Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  Gunner Jackson Pharris smartly ordered California’s shipfitters to counterflood. This equalized her weight and saved her from Oklahoma’s fate. He then oversaw teams of men plunging through the fumes to ferry ammunition from the magazines below to the deck guns above. He would be awarded the Medal of Honor, as would be Machinist’s Mate 1st Class Robert Scott, who refused to evacuate while he ran the forward air compressor that fed power to California’s antiaircraft cannon. He said, “As long as I can give these people air, I’m sticking,” and sacrificed his life.

  California’s John McGoran remembered the first thing he heard about the attack was when he was taking dirty dishes to be washed and a sailor darted past, maniacally singing, “The Japs are coming! Hurrah, hurrah!” Someone asked for help with a wounded man, and McGoran immediately thought to himself, “If on December 6 anyone had asked me to help save the life of this offensive guy, I would have answered, ‘To hell with him.’ I had known this fellow since boot camp, and he was one of the most overbearing individuals I had ever met. But now, unconscious, he had no personality. His was a life to be saved.” Then “this crazy thought struck me. ‘No one will believe all this when I tell them someday. And since I have no memory for dates, it will really sound silly.’ So I sat down and with my pocketknife scratched on the back of my wristwatch ‘Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941.’ ”

  Fires on California had to be fought with water from Ford Island’s swimming pool because as Arizona sank, her body settled on the water main and broke it. Likely for the first time in naval history, two garbage-scow crews received formal commendations for their courage in firefighting.

  A motor-driven whaleboat arrived from Honolulu harbor to immediately make repeated trips to the edge of the floating fire to help extinguish it or at least keep it from spreading. Just as repeatedly, the whaleboat itself caught fire, and as soon as it could put out its own flames, it would return to fight the burning water.

  The night before, California musician Warren Harding had been delighted by the sight of a meteor shower. Then he remembered something his grandfather had said . . . that, when you see a shooting star, someone you know will die. “My God,” Harding thought, “how many people do I know that are going to die soon?”

  Ninety-eight died on his ship.

  • • •

  While Mitsuo Fuchida felt contempt for the US Navy that hadn’t even installed torpedo crinolines around their battleships, his fellow aircrews in the second attack wave were impressed by the Americans, who were now fully alert and fighting back. Dive-bomber pilot Zenji Abe:

  “As we crowded the shoreline, a group of black puffs of smoke appeared to our right front, and then another group appeared quite near our formation—about two hundred in all.

  “Antiaircraft fire! Except for scattered shots in China, it was the first time I had experienced that. I watched the puffs come closer and closer. The thought flashed across my mind that perhaps our surprise attack was not a surprise at all. Would we be successful? I felt awful.

  “[Then] there was a feeling of calm. It was very clear. Not many clouds. And I could see the large ships. I knew that they were the targets. I knew that they were what we needed to hit.

  “I banked as a signal to my men and headed down. From the ground, thousands of tracer bullets soared upward, seeming to gain speed as they passed close by my plane. My altitude was three thousand meters and my speed two hundred knots. I applied my air brake and took the cover off my bombsight. I was diving at about a fifty-degree angle. There were no aircraft carriers in the harbor, so I decided to attack a cruiser.

  “I caught my target, a big cruiser, squarely in the middle of the range scale of my sight. Warrant Officer Saito began to call the altitude. A strong northeast wind was blowing the plane to the left. I corrected for the drift as the target drew nearer and nearer until it almost filled my sight. ‘Six hundred meters,’ Saito called. ‘Ready . . . release!’

  “I released my bomb and at the same time pulled back on the stick. I almost blacked out for a moment, but I pulled out at fifty meters to the sound of Saito’s voice in the voice tube. My observer was excitedly calling out the results of our bombing. ‘Formation leader short. Second plane short. Third plane hit! Adjustment correct. Second echelon successful!’ I was later able to identify our target as an Omaha-class light cruiser, Raleigh.”

  • • •

  Tennessee sailor Millard McDonald: “My thoughts were to make an act of defiance to show the enemy that, although we were badly battered, we were not defeated. We climbed as fast as we could, for the steel of the mast was hot from the nearby fires and beginning to burn our hands. We climbed through a thick smoke cloud, and Oscar then climbed to the yard in order to put the new halyard through. The moment he signaled everything was ready, I attached the nation’s colors and hoisted them along the mast. At the very moment we completed our task, general quarters once again sounded. We turned to look at the sky and saw another wave of Japanese planes strafing his way to our position.”

