by Craig Nelson
Haleiwa was directly beneath the attack route to the army’s airfields and the navy’s Pearl Harbor—the point where Fuchida’s attack force split apart, the bombers winging off to their assigned targets, as the fighters pulled to the fore to protect against an American counterstrike—but the island was so swarming with soldiers, sailors, and pilots that a squadron of hundreds of planes sparked little notice. Those out on the golf links, on their way to church, surfing at Waikiki, fishing off the western coast, or even servicemen on a Sunday morning’s duty roster, just naturally assumed they were American aircraft and paid little notice. Both Takeo Yoshikawa and General Short would believe it was all just another drill, Short thinking that either the navy had forgotten to mention it, or maybe he’d just forgotten himself. What everyone remembered, however, was what a beautiful day it was.
The last of that tropical winter’s morning fogs lifted, and through his binoculars Fuchida could see the enormous and majestic United States Pacific Fleet. He was at first confused, since the consulate’s spies had reported nine battleships, while he could only see seven; this was because Pennsylvania was dry-docked, and Yoshikawa had included Utah as a battleship; she was instead retired and used for target practice. And to the great disappointment of this naval airman, not one of America’s aircraft carriers was anywhere to be seen.
At 0753, Fuchida’s radioman tapped, To Ra To Ra To Ra. To is the first syllable of totsugeki—“charge” or “attack”—and ra the first of raigeki, “torpedo.” That tora means “tiger,” the animal of Fuchida’s birth year, was a bright omen. This message, eventually relayed to the whole of Japan’s navy, informed the empire that Operation Z had come as a complete surprise to the armed forces of the United States of America.
On Akagi, Nagumo was dumbstruck at hearing the news, and Kusaka silently wept tears of joy. They could barely believe that Yamamoto and Genda’s outrageous plan had actually worked.
• • •
At around 0730, a Matson line passenger ship, the SS Lurline, was crossing the Pacific on its northeasterly route to San Francisco when the officer of the watch, “Tiny” Nelson, heard an SOS over the radio and showed it to chief officer Edward Collins. The SS Cynthia Olson, a 2,140-ton steam schooner ferrying lumber to Hawaii from Tacoma for the American army was being attacked by a submarine.
Commander Minoru Yokota, captain of Imperial Japanese Navy submarine I-26, was with sister sub I-10 monitoring the Aleutian Islands between Russia and Alaska until December 5, and then reporting on military shipping to Hawaii between the fifth and the seventh. After the start of Japan’s East Asian conquest signaled by Fuchida’s call of To Ra To Ra To Ra, they were now to begin taking down American ships. Yokota’s first sighting by periscope of one of these targets was the Cynthia Olson, which the sub followed until the very moment of X-day’s zero hour, when I-26—a hundred feet longer and four hundred pounds heavier than the ship, armed with six torpedo tubes, two 25 mm machine guns, and a 140 mm deck cannon—surfaced directly before the schooner, at about a thousand meters.
Yokota fired eighteen rounds into Cynthia Olson from his deck gun, then submerged and launched a torpedo. It missed, so he resurfaced, to give her twenty-nine more shells from his gun. As Cynthia Olson began to sink, I-26 left to prowl America’s West Coast, looking for more prey.
Cynthia Olson radioed Lurline, “All crew abandoning ship in lifeboats.” The following day, Japanese submarine I-19 reported surfacing to give food to some of the ship’s survivors, and that report is the last we know of Cynthia Olson’s merchant marine crew of thirty-three and her two army privates, radio operator Samuel Zisking and medical technician Ernest Davenport. Those thirty-five bodies were never found.
PART II
* * *
STRIKE!
CHAPTER SIX
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FROM THE AIR
Though December 7, 1941, is remembered as the worst defeat in American naval history, a significant part of Genda’s and Fuchida’s strategy was how to take out, with bombers and fighters, American air forces so they could not defend the territory or attack Nagumo’s fleet. The story of the first victims of the Japanese attack on Hawaii has seldom been told, as it began on the other side of Oahu from the great naval base of Pearl Harbor.
