar radar sighting. If Tyler had passed the information over to Fourteenth Pursuit Wing operations officer Major Kenneth Bergquist, at least perhaps American planes would have been eventually sent in the right direction to find Nagumo’s fleet. But Lockard and Elliott also erred in not telling Tyler that they knew their blip meant over fifty planes, which would have indicated even to Tyler that this could not possibly be planes from an American carrier or Flying Fortresses arriving overseas from California. Kermit Tyler would try to defend himself at the army board hearing by discounting the entire system: “If the AWAS service had been operating under twenty-four-hour basis, under the most favorable conditions, it would probably [have] provided a forty-five-minute warning to the army and perhaps a thirty-minute warning to the navy.” But wouldn’t any warning be better than none?
Naval Reserve Officer William E. G. Taylor had worked piloting fighters for a year with the British navy and another with her air force. His knowledge about the use of radar in the Battle of Britain got him assigned as an advisor to the army’s radar warning system for Oahu. Unfortunately he determined that that “the communications between the fighter-director officers’, or controllers’, positions, and the fighter aircraft were totally inadequate to control fighters more than five miles off shore.” Even so, he concluded, “I feel, and felt then, that these stations should have been operating twenty-four hours a day, and the air warning system fully manned.”
• • •
Like every dawn of every day on every island in that reach of the world, there was a cool wind, a hint of rain, and the empty, endless yaw of the bright blue Pacific.
The clouds had parted and the shores of Oahu had appeared with such imminence that Fuchida had to immediately call out, “Tenkai!”—Prepare to attack!—and remind his pilot, Lieutenant Mitsuo Matsuzaki, to be on the lookout for American fighters. He then raised his flare gun. As he and Genda had planned, if it was clear the attack was going to be a complete surprise, he’d fire once, bringing the torpedo planes to the fore, as well as fighters to destroy the enemy’s aircraft and bases, followed by divers and horizontals. But if American defenses were alerted and ready, the torpedo planes would be vulnerable, so he’d fire twice, meaning, divers, fighters, and high-levels striking first to take out American air forces and antiaircraft defenses.
By the time of their arrival, Fuchida had not yet been informed of Chikuma’s reconnaissance report that Pearl Harbor was unaware of what was to
come. But he saw no defenses up and ready whatsoever on the entire flight in, so he decided that surprise had been won. At 0740, just as he arrived at Kahuku Point, he fired his flare. As the pilots swerved southwest to follow the shore, they recast, to attack. Fuchida carefully watched his planes jockey into position, then he noticed that the fighter group headed by Masaharu Suganami had not taken formation. He waited a bit, then decided that Suganami’s men hadn’t seen his signal and so fired a second “black dragon.” But these two shots were taken as the “two-shot” alert by Takahashi, who brought his dive-bombers to the fore to annihilate American air defenses at Ford Island and Hickam. When Murata saw what Takahashi had done, he knew his torpedo planes needed to get to their targets as soon as possible before they were obscured by clouds of bomb bursts, so he charged forward with his team as well
It was now 0749. Zero hour. Fuchida had his radioman order all pilots, TO TO TO!—Charge! While the forty-nine horizontals held formation at 9,800 feet, the forty torpedoes fell to a mere 50 feet, skimming just above the water, leading the force. The fifty-one divers rose to 13,000 feet, while eighteen fighters fell to 6,500 feet, and the other twenty-five cruised at 12,500. As Fuchida stewed that the careful tactics he’d devised with Genda had utterly failed, the whole of the Japanese assault force dove pell-mell to its targets.
One of Hawaii’s beaches least known by tourists and much favored by locals is Haleiwa, on Oahu’s legendary north shore. The Mann family was spending that weekend at their Haleiwa beach house when, first thing Sunday morning, they were all woken up by the frantic barking of their two pug dogs and the low rumble of airplane motors. Mrs. Mann assumed that the racket was another stick-happy pilot from Wheeler Field, maybe that notorious Lieutenant Underwood, who so enjoyed swooping low over the coastline. James Mann and his son, Junior, were astonished to go outside and see over a hundred planes circling above their heads. Junior, though all of thirteen years old, knew enough about aircraft to point out, “They’ve changed the color of our planes.”