Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  “At this time I attempted, with the assistance of the crews of number two and number four turrets, to put out the fire which was coming from the boat deck, and which had extended to the quarterdeck. There was no water on the fire mains. However, about fourteen CO2s were obtained that were stowed on the port side and held the flames back from the quarterdeck, enabling us to pick up wounded who were running down the boat deck out of the flames. I placed about seventy wounded and injured in the boats which had been picked up off the deck aft and landed them at the Ford Island landing. This was completed about 0900 or 0930. All personnel but three or four men, turrets number three and number four, were saved. About 0900, seeing that all guns of the antiaircraft and secondary battery were out of action and that the ship could not possibly be saved, I ordered all hands to abandon ship.”

  Ensign G. S. Flannigan: “When that bomb hit, it made a whish with a gust of hot air and sparks flew. There followed a very nauseating gas, and smoke immediately afterwards.

  “Before this time, condition zed had been set in the lower room of Turret three, and the men in the passage and I were unable to get out of the passageway. I beat on the door for some minutes before someone inside the turret opened the door. We got all the men that we could find in the passageway into the lower room and then dogged down the passageway door.

  “The air in the turret was fairly clear for a while, but finally gas or smoke starting coming in. The men made quite a bit of confusion at first but they were very obedient when Ensign Field and I ordered them to keep quiet. About this time we got a flashlight and saw the turret was very misty with smoke. Just after this, we heard hissing noise, which was later discovered to be air leaking from holes in the forward transverse bulkhead of the lower room.

  “Conditions from smoke were getting worse and worse. It was then that we decided that we would have to leave the lower room. I took charge of the men in the pits, and Ensign Field went out on deck to help Lieutenant Commander Fuqua. We saw smoke entering the pits through the pointers’ and trainers’ telescope slots. I urged the men to take off their shirts, and we closed the openings with the clothes.”

  US marines Sergeant John Baker, Corporal Earl Nightingale, Major Alan Shapley, and Second Lieutenant Carleton Simensen were climbing the mainmast when one of Minoru Genda’s eight-hundred-kilogram, armor-blasting shells hit Turret 4, bounced up, and hit the deck, exploding into shrapnel. Corporal Nightingale: “I was about three-quarters of the way to the first platform on the mast when it seemed as though a bomb struck our quarterdeck. I could hear shrapnel or fragments whistling past me. As soon as I reached the first platform, I saw Second Lieutenant Simensen lying on his back with blood on his shirtfront. I bent over him and, taking him by the shoulders, asked if there was anything I could do. He was dead, or so nearly so that speech was impossible. Seeing there was nothing I could do for the lieutenant, I continued to my battle station.

  “When I arrived in secondary aft I reported to Major Shapley that Mr. Simensen had been hit and there was nothing to be done for him. There was a lot of talking going on and I shouted for silence, which came immediately. I had only been there a short time when a terrible explosion caused the ship to shake violently. I followed the major down the port side of the tripod mast. The railings were very hot, and as we reached the boat deck, I noted that it was torn up and burned. The bodies of the dead were thick, and badly burned men were heading for the quarterdeck, only to fall apparently dead or badly wounded.”

  Surrounded by the corpses of their friends and the destruction of their home, Shapley, Nightingale, and Baker finally got to the boat deck, where Fuqua, as senior officer present afloat, was in the middle of this scene of incomprehensible horror, leading shocked crewmen—many of them teenagers, or nearly so—in the abandonment of his ship. Aviation Machinist’s Mate 1st Class D. A. Graham: “There were lots of men coming out on the quarterdeck with every stitch of clothing and shoes blown off, painfully burned and shocked. Mr. Fuqua set an example for the men by being unperturbed, calm, cool, and collected, exemplifying the courage and traditions of an officer under fire. It seemed like the men painfully burned, shocked, and dazed became inspired and took things in stride, seeing Mr. Fuqua, so unconcerned about the bombing and strafing, standing on the quarterdeck. There was no ‘going to pieces’ or ‘growing panicky’ noticeable.” John Baker said that Fuqua’s “calmness gave me courage, and I looked around to see if I could help,” but Fuqua ordered him to join the others in the boats. Private Cory remembered Fuqua quietly urging them on: “Over the side, boys! Over the side!” Grabbing life rafts, they jumped overboard. The commander’s leadership had such a profound impact that it saved countless lives beyond the seventy that are his official credit.

