Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

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  Moored at Berth F-7, the 600-foot long, 31,400-ton Arizona was tied, bow to stern, on her port to the 466-foot, 12,585-ton repair ship Vestal. As Minoru Genda had predicted, US ships such as Arizona that were anchored inbound had suffered little damage from his dive-bombers and torpedo planes. Vestal’s Warner Fahlgren: “We’re supposed to weld up the portholes on the Arizona, we were the repair ship. I was in the rec room addressing Christmas cards to send home when general quarters rang. They were coming down dropping torpedoes and strafing at the same time. I can remember seeing them drop a torpedo [at 0755] and it coming toward our ship—it looked like it was coming right where I was at. You could see the wake of the torpedo and it looked like it was coming to you. The torpedoes that hit the Arizona, they went underneath our ship.”

  Aboard Arizona, Ensign Jim Miller felt that strike and thought it was a mistaken firing of the catapult. Jim Lawson, enjoying Flash Gordon in the Sunday paper, didn’t think anything of the thumps since the army had been doing so much construction work next door. When he heard general quarters, he raced to his battle station at Turret 4: “It was just a few minutes when the people down in the lower handling room, where the powder magazines were, started yelling, ‘We’re hitting water and it’s coming pretty fast.’ We didn’t have any power or any communications whatsoever with the rest of the ship, so we had no idea what condition she was in. The guys there in the lower handling room kept getting water, water up to their knees, water up to their waist. Pretty soon it was up to their chins.”

  The division officer approved an evacution to the turret’s upper level, but when sea water hit the unit’s batteries, the room filled with chlorine gas. Lawson: “The fumes were so bad I was sitting there in the pointer’s chair with a T-shirt over my nose saying, ‘What do we do next?’ The division officer was absolutely worthless—he didn’t know what to do either. We had no communications with the bridge, we couldn’t ask anybody what was going on. We were just sitting there in limbo. We knew we’d been hit bad.”

  Vernon Olsen was hauling himself up Arizona’s after mast to his battle station, the crow’s nest: “They were strafing and bombing, but it don’t take you long. You crawled up the ladders as fast as you could. I was scared. Everybody was scared. Anybody said they weren’t scared were crazy.” But as for so many others, a problem kept Olsen from firing back at the Japanese with his .50-caliber machine gun: “The ammunition was stored below the platform, but the guy with the key never got there. [So] we just stood there and watched them fly right between the masts and bomb us. You could see their faces. You could see them laughing when they were firing at us. They flew right between the two masts. Our machine gun nest must’ve been two hundred, three hundred feet high, so we had a bird’s-eye view of it. We could see them bombing Ford Island. We felt pretty vulnerable.”

  Jim Foster was alone at his antiaircraft-gun battle station when he saw Admiral Isaac Kidd and Captain Franklin Van Valkenburgh sprinting to the bridge. Kidd turned to Foster and said, “Man your battle station, son.” Jim Foster: “He hit me on the shoulder. I think he called me son. I don’t know why. Man your battle station—one man on a sixteen-man gun!” Worth Ross Lightfoot and John McCarron then joined him. They loaded in a shell and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. Then, Jim Foster was knocked unconscious. He came to and found that his legs and feet were all burned to hell, and his nose was broken: “We were blown off the gun. We went over the gun shield and landed on our hats over there. I was on the bottom of the admiral’s boat.” He looked up at the bridge, now in flames, to see what had happened to the admiral and the captain: “It was like pouring molten metal in there. It must’ve been the powder coming up out of the stack on the bridge. They died in that fire.”

  Lieutenant Commander Samuel Fuqua: “We found the admiral’s body on the boat deck, or we found a body which I believe to be the admiral’s body on the boat deck, just at the foot of the flag bridge ladder. The captain’s body was never found. However, the captain’s ring and some coat buttons were found on the flag bridge.” Divers eventually found Admiral Kidd’s wedding ring in the water. It had melted.

  Foster, meanwhile, went to look for shelter in the galley deck: “I stuck my head in and it was full of gas or something. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see anybody, but I heard them hollering all down below. They were screaming and pounding. Cursing. And the noise of the bombs was deafening. Bang! Bang! Boom! Bang! The ship would jerk and toss every time a bomb hit.”