  Projectiles decimated Tennessee’s Turret 2’s center gun and killed four men running Turret 3. Signalman 2nd Class Richard Burge: “One Jap plane was hit and exploded over Ford Island, and the pilot landed just fifty feet from the USS Tennessee. We left his body in the water for three weeks before we picked it up.”

  Even after the Japanese second wave had left, the ship was still in danger. “The Tennessee was moored inboard of the West Virginia at berth F-6,” as Executive Officer Commander Colin Campbell reported. “The West Virginia had been sunk and was on fire. The Arizona, about seventy-five feet astern of the Tennessee had been sunk and was on fire, and oil was burning on the water. The stern of the Tennessee was on fire, and fires were raging on the Arizona and West Virginia, threatening destruction of this ship. When the captain came aboard, he directed me to go aft and take charge on the quarterdeck, where I remained practically continuously supervising the firefighting on this ship and against the oil fires on the water coming from the Arizona, until about sundown Tuesday the ninth, by which time the oil fires on the Arizona had been extinguished by this ship and yard tugs.”

  As Campbell reported, it would take three days to stop the burning fires of Pearl Harbor. Seaman Jimmy Anders: “All this time, our cooks had been busy preparing sandwiches, nice big thick ham sandwiches. . . . In times like this, I was amazed how so much attention was paid to eating.”

  Of the many remarkable Pearl Harbor stories, one began in a farmhouse outside Odebolt, Iowa, that produced eight brothers and a father—the Pattens—who all signed up with the US Navy, collectively giving the nation 124 years of service. On December 7, six of them—Gilbert, Marvin, Bick, Allen, Ray, and Bruce—were working in the engine room of the USS Nevada. Allen remembered that morning’s breakfast was “a ‘dog’ sandwich and beans. Then some of the other B Division sailors and I sat around drinking tea and coffee and discussing the Rose Bowl, and who would win the football game, Duke or Oregon. Then something strange started happening, and we couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was just past eight a.m., we were three decks down, and the Nevada started shaking like a three- or four-scale earthquake. The porthole was open and I heard a rat-a-tat-tat sound, like a machine gun. We were all very confused; it had been such a nice serene morning. We thought it odd that someone might be practicing with their guns. Then the B Division mess cook, Henry, he was just a kid, eighteen years old, yelled down to us, ‘Hey, you guys, we’re being attacked.’ ”

  “The planes are coming in,” Steward 1st Class Ben Holt remembered. “The Nevada is getting hit. Our gunners are now manning the guns. I’m trying to secure cans on the side to keep them from rolling across the deck. I saw only one officer, Ensign Taussig. I remember him very vividly.”

  Joseph Taussig: “I caught a glimpse of a torpedo plane flying from the east and very low over the water. . . . The bomb-bay doors were open, and out dropped a ‘fish.’ My reaction was merely to think of the welcome break in the Sunday-morning tedium that
we would have watching the salvage operation of digging the torpedo out of the mud under forty feet of water, the controlling depth of Pearl Harbor.”

  “On the way to my battle station, I found one of my brothers arguing with a chief petty officer,” Boiler Tender Bruce Patten remembered. The officer said he was sick of hearing about rumors that they were under attack. “Then the first bomb hit and ended the argument.”

  According to Captain Charles Medinger, Nevada was originally set to spend the weekend of December 5–7 at sea. But when alien-submarine contacts were reported, she returned early to Pearl Harbor. She normally moored at one particular berth, but as Arizona was there, she had to tie up elsewhere.

  “All guns were soon roaring,” Robert Thomas Jr. said. “As I watched, the USS Arizona, just three hundred feet ahead of us, erupted in an enormous flash and thunderous blast that knocked me twenty feet backwards onto my back. I knew that German and British ships could explode, but I couldn’t believe that an American ship could blow up like that. It was heart-wrenching to see the few tattered survivors abandon ship.”

