by Craig Nelson
A group of leading congressmen, invited by Roosevelt, had assembled in the Red Room and were now ushered into the study. Roosevelt told them that the United States had lost perhaps four battleships, that the army had estimated three hundred dead, and that he didn’t know the full extent of the navy’s casualties, but that they “will undoubtedly be very heavy.” He asked them to keep all this to themselves, which he knew was out of the question, so told them only what he thought the public should know.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Tom Connally was incensed that the military had responded so poorly, demanding, “Where were our forces—asleep? Where were our patrols?”
As FDR continued with the news that Japan was now invading Guam, Wake, and Shanghai, he was handed the latest report, of two hundred American marines in China forced to surrender. He then asked Congress to call a joint session at 12:30 p.m. the next day. What was he going to say? they wanted to know. Would he want war declared against both Tokyo and Berlin? Roosevelt said he hadn’t made up his mind yet about Hitler, but “that it would be necessary to strangle Japan rather than whip her and that it took longer. He once spoke about two or three years being required.”
Franklin and Eleanor had plans for dinner that night with broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow and his wife. When Murrow called to say he assumed the meal was canceled, Eleanor said, nonsense, come on over and eat with me; she would make them her Sunday-night special of scrambled eggs. Then Roosevelt sent word that he wanted to talk to Murrow, so while his wife went back to their hotel, just after midnight Murrow went to see FDR. Waiting outside, he observed the comings and goings of various American leaders: “There was ample opportunity to observe at close range the bearing and expression of Mr. Stimson, Colonel Knox, and Secretary Hull. If they were not surprised by the news from Pearl Harbor, then that group of elderly men were putting on a performance which would have excited the admiration of any experienced actor. . . . It may be that the degree of the disaster had appalled them and that they had known for some time. . . . But I could not believe it then and I cannot do so now. There was amazement and anger written large on most of the faces.”
Inside the Oval Study, the journalist found the president with Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan—who would become head of the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services—noshing on sandwiches and beer. The president, agitated, was incensed the army had so many planes destroyed “on the ground, by God, on the ground!”
At the railings before the executive mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue, a crowd gathered. Even on this wet and chill December night, people wanted to be together. The crowd sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and “God Bless America.”
• • •
At Pearl Harbor, the surviving dinghies, barks, ketches, gigs, lighters, skiffs, and tugs now slipped between the sinking ruins of ships and the rising pillars of oil-fired smoke to beat back the flames and collect the dead. One crew working especially hard to rescue swimmers from the burning sea were the men of a water barge with a bad reputation. It was their tradition to pipe ten thousand gallons of freshwater above quota in exchange for treats, such as what had been worked out on December 6 with the USS Curtiss—a holiday turkey and sixty dozen eggs. The turkey was roasting for Sunday supper when Nagumo’s First Air Force attacked. Now the barge’s guilty and embarrassed men were doing all they could to help.
Moored at Pearl’s submarine base, the eighteen ships of Lieutenant Commander William Specht’s Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron were still in working order, and their crews began rescue operations. Seventeen-year-old Mal Garcia was working dock detail during the attack when an officer yelled, “Hey, coxswain, get that whaleboat out of here.” Mal considered telling the superior he was actually a radioman on submarine tender Argonne, but then remembered that you can’t argue with a commander and spent the rest of the day helming an eighteen-footer, ferrying the dead and the wounded. He later said that Pearl Harbor aged him from seventeen to maybe thirty-five, and that later he tried to remember what it was like to be a teenager, but couldn’t. He would spend in time twenty-two years with the US Navy.
“I remember one fella that—I never will forget this one—about him reaching up for the gunnel, trying to get out with his hand coming up,” Bert Davis remembered. “And I reached down to help him, and I grabbed him right around his arm and I started pulling, and all the skin came right off in my hand. But that’s the thing that sticks in my mind all the time, and I have nightmares sometimes about it. But you try and you do your best.”