  “After the torpedo attacks, horizontal bombers, in Vs of five planes, came in from southward at twelve to fifteen thousand feet, in close formation and unhindered except for AA fire,” Jarvis’s Ensign W. F. Greene reported. “Horizontal attacks were regularly spaced at rather long intervals, though I cannot be sure of the exact time, at about ten-to-fifteen-minute intervals.” Greene was observing Mitsuo Fuchida and his high-level bombers in their formations of five, six, and nine, the nine made of three Vs of three planes each, a tactic that had resulted in their best trial-run hit ratio: 33.5 percent. Just as he’d sent the dive-bombers in for the kill, Fuchida ordered his radioman to flash Tsu, tsu, tsu on the telegraph, which told his horizontals to begin their deadly run. Fuchida: “Dark gray puffs burst all around. Suddenly a cloud came between the bombsight and the target, and just as I was thinking that we had already overshot, the lead plane banked slightly and turned right toward Honolulu. We had missed the release point because of the cloud and would have to try again.” One pilot released his 800-kilogram (1,763-pound) bomb anyway. It fell into the water, completely worthless. Fuchida let the pilot know his feelings with a shake of his fist; the bombardier responded that American antiaircraft fire had shook the bomb loose.

  After the Japanese circled around for another attempt, Fuchida’s plane was hit by American shells. He asked if everything was all right, and a crewman reported that it was just “a few holes in the fuselage.”

  Fuchida: “We were about to begin our second bombing run when there was a colossal explosion in Battleship Row. A huge column of dark red smoke rose to one thousand meters. It must have been the explosion of a ship’s powder magazine. The shock wave was felt even in my plane, several miles away from the harbor.”

  “A spurt of flame came out of the guns in [Arizona’s] number two turret, followed by an explosion of the forward magazine,” said a mechanic on nearby tanker Ramapo. “The foremast leaned forward, and the whole forward part of the ship was enveloped in flame and smoke and continued to burn fiercely.”

  Lieutenant Commander Samuel Fuqua: “I glanced up. I saw a bomb dropping, which appeared to me was going to land on me or close by. The next thing I remember I came to on deck in a position about six feet aft of the starboard gangway. I got to my feet and looked around to see what it was that had knocked me down. Then I saw I was lying about six feet from a bomb hole in the deck. . . . I would judge about eight fifteen or eight twenty I saw a tremendous mass of flames, the height of three hundred feet, rise in the air forward and shook the ship aft as if it would fall apart like a pack of cards.”

  Pilot Heita Matsumura: “A huge waterspout splashed over the stack of the ship and then tumbled down like an exhausted geyser . . . immediately followed by another one. What a magnificent sight!”

  Pilot Otawa: “Now we had given this world-famous American navy the first blow. And I was the one who had made this first strike. I had been trained all the way for this moment. Now all this training was rewarded. Since the bomb weighed eight hundred kilograms and the weight of the plane itself was two and half tons, the plane suddenly lifted when we released that heavy bomb. At that moment, all of my feelings of joy rushed up. I did it!” The single bomb strike that took so many American lives in that instant would officially be credited to one of Fuchida’s high-level bombers from Hiryu, Tadashi Kusumi.

  As over a thousand American boys were incinerated, drowned, or eviscerated by shrapnel, five-hundred-foot-high towers of flame erupted into the sk
y. An immense fireball roared across the city of the sea’s vitals, then the 32,600-ton dreadnought lifted out of the water, cracked her back, and sank back down, her enormous superstructure enveloped in vicious and immense oil-black clouds, her forward compartments flooding with both water and oil.

  Japan’s air commander couldn’t take his eyes away from Arizona’s fiery death throes. After he had become a Presbyterian missionary, Fuchida would remember it as “a hateful, mean-looking red flame, the kind that powder produces, and I knew at once that a big magazine had exploded. Terrible indeed.”

  “A red fireball shot up and spread into a mushroom of death nearly a thousand feet high,” said California sailor Theodore Mason. “A mighty thunderclap of sound, deep and terrible, rode over the cacophony of planes and bombs, and now-awakening guns.”

  A West Virginia sailor: “Ships on fire, ships burning, explosions going on all over the place. I saw the Arizona blow up and she just rained sailors. And of course those were the ones that were fortunate enough to live—the ones that were blown off the ship.”

