by Craig Nelson
The voice on the radio was Enterprise’s Bombing Squadron Six Ensign Manuel Gonzalez; flying five hundred yards to his right and another five hundred over his head was Ensign Frederick Weber. Around twenty-five miles before reaching the shores of Oahu, Weber had noticed a strange bunch of planes “milling around” at three to four thousand feet. He assumed they were American Army Air Corps—they were in fact first-wave dive-bombers on their way back to Nagumo’s ships—when suddenly he realized that Gonzalez was missing. Weber circled in a roll and made four or five turns trying to spot his friend and finally saw another plane on the same course. He assumed this must be Gonzalez and tried to catch up, but at two thousand yards the other pilot pulled a 180, so Weber slid to turn as well, to follow the leader. Then suddenly the other plane spilled forward, the American pilot saw its meatballs, cracked his throttle full open, reversed into a diving turn, then an inverted dive, to evade, leveling off a mere twenty-five feet over the ocean.
Arriving halfway between Ewa and Ford Island, Brigham Young saw bursts of antiaircraft fire directly in front of him, and then was immediately attacked from the rear by “low-wing monoplane fighters with retractable landing gear.” He dove to the ground in a zigzag to escape fire. Directly behind Young was Perry Teaff, whose own Dauntless got shot up, but as neither Teaff nor his gunner Jinks were injured, they continued to follow Young. As he skimmed over the cane field north of Pearl City and its algaroba trees with their three-inch spikes, Young realized they were also getting shot at by American antiaircraft defenses. He tried to radio Ford Island’s control tower to establish their planes as friendly, but in the chaos he couldn’t communicate with Ford.
Hopping radioed his fellow SBDs that Oahu was under attack, but almost no one heard his call. He rolled into an escape dive and set down at Ford, alive and well even though he was engulfed by American bullets all the way in.
One pilot who could hear Gonzalez’s plea was Ensign Edward Deacon, flying in with Ensign William Roberts. They had arrived at 0833 over Barbers Point, and on hearing Gonzalez, each climbed to a thousand feet. Now Ford Island couldn’t even be seen because of all the smoke from the fires at Ewa, so they headed elsewhere, only to find twenty enemy dive-bombers directly in their flight path. Deacon and Roberts then dove to land at Hickam, where American soldiers on the ground barraged them with .50-caliber and 20 mm gunfire. Both planes were hit. Roberts was able to land but Deacon’s motor started to sputter, and his lift to stall out. He was at two hundred feet, too low for a chute, and he decided to try to land in the ocean. Deacon brought her in just fine; he and his radioman/gunner 3rd class, Audrey “Jerry” Coslett, were both amazed to have survived. Then someone on the beach two hundred yards off started firing at them, hitting Deacon in the thigh and Coslett in the wrist and in the neck. Deacon got out of the life raft and paddled them both to a boat in the channel, which took them to Hickam, and then an ambulance carried them to the hospital.
Ewa’s commander, Claude Larkin, saw a midair collision of Ensign John Vogt’s SBD with a Japanese bomber. Vogt, with his radioman/gunner 3rd class, Sidney Pierce, were able to bail out, but at too low an altitude. Falling, they crashed into trees and were killed.
Lieutenant Clarence Dickinson radioed Ensign John McCarthy to join him in a climb to four thousand feet and assumed that they were safe, but instead they were “very shortly attacked by two Japanese fighters as we headed towards Pearl Harbor.” When McCarthy tried to maneuver so as to get a better line of sight to take down the Zeros, they strafed him raw, igniting his engine and main tank. Dickinson saw him drop and try to recover, then fall, crashing into the ground.
Then, a parachute appeared. McCarthy had a broken leg, but had survived. Radioman/Gunner 3rd Class Mitchell Cohn went down with the plane, however, and did not live; he would be one of many Pearl Harbor casualties buried in the Punchbowl as “unknowns.” Two others whose fates are still unknown were Ensign Walter Willis with Coxswain Fred Ducolon, whose SBD vanished on the approach to Luke Field.