At 0740, Fuchida’s armada was just north of Kahuku Point when forty-three Zeros cut away to come in north and west of Wheeler Field at the dead center of Oahu. Five minutes later, dive-bombers from Soryu and Hiryu turned hard, to approach Wheeler from the south. Eleven Shokaku and Zuikaku Zeros flew east to pass north of Pearl Harbor and its neighboring airfields on Ford Island and at Hickam to attack the naval air station at Kaneohe (kahn-a-o-hay) Bay, while eighteen Akagi and Kaga Zeros headed toward the US Marines’ Ewa (a-vah) Mooring Mast Field on the southwest coast.
Seventeen-year-old Fred Kamaka was attending Kamehameha High School, studying advanced woodworking to benefit his family’s ukulele-manufacturing business. After breakfast, Fred stood on a campus hillock with a commanding view of the great panorama of Oahu, from the ridge of Diamond Head across Waikiki, the volcanic crater Punchbowl, the city of Honolulu with its harbor marked by the Aloha Tower, and to the west, the rustling sugarcane and pineapple fields of Ewa Plantation, with the Waianae Mountains behind her. He noticed a squadron of planes approaching in V configuration between the Army Air Corps field at Hickam and the navy’s stronghold of Pearl Harbor. The planes began diving, one after the next, in single file. Lieutenant Ainsley Mahikoa had pulled up in his car; now he explained to the students gathering to watch, “The planes are probably from the carrier fleet, which is absent from Pearl Harbor. Holes are dug into the ground and dynamite set off to simulate bomb bursts, and they are using smoke pots on the Hickam Field area instead of burning airplanes to make the action more realistic.” This all made perfect sense as, the week before, everyone had watched the army and navy conduct interservice war games, which included a mock bombing of Honolulu Harbor. Then Fred Kamaka pointed out something really exciting: “Look, we’re shooting down our own planes!”
What they saw falling from the sky was likely a civilian plane. At that moment under General Short’s anti-sabotage alert, a mere four of Oahu’s thirty-one antiaircraft batteries were in position, with none of their ammunition at hand; it all needed to be trucked over from locked-up depots. Of the island’s 780 antiaircraft cannon, only a quarter were staffed, with three GIs from the California National Guard’s 251st Coast Artillery Regiment who had spent the previous year deployed in Hawaii—twenty-year-old Sergeant Henry Blackwell, twenty-one-year-old Corporal Clyde Brown, and twenty-one-year-old Sergeant Warren Rasmussen—among the men with that day off. Blackwell and Brown had gotten their flying licenses after taking the Civilian Pilot Training Program from Robert Tyce of Honolulu’s K-T Flying Service, and they’d convinced Rasmussen to come along that morning of December 7 to John Rodgers Airport to join them in renting a pair of K-T’s taxi-yellow Piper Cubs, and soaring over paradise. Bob Tyce himself and his wife, Edna, were on their way to the airport at that moment because they had gotten friendly with Blackwell and Brown and wanted to say good-bye. The two young men were set to return to California on December 8, and this would be an aerial aloha to their memorable time in Hawaii.
The three guardsmen lifted off at the crack of dawn, soared over Waikiki and Diamond Head, and then turned to follow the coastline west, flying between five hundred and eight hundred feet in altitude and around two miles offshore. At 0755, forty-one-year-old navy Machinist’s Mate 1st Class Norman Rapue was working aboard the YT-153, a sixty-five-foot tugboat heading out into Pearl Harbor’s channel with a harbor pilot to man incoming cargo ship USS Antares. Rapue watched as two bright yellow Piper Cubs were attacked in the skies just south of Fort Weaver. The little props were hardly a priority for the arriving Japanese warplanes, but the First Air Fleet’s crews were ordered to attack any and all targets of opportunity. “They didn’t have a chance,” Rapue said. “Both were cruising about two and a
half miles offshore at about five hundred feet altitude when seven Japanese planes swooped down. . . . One of the yellow planes plummeted straight down into the ocean while the other circled for a moment and then plunged down.” By 0830, an army rescue boat was out searching for Rasmussen, Blackwell, and Brown, but never found them, or any sign of their planes.
At the same time as the guardsmen were being slaughtered, twenty-six-year-old flight instructor Tommy Tomberlin and his student, James Duncan, were flying a neon-orange Aeronca 65TC north of Laie’s landmark Mormon Temple when two red tracers shot into the canvas fabric of their rear fuselage. As the teacher took back the plane’s controls from the student to quickly descend, two Japanese continued firing at them . . . but missed. After swooping down to skim just over the water, Tomberlin flew southeast, following a pass through the Ko‘olau hills back home to John Rodgers. He was hoping for protection, but found none. The civilian airport was just to the southeast of one of Genda’s main targets, Hickam Field, and the two men arrived to find the sky now filled with attacking planes.