  Burning Arizona crewmen ran aft or into the water, thinking they would find relief. Instead they found six-inch pools of fiery fuel oil covering the sea, turning them into matchsticks. Clint Westbrook: “All of the oil tanks on all of the battlewagons had been ruptured, most of them, and you could just about almost get out and walk on it, it was that thick. And around those ships that had fire on it was on fire as well, so a lot of these people jumping off the ships were jumping right into burning oil. We had just loaded the day before ’cause we were going back to the States for Christmas. The admiral had told us, so we had filled the tank Saturday.”

  The burning oil’s smoke created an impenetrable black fog floating ten feet over the surface. One witness said, “These people were zombies. . . . They were burned completely white. Their skin was just as white as if you’d taken a bucket of whitewash and painted it white. Their hair was burned off; their eyebrows were burned off; the pitiful remains of their uniforms in their crotch was a charred remnant; and the insoles of their shoes was about the only thing that was left on these bodies. They were moving like robots. Their arms were out, held away from their bodies, and they were stumping along the decks.” The teakwood decks, once holystoned into a rich glow, now “looked like a boneyard” from all the body parts. Adolph Kuhn: “The most vivid recording in my memory bank of that ordeal was the hundreds of white sailors’ hats floating in the salty brine, with their black stenciled names in full view.”

  In the US Navy’s final accounting, USS Arizona was struck by eight bombs. Like all the great battleships of Pearl Harbor, Arizona’s powder and ammunition magazines, as well as her fuel tanks, were full; the latter with about 660,000 gallons of oil. Similar to the unbelievable series of events that had exploded the Shaw, one Japanese bomb had penetrated to an Arizona powder magazine, igniting it into a chain reaction that turned the ship itself into a bomb. The explosion in her forward magazine of 308 fourteen-inch shells, 350 five-inch rounds, 5,000 powder cans, and over 100,000 rounds of bullets was so forceful it blew out some of her hull’s armored plates until they were pancake-flat horizontal. The Tennessee was more damaged by Arizona’s debris than she was by the direct strikes of two Japanese bombs.

  Arizona sank in nine minutes. The souls of 1,177 sailors and marines were lost, more than died in the Spanish-American War and the First World War combined. It was the highest mortality in the sinking of a single vessel in American naval history, and of human beings killed by a single explosion in the history of war . . . until Hiroshima.

  Six months later, when Lieutenant Wilmer Gallaher dove his Dauntless to pay back Akagi with a fatal blow at Midway, he remembered the horror at Pearl Harbor. As Akagi exploded, he whispered to himself, “Arizona, I remember you.”

  Arizona’s explosion was so immense it blew crewmen off the neighboring Vestal’s deck, including Captain Cassin Young. He swam back, countermanded the crew’s collective decision to abandon ship—“You don’t abandon ship on me!”—and ordered them back to their posts to defend Pearl Harbor. Young found two bodies on the afterdeck: “These men may have been either Arizona personnel blown over by magazine blast or members of Vestal after gun crews: they were burned beyond recognition.”

  As Vestal began firing back with her three-inch and her machine guns, two bombs struck, one exploding in a lower hold, cutting power cables and igniting a fire that burned toward the forward magazine, which held seven hundred rounds of ammunition. Vestal saved her own self from detonation by flooding that magazine, but could do little about the second bomb, which hit to port and farther aft, breaking tanks. The ship began to flood with both fuel and sea water.

  Sailor Warren Law: “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life since, and I hope I never do. The devastation was just unbelievable on those battleships. You think they’re big, heavy, lotta heavy steel and all that. When you see those superstructures just twisted—big hunks of steel that were twisted just like you take a straw and twist the thing. I couldn’t believe the amount of devastation that I saw.”

  On Arizona, Boatswain’s Mate 2nd Class John Anderson “was standing on gun turret number four when I saw a bomb hit the side of it. It scooped out the side of the turret. It went right past me, a big mound of molten steel. I got my people out and went to look for my brother.” Anderson’s twin, Delbert, was stationed at Turret 3, and John tried to find him, but between the wreckage left behind by the explosion, and the number of dead and dying men on the deck, John couldn’t make it to 3. So he went in search of an officer to get some direction and came across his ensign “dead on deck, his back split open like a watermelon.”