Dickinson and Radioman/Gunner 1st Class William Miller, meanwhile, now came under fire from four or five warplanes simultaneously, one a mere hundred feet off. Miller said that he was hit and “I think it was just as the wing caught fire.” Dickinson asked, “Are you all right, Miller?” He said, “Mr. Dickinson, I’ve expended all six cans of ammunition.” Then Dickinson heard Miller scream “as if he opened his lungs and just let go. I have never heard any comparable human sound. It was a yell of agony. I believe Miller died right then. When I called again there was no reply.”
Their left fuel tank was on fire, and their Dauntless was out of control. Dickinson ordered Miller to bail. The radioman didn’t answer. The SBD went into a spin. Dickinson bailed, falling to the ground with the spit of luck that the Japanese weren’t able to fire on him or his chute nor did the marines at Ewa open fire. He landed on the soft, recently graded dirt of a road under construction and hitched a ride back to base with a couple out for a Sunday picnic.
When Clarence Dickinson later told his story, he began to sob. Just before they had taken off from Enterprise, William Miller had said, “Mr. Dickinson, my four years’ tour of sea duty ends in a few days and there’s a funny thing about it.” “What’s that, Miller?” “Out of twenty-one of us that went through radio school together, I’m the only one who hasn’t crashed in the water. Hope you don’t get me wet today, sir.”
Scouting just to the south of Dickinson and McCarthy were Lieutenant (jg) Hart Hilton with Radioman/Gunner 2nd Class Jack Leaming. When Leaming heard, “Don’t shoot! This is an American plane!” and then “Get out the rubber boat, we’re goin’ in!” he was shocked, thinking, “What the hell is wrong with that crazy SOB? He’s breaking radio silence! He had forgotten to keep his transmitter switch off! What was wrong?” Naval aviators were trained to keep quiet on the radio and, if they had to, pulled close enough to see each other and, patting their heads with the palm for a dash and a closed fist for the dot, used Morse code to communicate. Then Leaming smelled gunpowder. They were arriving at Pearl Harbor, now engulfed in two columns of smoke.
Seven Enterprise planes were still in the air and approaching the island at about four hundred feet when they noticed, at four thousand feet, enemy fighters. But these did not attack. Knowing how unfair a fight between their Dauntlesses and a Zero would be, the Americans didn’t start anything. So, they circled. Finally there was a lull at around 0845. Deciding Ford was too risky, they landed back to back at Ewa, only to be told by the marines there that, since the Japanese had destroyed nearly all of Ewa’s own planes, the SBDs should get out while they could. All seven took off, heading again for Ford.
Coming over the channel, a US destroyer hit them with her 1.1-inch, .50-caliber, and .30-caliber guns. Enraged by this friendly fire, Jack Leaming grabbed his Aldis lamp and used its pistol grip to flash Morse code to the destroyer. Hilton rolled bank right so its bridge could see the American stars on his wings and headed in. Finally he decided to forget Pearl Harbor; they were going back to Ewa. Four others followed him, and all landed just fine.
• • •
After an hour and forty-five minutes, General Short’s Hawaiian Department had lost 163 killed, 336 wounded, and 43 missing. Of 231 aircraft, 64 were destroyed, 93 were irrevocably damaged, and 74 were fixable. Of Halsey’s Enterprise air crews, six of eighteen planes were lost, with eight men dead and two wounded.
As it turned out, rough weather and mechanical troubles delayed Enterprise’s own return to Pearl Harbor by a day, to December 8. Marine Ernest Phillips was part of Halsey’s Task Force Two, serving on Northampton:
“We’d been practicing towing a carrier when a line snapped and became wrapped around the propeller shaft. We had to send divers over the side to unravel the mess. It was then too late to enter Pearl Harbor. They had submarine netting in place and a dispatch that said, ‘Delay entering Pearl until 10 a.m., December 7.’
“Some of the destroyers kept making submarine contacts. Accordi
ng to the dispatches, they said, ‘You are in error. We do not have any submarines in the area. Please instruct your operators on the proper use of equipment,’ or words to that effect. The admiral was very put out they were making the contacts where they shouldn’t be.
“Right around eight o’clock we were called to general quarters. We were told the Japanese were attacking Pearl Harbor. Of course we had been doing these exercises before and assumed this was just another drill.
“We were not spotted by the Japanese. We weren’t that close in. We could see the smoke but couldn’t see the harbor. We turned the ship in the other direction. Occasionally we could see a plane shot down and we cheered. We later learned that many of those were our own planes taking off from Hickam Field.”