  “I was the second-to-last man off the ship,” Private Cory said. “Fuqua was the last guy. Those rafts immediately started drifting and floating into the burning oil, so those were quickly abandoned. The two or three guys that actually got on one were going right into the fire so they had to get off immediately. The currents were taking them right into the fire.”

  Marine Corporal Earl Nightingale: “Charred bodies were everywhere. I made my way to the quay and started to remove my shoes when I suddenly found myself in the water. I think the concussion of a bomb threw me in. I started swimming for the pipeline which was about one hundred and fifty feet away. I was about halfway when my strength gave out entirely. My clothes and shocked condition sapped my strength, and I was about to go under when Major Shapley started to swim by and, seeing my distress, grasped my shirt and told me to hang to his shoulders while he swam in. We were perhaps twenty-five feet from the pipeline when the major’s strength gave out and I saw he was floundering, so I loosened my grip on him and told him to make it alone. He stopped and grabbed me by the shirt and refused to let go. I would have drowned but for the major. We finally reached the beach, where a marine directed us to a bomb shelter, where I was given dry clothes and a place to rest.”

  For these actions, Major Shapley would be awarded the Silver Star.

  Argonne’s Charles Christensen: “The oil was on fire and [the men] were trying to swim out of it. They’d come up and try to get their breath. The whites of their eyes were red. Their skin was coming off. At the hospital, oil was all over everything and everybody. I never saw any panic. I was always proud of the navy after that.”

  One man in the water didn’t know how to swim. Jim Lawson tried to help, but it would have meant drowning for both: “I was making no progress, just treading water with him, and the breeze and the current were taking us into the fire. I went ahead and let him go.” Finally Lawson was picked up by Fuqua, running a barge. Lawson got the sailor who couldn’t swim to dog-paddle over, tied a T-shirt to the man’s ankle, and they towed him to Ford Island. “There was a guy standing on the dock, how he got there I don’t know. He looked like he just got off the grill. He was burned to a crisp. The poor guy, what kept him alive I don’t know. He kept asking for help and no one could help. What could you do?”

  “A friend of mine was crying and asking me for help,” Arizona crewman Carl Carson wrote. “I looked at him in horror. His skin was hanging off him. There was nothing in the world I could do for him. He was dying. They gave us the word to abandon ship. I started to swim to Ford Island. I must have passed out and gone down in the water. Everything was peaceful and nice. It would have been so easy to just let go. And I saw this bright light, and something made me come to. And there was oil all around. And fire all around. A man saw me down there and he reached down and pulled me up to the surface.”

  Jim Foster jumped into water to get away: “When I came up, I was gagging. I was really busting water trying to get away from that thing before it blew up. I wasn’t a very good swimmer, but I really busted water for about ten feet and realized I was giving out. I was giving plum out. The planes were still coming in, and they were strafing all the men in the water.”

  Finally he reached a pipe sticking out on the beach on
Ford Island, and he and two others held on to it until they could get help. Foster and John McCarron survived; with Foster’s feet so burned up it was months before he could wear shoes.

  Worth Ross Lightfoot died after a couple of weeks.

  “Both my legs were burnt pretty bad,” Arizona Seaman 1st Class Donald Stratton said. “My legs, arms, face, my hair. Lost my hair. Lost a couple of tattoos . . . don’t recommend that way to get rid of ’em. . . .

  “I seen everything that went on there, and I tell you what. There was more courage and more heroics and more valor and more sacrifice that day than a human being ought to see in ten lifetimes.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  * * *

  DESCRIBING THE INDESCRIBABLE

  Honolulu radio station KGMB interrupted its morning broadcast at 8:04 to announce that all military personnel were ordered back to duty, followed by calls for area policemen and firemen and, at 0840, the first American broadcast of World War II: “Calling all nurses! Proceed to Pearl Harbor! Oahu is being attacked! The sign of the rising sun is to be seen on the wings of the attacking planes!”