Also in the air at that moment, twenty-two-year-old flying teacher Cornelia Fort was giving a lesson to a student pilot in an Interstate S-1A Cadet when she saw two planes headed their way, one on course to crash directly into them. She yanked the yoke and punched the throttle, furious at another hotdogging Army Air Corps pilot. She looked down to get his registration number so she could file a complaint, which was when she saw the red balls on the wings and knew that “the air was not the place for our little baby airplane.” She set down as fast as she could and ran into Andrew Flying Service, machine-gun bullets strafing the ground around her feet, yelling, “The Japs are attacking!” Everyone on the ground laughed at this silly woman.
At about 0750, Bob and Edna Tyce arrived at the K-T Flying Service hangar at John Rodgers. While his wife did a little work in the office, Bob decided to go out and get some sun on the ramp. He yelled for Edna to come outside, pointed out some smoke in the distance, and said, “I think Hickam Field is having some kind of an accident.” The couple then saw an airplane coming toward them. The plane that had fired on Cornelia Fort now buzzed the Tyces. Edna remarked, “They’re flying too low over a civilian airport.”
As Bob, puzzled, turned to say something to his wife, a machine gun’s bullet entered the back of his head and out the side of his throat, leaving, Edna later said, a hole big enough to “put a golf ball through.” Bob fell to the ground. Edna knelt beside him. She had previously worked as a nurse and immediately began taking his pulse. He was dead.
The Japanese crew that killed Bob Tyce then machine-gunned a Hawaiian Airlines DC-3 passenger plane waiting to depart for Maui. Shells tore into her wing, cockpit, twin engines, and passenger cabin, but when the airline’s ground staff realized something was terribly wrong, they quickly got their customers out of the plane and back into the hangar, and no one was hurt.
Lawyer Roy Vitousek and his seventeen-year-old son, Martin, meanwhile, were out on a sightseeing trip, also in an Aeronca Tandem. Roy was so busy piloting he didn’t even notice all the planes appearing around them until his son yelled out, “Look! P-40s!” The father looked over to see the red ball on one plane and yelled, “P-40s hell! They’re Japanese!” The Vitouseks were fired on but their little Tandem escaped. Roy pulled out into a steep climb and headed south, to circle over the ocean until he saw things quiet down a little. An hour later, Edna Tyce realized the three servicemen from California who’d rented two of her Piper Cubs had never come home. Blackwell, Brown, and Rasmussen from the 251st went down in history as the first Americans killed in World War II.
The California National Guards’ F Battery was stationed at Camp Malaloke, which is where the Japanese appeared next. “Captain Lemon came running around the end of the mess hall,” Corporal Warren Hutchens remembered. “His pants were half-unbuttoned, and holding a pistol above his head, he yelled, ‘Come on, get with it, a war is on!’ We could not believe what he said until Japanese planes started strafing the camp. I started running messages from Colonel Sherman to Captain Lemon. While on a run to headquarters, I stopped at Battery E latrine to do my regular routine. While [I was] sitting on the toilet, a Jap plane strafed through the tin roof, cutting the bowl next to me in half! There was an eighteen-inch distance between bowls. Luckily I did my thing so I pulled up my pants and lay under the urinal thinking they might come back.”
The Japanese continued to strike on the way to their primary targets. “In the movies, an airplane attack always has the rat-tat-tat of guns as the plane dive-bombs its target,” Dorinda Stagner Nicholson said. “But when these Japanese planes flew directly over us, the sound of the bullets was muffled by the roar of the engines. Even though we couldn’t hear them, the incendiary bullets found their targets. Our kitchen was now on fire, and parts of the roof were gone. The front door of our next-door neighbor was so bullet-ridden from the strafing that it fell from its hinges.” Dorinda was six years old at the time. “Within an hour or so, Dad put the family in the car. We got on Lehua Avenue and just kept following it all the way up into the hills and hid there in the sugarcane fields. When we were waiting out the attack in the cane field, I wasn’t thinking about the dive-bombers returning. I was thinking about my dog, Hula Girl. She was a black-and-white mix, the kind of dog known in Hawaii as a poi dog. What if she had been hit by a bomb or bullet? It was then for the first time that I began to cry.”