  Joe Taussig: “I felt a very sharp blow on the bottom of my feet, and very shortly after that I felt a blow on my hip. And I looked down and my left foot was under my left arm. I was standing in a doorway so I wasn’t knocked down. I was hit by a missile which passed completely through my thigh and through the case of the ballistic computer of the director, which was directly in front of me. The intercom called. It was the chief quartermaster, named Robert Sedberry. And he said, ‘Mr. Taussig, aren’t you the officer of the deck? You better get down here because we’ve got a signal to get under way.’ And I said, ‘Sedberry, you’ve been on that bridge seventeen years. If anybody can get the ship out, you can get her out.’ ”

  Allen Patten: “Part of the crew was on liberty, and only one of the ship’s six boilers was lit and on line. Thick ropes held the ship tightly in place. An ax cut through the hemp mooring lines, and by eight eighteen a.m., we had all six boilers off in ten minutes—record time. The Nevada was under way in eighteen minutes, steaming through billowing smoke, which was pouring from the Arizona.”

  Even though she’d been hit by a torpedo to her hull and two bombs to her deck, Nevada set sail. Ben Holt: “How could the ship move? It took hours to get up enough steam to get the ship to go. And this ship was moving! And all of us were just kind of ‘Hallelujah!’ ”

  As American servicemen across the devastated Pearl Harbor—which to so many looked like the end of the world—watched, thrilled and amazed, Robert Sedberry did the impossible, piloting Nevada across the notoriously narrow Pearl Harbor around the burning Arizona, the sinking West Virginia, and the capsized Oklahoma. Robert Thomas: “The chief quartermaster took the controls in an attempt to get to sea where we could maneuver and fight. There were no senior officers on board. They were all on land. As we cleared the burning Arizona, the harbor became visible to us. Good God! The West Virginia was awash and burning, the Oklahoma had capsized, the California was listing and afire, and the Pennsylvania, in dry dock, was burning. I thought, ‘We are the only ones left!’ ” Joe Taussig: “We’d had a torpedo hit us on the port side by number two turret, so we were flooded pretty bad. But Sedberry got the ship out, which is probably one of the greatest seamanship maneuvers of all times because the Arizona had blown up ahead of us.”

  Just as the Nevada reached the channel, the First Air Fleet’s second wave of warplanes appeared overhead. Pilot Yonnekichi Nakajima: “A battleship had survived and was navigating its way toward the mouth of Pearl Harbor. We all started to bomb it.” Nevada’s drive to the sea was the opportunity Fuchida had been praying for. A capital ship, sunk in the channel, would seal Pearl Harbor for months, striking a perhaps fatal blow against American naval power in the Pacific. Originally, one squadron of dive-bombers had targeted Helena and another had their sights set on Dry Dock One, but seeing this remarkable target of opportunity, they curved up and set about to destroy Nevada.

  Robert Thomas: “As we passed down the channel, I heard a shout, ‘Dive-bombers! Dive-bombers!’ I looked up and saw them in an echelon formation beginning to peel off, and then down they came. We were their targets. Through our firing they came, the pilots and other details clearly visible. Each carried a single bomb lodged between its fixed-wheel landing gear. As each bomb was released, I could tell from the relative motion as to whether it would be a hit or a miss. The first two or three missed just starboard. The next bomber released and his bomb just grew larger. I knew it was a hit. I said to myself, ‘Mother, I am sorry.’ ”

  Surrounded by the explosions of water columns from Japanese misses, Nevada seemed to be one of the lucky ones. It was like a dream. She was going to make it out and use her great guns to strike back at the Japanese! But then a bomb hit home and exploded, first shaking Nevada, then crippling her. Another hit to the starboard killed so many on the deck that Chief Gunner’s Mate Robert Linnartz had to work as rammerman, sight-setter, and pointer to keep his gun running, even though he himself was seriously injured. Likewise, Ensign Thomas Taylor continued running the port antiaircraft battery, even though he was burned and deaf, his eardrums having been cracked open by a blast. Ben Holt: “People were being blown over the side. The ship was listing. People were saying, ‘Abandon ship! Abandon ship!’ And that’s when I said, ‘It’s time to go over the side.’ ”

  Artis Teer was working his five-inch gun when a bomb exploded in the casemate next to him, killing two men, knocking Teer unconscious, and showering his back with shrapnel. He was so wounded that the rest of his crew abandoned the gun and left Teer behind, assuming he was dead. He came to, saw his gun on fire, and, though delirious, remembered a round was inside that would explode. So he crawled to the gun, pointed it to sea, and fired.