“That afternoon of course, anybody that was in the water was gone,” Vestal machinist Arnold “Max” Bauer remembered. “They had floating bodies. They brought them up. And as time went on, people would come to the surface. They’d be bloated. They’d tie a rope around the foot. I saw boats haul fifteen, twenty men at a time with ropes on the legs, towed behind the boats.” Raleigh’s Boatswain’s Mate 2nd Class Nick Kouretas: “We would lasso a leg, an arm, a head, and maybe towed four, five, or six bodies behind us slowly in the launch over to the landing.” There, corpsmen “would jump in the water with sheets . . . and scoop up the bodies.” On day three, Utah’s Karl Johnson said, “They brought [the bodies] out in a dump truck. They would pull the chain just like it was a load of dirt and dump them out.”
Officially, 1,178 were wounded. The number overwhelmed the military’s care facilities, many of which had been damaged in the attack. Medics had to turn anything with a roof and a floor—barracks, school, canteen—into a hospital, while some hospitals bedded their overflow of patients on the lawn. Everything and everywhere became a critical-care post, starting with the sick bays and dressing stations of the still-operational capital ships, the hospital ship Solace, and the Mobile Base Hospital, all still afloat on the burning harbor waters. The next stop was the dock itself, where 150 cots were arrayed under fire from strafing and shrapnel; this “hospital” was eventually transferred to the Navy Yard’s Officers’ Club. Pharmacist’s Mate 2nd Class Lee Soucy:
“A line officer came by to inquire how we were getting along. We told him that we had run out of everything and were in urgent need of bandages and some kind of solvent or alcohol to cleanse wounds. He ordered someone to strip the beds and make rolls of bandages with the sheets. Then he turned to us and said, ‘Alcohol? Alcohol,’ he repeated. ‘Will whiskey do?’
“Before we could mull it over, he took off and in a few minutes he returned and plunked a case of scotch at our feet. Another person who accompanied him had an armful of bottles of a variety of liquors. I am sure denatured alcohol could not have served our purpose better for washing off the sticky oil, as well as providing some antiseptic effect for a variety of wounds and burns.
“Despite the confusion, pain, and suffering, there was some gusty humor amidst the pathos and chaos. At one point, an exhausted swimmer, covered with a gooey film of black oil, saw me walking around with a washcloth in one hand and a bottle of booze in the other. He hollered, ‘Hey, Doc, could I have a shot of that medicine?’ I handed him the bottle of whichever medicine I had at the time. He took a hefty swig. He had no sooner swallowed the ‘medicine’ than he spewed it out along with black mucoidal globs of oil. He lay back a minute after he stopped vomiting, then said, ‘Doc, I lost that medicine. How about another dose?’ Perhaps my internal as well as external application of booze was not accepted medical practice, but it sure made me popular with the old salts. Actually, it probably was a good medical procedure if it induced vomiting. Retaining contaminated water and oil in one’s stomach was not good for one’s health.”
The tide of the gruesomely injured kept coming, and coming, and coming. Thousands of bullet wounds. Hundreds of shell and shrapnel wounds, of bomb-fragment wounds, of broken bones of every kind. Men with their arms and legs forcibly amputated, their torsos disemboweled. Lieutenant Elizabeth Elmer at Fort Shafter’s Tripler General Hospital remembers such an avalanche of patients that doctors had to amputate on stretchers; there wer
en’t enough tables to operate. By the end of a day spent disposing of body parts, her hose and shoes were soaked in blood. Then a group of Honolulu’s working girls arrived at the hospital to volunteer. Elmer didn’t know what to do, but the chief nurse reasoned that since the men “spend enough on them, now it’s their turn to spend some money on the boys.”
Radioman Jack Leaming: “There were screams of men still hurt, unattended, still dying . . . men running around crying like babies, in a state of shock, cussing, screaming, ‘Let me at those yellow bastards!’ or ‘They killed my best buddy!’ Every second that stretched into minutes reflected and affirmed that the unquenchable struggle for life is timeless, and the hope and faith that bind men together in their most hopeless hour is of the divine. War pumps you up. A uniform suddenly becomes radiant, and destruction is the goal. It is easy to do and gets easier the more you do it. The squadron, your buddies, the ship, become more important than yourself. You become more vindictive and brutal.”