* * *
I. Barracks museum curator Herb Garcia: “Remember, the soldiers who witnessed this were not trained observers, just excitable Depression-era kids. Then rumors got bigger in the telling and were reinforced by From Here to Eternity. Now, ninety percent of the veterans who return here say, ‘Yeah, I was bombed, I was strafed.’ If I argue, they say, ‘Look, buddy, I was here and you weren’t.’ ”
CHAPTER SEVEN
* * *
PEARL HARBOR
Nestled in the center of Oahu’s south coast is the inlet of Pearl Harbor with Ford Island at her heart. The navy’s carrier planes and seaplanes were housed at hangars, aprons, and airfields, while her carriers anchored to the island’s northwest, and battleships lay to its southeast. December 7, 1941, counted ninety-six ships, including cruisers Detroit, Baltimore, and Raleigh; seaplane and aircraft tenders Tangier, Swan, and Curtiss; repair ships; minelayers; leftovers from Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet good only for target practice; and the queens of Pearl, the mighty tenants of Battleship Row: Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Tennessee, West Virginia, Maryland, Oklahoma, and California.
The first light of a Sunday morning started with the loading of perishables—USS Chew received ten gallons of milk; the Conyngham, six gallons of ice cream; the Maryland hauled in two thousand pounds of ice. Along with Pearl City, the harbor was home to forty thousand soldiers and sailors on December 7; most were looking forward to a relaxing day far from chores and commanders. Many sat around in their cabins, in pajamas, robes, or kimonos, just starting the Sunday comics. A number were sleeping off a Saturday-night tour of Honolulu’s red-light Hotel Row. Signalman John Blanken on San Francisco planned on swimming at Waikiki; Ensign Thomas Taylor, on Nevada, had a tennis game scheduled; the marines of Helena were going to play softball; a group of old navy hands on St. Louis were looking forward to a round of checkers. Yeoman Durrell Conner spent his morning on California wrapping Christmas presents; there were, after all, only seventeen shopping days left.
• • •
Flying toward the harbor, Lieutenant Commander Shigeharu Murata ordered his torpedomen to assume attack formation at 0751. Just northwest of Ewa, they split in half, with two groups of eight planes each descending to Pearl Harbor from the west and two groups of twelve planes each flying southeast in an arc over Hickam to attack Ford Island from the east. “A faint haze of kitchen smoke from houses preparing breakfast hung over the water,” pilot Zenji Abe remembered. “It was a peaceful scene. Fuchida was observing through his field glasses, and as the wave drew nearer, the basket [crow’s nest] and tripod masts of the battleships Nevada, Arizona, Tennessee, West Virginia, Oklahoma, California, and Maryland appeared through the haze.”
Worried that smoke from the dive-bombing attacks on Hickam and Wheeler might prevent his men from hitting their targets, at 0757 Murata ordered his crews to as quickly as possible drop their torpedoes against the dreadnoughts anchored east of Ford Island. In formations of twos and threes, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu airmen descended to the attack altitude of fifty feet, preparing, as instructed, to risk their lives closing in on their targets. The dive-bombers and torpedo planes flew so low that it often looked as if they were about to crash into the American ships’ superstructures.
Raleigh Ensign Donald Korn saw a line of planes coming in from the northwest. Arizona Seaman “Red” Pressler noticed another string, coming over the mountains to the east. Helm Quartermaster Frank Handler saw a group coming in from due south, flying directly into the harbor’s entrance and coming up the channel known as Southeast Loch, only a hundred yards from where he stood. One of the pilots gave Frank a wave, and he cheerfully waved back. Helena Signalman Charles Flood thought their approach was strange, but it reminded him of something. He’d been in Shanghai in 1932 when the Japanese had invaded. Their planes had dived and glided in this exact same manner.
“It must’ve been about seven forty-five, seven fifty, we saw a bunch of airplanes coming in, but they were coming in from all over the place,” West Virginia marine bugler Richard Fiske said. “So we thought this was going to be a regular drill like we normally had. And nobody got too excited about it until we saw these planes start forming around. The torpedo planes went around the mountain, and they were coming right down the channel there, and they were aiming right for the battleships.”