  Soon after, one of Oahu’s leading citizens, Allan Davis, made a private call to that morning’s on-air personality, Webley Edwards. Davis told Edwards that he was making a mistake announcing the attack, that this was all just maneuvers, and America was still at peace. Edwards, having heard so many others insist that the reports were wrong, blew up, saying, “Hell, no, this is the real McCoy!” Davis was so shocked that he just mumbled and hung up, but Edwards realized his audience needed to be shocked into the reality of what they were facing and repeated again and again that this was the “real McCoy.”

  Just like so many servicemen, civilians in Hawaii had trouble believing the news, or even their own eyes. Perhaps the most common reaction was that of Yee Kam York, who followed much of the attack with binoculars from just outside Honolulu. He told his wife, “These Americans, when they have maneuvers, they certainly make it realistic.” KGMB listeners heard the word sporadic used to describe the attacks and thought it was simulated, a common announcement in Honolulu. Others had trouble taking the warning seriously since a popular record getting much radio play at the moment was “Three Little Fishes,” meaning war bulletins were interspersed with down in the meadow in a iddy biddy poo thwam thwee little fishies and a mama fishie too.

  When Ethelyn Meyhre heard Webley Edwards’s announcements, she woke her dad, who laughed, said it must be a joke, and went back to bed. When Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Robert Shivers called director J. Edgar Hoover with the news, Hoover was so incredulous that Shivers held his telephone out the window, so the director could hear the bomb strikes and machine guns.

  By 0930 the Honolulu Star-Bulletin had an edition hitting the street with the headline “WAR! OAHU BOMBARDED BY JAPANESE PLANES.” A policeman called editor Riley Allen to warn that some of his more enterprising newsboys had gone out to Pearl Harbor to sell their papers and were in serious danger.

  Besides breaking news of the attack as it happened, KGMB warned its listeners: “The United States Army Intelligence has ordered all civilians stay off the streets. Do not use your telephone. The island is under attack. Stay off the streets. Keep calm. Keep your radio turned on for further news. Get your car off the street. Drive it on the lawn if necessary, just so you get it off the street. Fill water buckets and tubs with water, to be ready for a possible fire. Attach garden hoses. Prepare to take care of any emergency. Keep tuned to your radio for details of a blackout, which will be announced later. In the event of an air raid, stay under cover. Many of the wounded have been hurt by falling shrapnel from antiaircraft guns. If an air raid should begin, do not go out of doors. Stay under cover. You may be seriously injured or instantly killed by shrapnel falling from antiaircraft shells.”

  • • •

  Over Pearl Harbor, Mitsuo Fuchida and his squadron of horizontal bombers circled again. The commander needed to make detailed sightings for his damage reports to Nagumo, Genda, and Yamamoto, while his pilots needed to take down the USS California. Fuchida: “A warm feeling came with the realization that the reward of those efforts was unfolding before my eyes. I counted four battleships definitely sunk and three severely damaged, and extensive damage had also been inflicted upon other types of ships. The seaplane base at Ford Island was all in flames, as were the airfields, especially Wheeler Field.”

  It was now, however, no longer dawn, and the Americans were no longer sleeping. Antiaircraft fire so damaged Fuchida’s steering gear that the wire connecting the stick to the ailerons was a bare thread; twenty holes had been drilled into his fuselage, and he was in trouble: “Suddenly it was as though a giant hand had smashed at my plane. A gaping hole appeared on the port side. The steering mechanism was damaged.” Fuchida would not be deterred; while his bombers joined their torpedo brothers in attacking California, Fuchida went after Maryland: “I immediately lay flat on the cockpit floor and slid open a peephole cover in order to observe the fall of the bombs. The target—two battleships moored side by side—lay ahead. In perfect pattern [the bombs] plummeted like devils of doom. They became small as poppy seeds and finally disappeared just as tiny white flashes of smoke appeared on or near the ship.”