  The force of a bomb then blew Anderson down a quarterdeck’s hatch. He recovered and joined a group working to fight back with an antiaircraft gun, but when the ship lost power, that gun was unusable, so he joined the rescue operation: “By now the ship had settled some in the water. We were passing down the wounded hand over hand into the lifeboats as fast as we could. We weren’t any too gentle, as you can imagine.”

  When Anderson’s turn came to get in the boat, he announced that he was going back aboard to rescue Delbert. Samuel Fuqua set him straight: “He’s gone, they’re not going to make it. And we better get off before everyone else is killed, too.” Anderson accepted this, and as his boat left for Ford Island, he took one last look at lost home: “Everything was on fire. The ship was on fire, the water was on fire, and there were people in the crane . . . and I saw them as we went and they were up in this fire. I thought, ‘God Almighty, how are they going to make it?’ ”

  Now reasonably safe on Ford, all John Anderson could think about was getting back to Arizona to rescue more men: “I looked around and saw a boat floating in the water. I saw a kid named Rose, Chester Clay Rose from Kentucky, and I said, ‘Hey, Rose, are you game?’ . . . He said yes, so we dived in, got in the lifeboat, and went back to the ship.” They found the 250-pound body of Arizona’s cook: “I don’t know how he got blown out of the galley to the outside. He was dead, with a kitchen knife stuck in him from the force of the explosion.”

  It was so hard to find the living among such a floating mass of corpses that Anderson decided to stop making guesses and just bring in everybody. Anderson and Rose rescued as many as they could out of the water, filling the boat with both the dead and the injured. On their way back to Ford’s naval hospital, “we moved on into the middle of the stream, got hit by a shell, and lost everybody. I even lost Rose. I was the only survivor.”

  By the end of the week, he’d learn that his brother, Delbert, was trying to fix a jammed AA gun when he was killed.

  William Goshen was a pointer for Turret 3’s five-inch gun, but when he got there, no one else was around, and he couldn’t find any ammunition. The strafing scared him, so he sat against a locker where there was some cover. Next thing he knew, he was swimming; the explosion had thrown him in the water. He had escaped with his life by sitting in that little corner
; his turret was mere yards from the bomb strike: “All that was between me and that bomb was two canvas sheets. Evidently it burnt the canvas off and carried right on into the compartment where I was at, and the concussion happening inside blew me out.” Struggling to the surface of the water, “I looked over at the ship, and I knew there was no need going back there. I looked up at the boats; they were all on fire. The Arizona was on fire. I heard the buzzing of planes, the cracking of cannons, the machine guns they were strafing with.” He was taken to the Ford Island dispensary with burns on 70 percent of his body.

  Galen Ballard’s life was saved because, instead of going to bed the night of December 6 in his own bunk, he fell asleep in Honolulu, not waking up until a little after 0800. After starting the day with some Ink Spots on the record player, he turned on the radio and heard, “Seek cover. Personnel, report to your stations.” He was out of uniform, so he had to go back to the Navy Center to get it, and on a Sunday the building was locked: “I had to scale a wall to get to my locker and change into uniform and call a cab.” As he and the cabbie got close enough to see Pearl Harbor, “at first I thought from all the smoke they’d hit some oil reserves, but as we got going, I realized it was more than that. The bombers were going over and there was a lot of antiaircraft fire. We could see the Arizona was up in flames, and the Oklahoma was capsized. All we could see was smoke and flames. I was numb. Frightened. Confused. . . . Everything I owned was on the Arizona—all I had left was what I had on my back.”

  Samuel Fuqua: “As I was running forward on the starboard side of the quarterdeck, approximately by the starboard gangway, I was apparently knocked out by the blast of a bomb, which I learned later had struck the faceplate of number four turret on the starboard side and had glanced off and gone through the deck just forward of the captain’s hatch, penetrating the decks and exploding on the third deck. When I came to and got up off the deck, the ship was a mass of flames amidships on the boat deck, and the deck aft was awash to about frame ninety. The antiaircraft battery and machine guns apparently were still firing at this time. Some of the Arizona boats had pulled clear of the oil and were lying off the stern.