On the road between the gates of Pearl Harbor and the town of Honolulu lies Hickam Field, a state-of-the-art base that had just opened in 1939 with rolling lawns, four-lane avenues, administration buildings with art deco terra-cotta façades, a Moorish water tower, the world’s biggest barracks—ten wings sleeping three thousand—and a mess hall that could feed two thousand soldiers at once. Hickam was home to bombers—six B-17s, twelve A-20s, and thirty-three B-18s—with interservice rivalry regularly illustrated by the army’s buzzing its sailor neighbors and, when the carriers were in port, the navy’s crack pilots returning the favor.
Private Ira Southern woke up in Hickam barracks to what sounded like artillery guns blasting. Then came the jagged roar of a plane directly overhead, and a detonation. A dive-bomber had sliced a bomb though a barracks window, filling the air with shrapnel and the screams of wounded and frightened men. Southern went to get his gas mask, but was in such shock he couldn’t open his combination lock. Finally he got his mask and joined others to get some guns out of the supply room, which was locked. The door was broken open, but the guns inside were all locked up, too. The men were able to release some old Springfield rifles and a few Colt .45 semiautomatics, then had to lie flat on the floor to load up on ammo since bomb strikes were now throwing shrapnel into that room, too.
They went back out with their weapons to bring down some goddamn enemy planes. One soldier hid behind a group of bushes with his bolt-action rifle; another fought back with a submachine gun from under a truck. They were joined by two men trying to fight back with a gun on a tripod next to home plate on the camp’s baseball field, along with Sergeant Stanley McLeod and Corporal William Anderson blasting away with a Thompson submachine gun on the parade ground. All four were cut down by strafer fire. A hundred of Hickam’s civilian employees were arriving at work just then, including purchasing clerk Phillip Eldred, who was killed in a hail of Japanese bullets while driving to the base.
Captain Gordon Blake, Hickam base operations officer, was in his office getting ready for those twelve B-17 Flying Fortresses arriving from California. Working with him was operations officer Major Roger Ramey, since Ramey’s good friend, Major Truman Landon, was leading the squadron.
Everyone at Hickam who knew the score wanted to see those Fortresses; they were big and exciting and spanking brand-new. A bunch of air buffs, including two of the base’s mechanics, Jesse Gaines and Ted Conway, had gotten up early to watch. They saw the formation of bombers, in a perfect V, begin to peel, and Conway said, “We’re going to have an air show!” Others nearb
y, though, said something was strange; they looked more like navy fighters than B-17s. Then Gaines saw something falling out of the lead aircraft. An oil tank exploded; followed by the mess hall of Hickam barracks; thirty-five men died instantly. Back on the field, Japanese machine guns strafed the startled watchers, who scrambled away in zigzag terror.
The approaching Fortress crews saw the heavy pall of smoke over the island and wondered if the fires were sugarcane fields getting cleared. Truman Landon’s bombardier, Second Lieutenant Erwin Cihak, saw a formation of planes in single file heading his way and assumed it was the navy. Cihak then remembered hearing warnings about Japan from Hap Arnold, as well as that he had only a single .50-caliber machine gun on board. It was packed aboard in Cosmoline and stored in a crate.
Captain Blake and Major Ramey heard a tremendous blast and ran out to see a diver with red circles on its wings pulling up after bombing the Air Depot. Fearing for his B-17 pilots, who he knew had little remaining gas and were likely unarmed, Blake ran to the tower to help bring them in safely. He found his controllers giving the Fortresses all they needed to know—their assigned runway, the wind’s direction, its velocity—along with reports that the airfield was being attacked by “unidentified planes.”
When, at the tail end of their thirteen-hour trans-Pacific journey, an exhausted Major Truman Landon saw a group of pilots coming toward him, he, too, assumed they were friendly. But then those planes coming in at a higher altitude dove into a turn and swerved to attack while a voice on the intercom yelled, “Damn it, those are Japs!”
Landon was able to get away, but as he came around to landing position, Blake radioed a warning from the tower: “You have three Japs on your tail.”