At 0755, the Ford Island Navy Yard’s signal tower atop the water tank raised a blue flag meaning “prepare,” and the men assigned to each ship’s morning colors took their places, fore with the navy’s jack flag—the USN’s first official jack had as its insignia a rattlesnake and the legend DON’T TREAD ON ME—and aft with the Stars and Stripes. At 0800, the blue flag fell, and the two flags rose to the sound of a boatswain’s whistle, or a bugler’s colors, or a band of horns and woods playing the national anthem.
Even after a Japanese plane screamed above their heads to drop a torpedo against Arizona, the USS Nevada’s brass band continued playing to the very last note of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” After its sole torpedo missed, the Japanese returned to strafe the band, tattering its flag. One sailor on Arizona watching the whole thing smiled in appreciation, telling his friends that surely “This is the best goddamn drill the Army Air Force has ever put on.”
Aviation Metalsmith 2nd Class Adolph Kuhn had spent the night playing poker and drinking with some friends and his cousin Andy Herrman at their barracks in the cane fields just outside the Pearl Harbor gates. Andy and Adolph woke up to bullets whizzing through their roof and assumed it was just another daredevil pilot from Hickam. They started playing poker again. Andy said, “Adolph, I wonder what it would be like to be in a real war.” Another strafer came by, some of his bullets hitting their score pad.
Ford Island’s Bloch Recreation Center, which had hosted “The Battle of the Bands” on Saturday night, was the site of a Catholic mass at 0800. Those waiting outside for the service to begin heard a popping sound, then watched planes flying a bare two dozen feet over their heads. For some reason, a sailor, and then a woman, fell to the ground, bleeding and screaming in pain. While some ran to hide, others ran to help. Ripping a strip from the woman’s petticoat to make a tourniquet, Pharmacist Mate 3rd Class Joseph Honish stanched her leg wound and got a man with a car to take her to the Naval Hospital.
Ford Island not only housed airstrips and command centers, but also neighborhoods of officers’ wives and kids. At naval housing next to Bloch Recreation, the family of Lieutenant Robert Littmann, the communications officer for minelayer Oglala, was getting ready to attend services downtown at Honolulu Cathedral. They heard a big blast. A sixteen-year-old cousin went out to see what had happened. A plane went right over his head, and he knew what its red circles meant; he ran inside to tell everyone. Littmann’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Peggy, then went out to see the excitement for herself. Another big plane went right over her, and a piece of metal fell out of the sky, and landed a few feet away. She ran inside to find her mother and her aunt on their knees, saying the rosary: “Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed be thy name and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death . . .”
Patrol Wing 2 commander Rear Admiral Pat
rick Bellinger—of the Martin-Bellinger Report warning of a aerial attack on Hawaii, and the winner of the Navy Cross in 1919 for his epic transatlantic crossing from Newfoundland to the Azores—had a thirteen-year-old daughter, Patricia. She had arrived in Hawaii the year before, thrilled to have elaborate flower leis draped over her neck as she walked down the plank of the luxury liner Lurline. Living on Ford Island was so isolated, but Patricia quickly made friends, such as Joan and Peggy Zuber, whose dad, Adolph, commanded the marine barracks (and whose mother, Alice, didn’t think Hawaii was a safe place to raise a family), and sixteen-year-old Mary Ann Ramsey, whose father, Lieutenant Commander Logan Ramsey, worked as Bellinger’s operations officer. The Ramsey house was so close to the Arizona that when the battleship projected movies on her deck, Mary Ann could sit in her front yard and follow along to the dialogue and music. The house’s other unusual feature was that it was built over a Great War gun battery, which had been turned into a garage, next to which was a cave that had once been a military dungeon, which the little girls thought spooky, and fun. In the spring of 1941, when the island began running air-raid drills every week, their neighborhood’s assigned shelter was the cave dungeon. The Zuber girls thought that if an attack came and they were forced to live there, it would be good idea to have fudge and lemonade.
Mary Ann Ramsey: “On Saturday night, 6 December, we had dinner guests. As our friends were leaving, Dad called out, ‘Well, let’s hope the Japs wait until after Christmas before they start raising hell in the Pacific.’ ” Miriam Bellinger and her daughters had spent that day at the circus in Honolulu. Coming home to Ford and passing the fleet, Miriam said, “Isn’t it beautiful? There are so many ships in the harbor.”