For a great many severely wounded and dying men, all the nurses and medics could do was give morphine, then mark their foreheads with a lipstick M. In the middle of all this great horror came moments of great humanity. Schofield Barracks nurse Myrtle Watson remembered “another fellow I was helping who looked up at me, saw my nail polish, and said, ‘Nail polish . . . on an officer . . . in the middle of a war.’ Two hours later, he was dead.”
Sixty percent of Pearl Harbor casualties were second- and third-degree burns. There had been fires at every airfield; both on and within the Arizona, California, Curtiss, Downes, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Shaw, and West Virginia; and on the oil that floated on the water of Pearl Harbor. Many of those burned had escaped through that water and were coated in marine fuel. To get to Ford, thousands of survivors had stumbled through roiling black clouds of smoke, many naked, dripping oil, sheathed in blood, screaming in pain. “The only thing I could see were their eyes, lips, and mouths,” a survivor said. “Their mouths were reddish; their eyes looked watery. Everything else was black.” With no time or enough equipment to clean off that oil, treatment proceeded anyway. Burned skin was cut away with scissors. To draw out the heat, tannic acid was sprayed on with Flit guns. Saltwater baths drew out the liquid. All of this was gruesome to perform, and excruciating to endure.
In an odd coincidence, New York surgeon John Moorhead, who had served in the army in the Great War, was in town giving a lecture on the subject of “Burns.” Picked up at his hotel that morning by a Dr. Hill, when Moorhead mentioned hearing on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, Hill said, “Oh, you hear all kinds of stories around this place.” Dr. Moorhead had to interrupt his presentation from time to time because of the many explosions. Finally Dr. Jesse Smith ran in, shouting that a dozen surgeons were needed at Tripler Hospital immediately, and the speech was over. Moorhead would spend the next eleven hours continuously operating. He said to a young man, “Son, you’ve been through a lot of hell, and you’re going into some more. This foot has to come off. But there’s been many a good pirate with only one leg!” To the hospital commandant, Colonel Miller, Dr. Moorhead suggested that perhaps he should be returned to active duty. After two hours, Miller returned to congratulate Colonel Moorhead with “You’re in the army now!”
Herbert Louden, a pharmacist 3rd class on the navy hospital ship Solace, was “ordered to take care of one boy in particular that I stayed with eight days and nights and never left him. His name was James T. Lackey from Beeville, Texas. He had been a seaman first class aboard the USS Curtiss, which received the only kamikaze bombing plane. It smashed into the Curtiss and blew up the powder room where this young man was passing ammunition. He was burnt all over his body except from the left knee to the left hip with first-, second-, third-, and fourth-degree burns. Because of his condition he had been given one-half gram of morphine soleplate and a half hour later another one-half gram of morphine soleplate, which was eight times the normal dosage.
“When the medical team of doctors came through the ship checking various patients, they advised me to make him as comfortable as possible, realizing that not all of the patients would make it. The following day a nurse, Agnes Shure, and a doctor whose name I believe was Carlton, came by to check on the patient. The patient said, ‘I hope I can be as good a man as my daddy,’ and he went into unconsciousness again. The doctor turned to me and said, ‘He has a will to live, and whether he lives or dies depends on the care you give him.’ Being a young Christian man of twenty-four, I believe in prayer and prayed many times for his recovery. When he finally came to, he said he did not believe in prayer or God and thought he was an atheist.
“I forced fluids on him and had a heat cradle over the top of him, which had thirty-two lights to help control his temperature. To begin with, he came aboard with tannic acid jelly all over his body, and this tannic acid jelly causes an eschar or scab under which infection grows. So everything, all of his skin had turned black and had to be removed. So I really skinned the man alive in order to save his life. I had to remove that to cleanse his proud flesh and do pin grafting. That is where you stick a pin through some of his skin, raise it up, and cut it off with a scalpel and put it on top of the proud flesh. This would start growing and spread.