  Machinist Donald Ross was running the forward dynamo. When the room became overwhelmed by smoke and heat, he ordered his crew out and kept running the power, until he passed out. Ross was pulled out, came to, and went over to the aft dynamo, which he ran until he once again passed out. Carried out and brought to, he again returned to running that machine, until he was directly ordered to abandon ship.

  Robert Thomas: “I ordered, ‘Take cover,’ and turned my back before the bomb struck. I was engulfed in a storm of blast, fire, smoke, and debris. A moment later, I noticed that I was still standing. I looked around to see a large crater in the deck just a few feet away and in the general vicinity of the now-empty main powder magazine. The bodies of my men were strewn about. I spotted one of my shipmates lying near the edge, and he was on fire. I took a step towards him and collapsed. That’s when I realized that my leg was broken. My right wrist and hand were shot through as well, rendering it useless. I then noticed blood spurting from my arms and legs and I couldn’t stop the bleeding. That worried me more than the rest of my physical condition. I crawled over to the edge of the crater and realized that I wasn’t able to pull the man to safety. It became a nightmare as I yelled at the top of my lungs to several sailors just a few yards from me on the deck below. Despite their proximity, they couldn’t hear me due to the deafening roar of the battle.”

  Robert Thomas would receive the Legion of Valor, the Purple Heart, and the Navy Cross. But another officer fell to his fears and started beating on the conning tower while begging, “Make them go away!” A very young seaman waited by a five-inch gun with a bag of powder next to his chest. He wasn’t going to be injured, he explained, only killed.

  Seaman 1st Class William Rodda: “When I got to the top of the first ladder, there was a Filipino sailor lying on his back. All his arms and legs were broken and bent the wrong way. I stepped over him, and at the top of the next ladder, there was a sailor on his back with a handful of guts sticking out through his T-shirt. After I stepped over him, I looked around. There were dead sailors lying everywhere. I got a hose and started putting water on the fire. After a while the water stopped. I was on the quarterdeck when our captain came aboard. He had an expression on h
is face you would not believe.”

  After being asked to send half of his crew topside to help in defense, Captain Charles Medinger “felt that those men who were singled out to go topside thought they were going to their deaths, and the ones who were staying thought they were staying to their deaths, because it looked as though we might get trapped down there.”

  Nevada was now beginning to list, sinking at her bow. Commander Thomas steered her to the floating dry dock off Hospital Point. There, he ran her aground. Fuchida’s great dream of sealing the channel died with that one tactic.

  “Some of us were given new, clean, shined galvanized buckets to pick up the isolated, fragmented parts of fallen shipmates,” Seaman 2nd Class Charles Sehe remembered. “In two of the Fifth Division five-inch/fifty-one gun casements were portions of the bulkheads which consisted of Cyclone security linked fences. One noticed numerous body parts which seemed to have been strained through these partitions from the force of the explosions. I recall picking up several knee joints, shoulder pieces, and several torn and burned torsos that were unidentifiable because of their blackened and burned condition. The tremendous force of those explosions seemed to have literally strained the soft tissue through the chain-linked fencing, leaving the bony elements behind.”

  Miraculously, all the Patten brothers survived Pearl Harbor, and Bruce Patten would become one of the few servicemen to participate in both the attack on Hawaii and in the Japanese surrender when he served on destroyer Wren, which accompanied the USS Missouri into Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.

  • • •

  Back at the dungeon on Ford Island, as machine-gun bullets strafed across the Bellingers’ front yard, sixteen-year-old Mary Ann Ramsey, thirteen-year-old Patricia Bellinger, and the little Zuber girls were now confronted by horribly wounded men seeking to join them in the sheltering cave. A medic told Patricia to give one of these men a blanket; she said he already had one. Then she realized what she thought was a blanket was the poor man’s skin, hanging from his shoulders like a burnt drape. Another medic asked the families to give spare cloth to help clean the oil off the injured men; the Zuber daughters donated their bathrobes.