  Commander W. F. Fitzgerald Jr.: “While on the starboard side of the flag bridge I felt the Maryland shudder from what was apparently a near miss off the port bow. Within a second or two I saw a bomb land on the forecastle of the Maryland and shortly thereafter (a matter of a few seconds) a large geyser of water sprung up on the starboard bow of the Maryland apparently from another near miss. By this time the guns of both the port and starboard batteries were firing continuously at the enemy planes. The fires on the Arizona and West Virginia seemed to be increasing, and frequently the Maryland was entirely covered with heavy black smoke.”

  Two of Maryland’s men were killed and one was injured by the falling shells; one “poor fellow had a hole right in his forehead where he’d been hit,” Vice Admiral Walter Anderson remembered. “There was the bottom of the overturned Oklahoma facing me, and the sunken, blasted Arizona. Great clouds of black smoke were billowing up from the oil afire on the water. There was the most comprehensive antiaircraft fire I had ever seen, and yellow Japanese planes were flying back and forth, almost literally hedgehopping. I thought to myself, ‘Dante’s Inferno never looked like this.’ ”

  Besides rescuing fallen sailors, the men of Maryland and Tennessee fought back with real strength. “Outstanding was the action of Leslie Vernon Short, seaman first class,” Maryland’s commanding officer, D. C. Godwin, reported. “Short, a machine-gun striker twenty-two years old, truly demonstrated the spirit of men behind the navy guns. Though he had not been called to duty at his gun station, upon seeing our country being attacked, he immediately manned a machine gun, opened fire on two approaching torpedo planes, downing the first one and injuring the second.”

  California’s bulkheads were so torn by the first two torpedoes that knifed through her port that rivets popped out and were ricocheting around the lower compartments. She would be hit by two more torpedoes, followed by two high-level bombs, and was especially vulnerable, since a number of watertight chambers had not been dogged down. “After the second torpedo hit, we began to get large quantities of smoke down the ventilator blowers, so we secured the ventilators,” Ensign W. A. J. Lewis said. “Smoke still came down, and word was received that gas was present. We could detect nothing but powder gases so did not put on gas masks. Later on the smoke became thicker, so I directed some of the men to put on their masks. The smoke began to take effect on the crew, so I ordered all hands except the talker on the upper level to go down to the lower level, where air was somewhat better. The forward part of the engine room had become very hot, and the metal in some places was too hot to touch. This accounted for some of the paint fumes, as the paint had begun to blister.”

  Caught in a burning hallway, Chief Radioman Thomas Reeves kept passing heavy shells forwar
d by hand until he passed out and died. The fires spread, and the rest of the men had to flee, many around the body of wounded ensign Herbert Jones. Two friends tried rescuing Jones, but he told them that it was all over for him, that they must leave and save themselves.

  Chief Yeoman S. R. Miller: “We obtained a line and lowered Ensign McGrath through the trunk to Central Station, which was then being flooded with fuel oil coming from vents and various other places. The oil fumes were so strong that we feared Ensign McGrath would be overcome with the fumes before the trapped men could be rescued. At this time the ship was burning fiercely, and there was also danger of the ship turning over as it was listing badly. Ensign McGrath completed his investigation and returned up the trunk to Flag Conn and reported that these men were in a compartment under Central Station and might be rescued by cutting a hole through the deck of Central Station. He reported that the deck of Central Station would soon be flooded with oil and that when this occurred, it would be too late to cut the hole through the deck. A cutting torch was quickly obtained and volunteers called for. Ensign McGrath and Campbell were both nearly overcome by fumes before the job was completed. The first who worked with the cutting torch was overcome by fumes and had to be replaced with another experienced man. During the time this hole was being cut, there was great danger of fire as the fuel oil was gradually working its way close to where the hole was being cut. In addition to this danger, there was danger of the ship turning over as it was straining the mooring lines badly. The hole in the deck was just cut in time before fuel oil flooded Central Station.”