“This grew new skin all over the young man. Some of the intravenous injections or fluid, feeding, and medications had to be done through the soles of his feet because of the eschar over his arms and other parts of his body. It was hard to find blood vessels.”
• • •
Sterling Cale oversaw six men boarding the charnel house that had once been the USS Arizona, to collect the dead. In hip waders and elbow-length black leather gloves, the workers came across a giant mass of bodies so charred that individual human beings could not be distinguished. Cale’s strongest memory was of the piles of ashes by the antiaircraft guns, which floated in the winds, eddying around his legs, and drifting onto his boots. These, he realized, were once men. He bagged up all he could—the heads, the torsos, and even that dust—for a week, pausing every so often to vomit.
Dental officer Lieutenant James Justice did what he could to identify corpses through dental records so the headstones of the dead would have names. Charles Brewer took fingerprints and remembered that in some cases of the severely burned and waterlogged, the skin would “just pull off” the fingers. One marine sergeant devised a solution; he’d take the skin from a body’s fingers and put it on his own to get a good print. Others, however, saw opportunity. Brewer: “Somebody had stripped a lot of our boys, officers and sailors, would take their rings and watches, and you could tell by the white spots on their arms that weren’t tan.”
With military efficiency the Chaplain Corps, assisted by two volunteer civilian priests, a marine guard to fire salutes, and a marine bugler to blow taps, processed burials in Honolulu’s Oahu and Halawa cemeteries. There would be a week of nearly constant memorial services, funeral corteges, and grave digging, with the many unknown buried as numbers. Since war had not yet been declared at the time of their deaths, none of the dead had dog tags, and the manner of their deaths, from fires and explosions, resulted in 670 “unknowns” buried in 252 different locations at Honolulu’s Punchbowl cemetery. Of that 670, 669 remain unknown to this day, and not surprisingly, casualty figures for an event so devastating are estimates. The army has at various times reported 218, 228, 229, and 240 deaths. In building the Arizona memorial’s marble wall, the navy listed 1,103 names, but forgot one, which had to be added after the wall was erected.
Today’s generally accepted numbers—2,403 dead, 1,178 wounded—mean that a great majority of the navy and marine casualties were from Arizona, while over 75 percent of the army’s toll were Air Corps men from Hickam and Wheeler. The numbers also reveal one of the most lopsided battles in military history. Against the US loss, the Japanese lost 55 naval airmen, 9 midget-sub crewmen, and the 65-man crew of one destroyed submarine. The United States lost 18 warships; the Japanese, 0. The United States lost 188 pl
anes, with another 159 severely damaged; the Japanese, 29.
There were in all this some miracles. Fire Control Man 3rd Class Dean Derrow was blown off West Virginia’s deck wearing only his sneakers, life preserver, and Skivvies. He was found floating in the water unconscious. Fished out and carried to Solace, he awakened to doctors telling him everything was fine and that he needed to return to duty. In January he went swimming, passed out, and slept for ten days. Doctors performed an appendectomy. Finally on March 7, 1942, X-ray tech Robert Rule found that an inch-and-half-long bullet had been stuck in Derrow’s heart for three months, mostly likely from the strafing attack on the boat that first carried him to Solace. On April 7, a California naval surgeon sawed away part of Derrow’s rib, then pulled out the bullet with forceps. Derrow married his nurse, Alice, and lived a good, long life. His funeral service on January 4, 1992, was conducted by Herb Louden—the corpsman who’d pulled him, unconscious, out of the water on December 7, 1941.
Charles Christensen would for the rest of his life remember one shining moment. Just as in the 1814 battle described by America’s national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Christensen saw that, in the middle of a devastated Pearl Harbor, on the mast of the USS California, destroyed, sunk, and abandoned, his nation’s flag still waved.
CHAPTER NINE
* * *
INFAMY
On Oahu, the night of December 7 was cold and wet and dark with fear. While sheltering themselves under anything available—ragged tents, dilapidated hangars, roadside ditches—the survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack weren’t unreasonable to collectively imagine the Japanese, at any moment, returning to finish them all off. It was as logical as math.