Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  About this speech, Kase wrote Hirohito, “Here is the victor announcing the verdict to the prostrate enemy. He can exact his pound of flesh if he so chooses. He can impose a humiliating penalty if he so desires. And yet he pleads for freedom, tolerance, and justice. For me, who expected the worst humiliation, this was a complete surprise. I was thrilled beyond words, spellbound, thunderstruck. For the living heroes and dead martyrs of the war this speech was a wreath of undying flowers. . . . [Would it] have been possible for us, had we been victorious, to embrace the vanquished with a similar magnanimity? . . . [W]e were not beaten on the battlefields by dint of superior arms. We were defeated by a nobler ideal. The real issue was moral beyond all the powers of algebra to compute.” That same week, Hirohito would explain to his son, Crown Prince Akihito, that Japan had lost because “our people . . . knew how to advance, but they didn’t know how to retreat.” As the signatures dried across the official documents, four hundred B-29 bombers and fifteen hundred Navy fighters drew a curtain across the sky. The Pacific war had endured just under four years; the American occupation of Japan would last almost seven.

  The night before he could be taken into custody by US forces, Prince Fumimaro Konoye committed suicide with poison. Next to his body lay Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, marked in red pencil: “I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. . . . Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still. . . . People used to say of me that I was too individualistic. . . . My ruin came not from too great individualism of life, but from too little.”

  The Japanese had regularly and publicly announced that, if they lost the war, they would kill every POW under their control. Two days before American troops landed on Luzon with Douglas MacArthur in the campaign to retake the Philippines, Allied intelligence had uncovered information that the Japanese had massacred every captive on Palawan Island. Consequently, the OSS’s Special Ops forces hurried behind enemy lines before the announced surrender to ensure that no more POWs would be summarily executed.

  Parachuting into Peiping on August 17, 1945, from a B-24 bomber, the seven members of MAGPIE touched down in the middle of what was, a few days’ past, the heart of enemy territory. Special Ops agent Dick Hamada: “A flatbed truck with six Japanese soldiers, armed with bayonets and guns and led by an officer, approached us. The soldiers dismounted and surrounded our team. Major [Ray] Nichols told the lieutenant, ‘The war is over and we are here to get the prisoners.’ The lieutenant stated emphatically, ‘The war is not over yet.’ ” After another day of negotiations, Nichols announced the Americans would go to the POW camps with or without Japanese consent. The Japanese capitulated. Hundreds of prisoners were released, but Major Nichols learned that some Americans, convicted of war crimes, were still being held at Fengtai. The major insisted that the Japanese confess to their own crimes, and release these prisoners immediately.

  On the evening of August 20, 1945, guards opened the cells of Jacob DeShazer, Chase Nielsen, George Barr, and Robert Hite, and took them to shave and shower—the first hot water they’d had in three years and four months. A prison official said, “The war is over. You can go home now.”

  Home. One airman’s wife remarked, “After the war ended, these men had time to think. The fact that they killed other human beings started to prey on their minds. My husband said again and again, ‘I pushed that lever. What if the bomb killed some kids? They had nothing to do with the war. I can’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t forgive myself if it were true.’ ” An army psychiatrist who spent his entire professional life studying the effects of combat said, “One thing I’ve noticed in the interviews I’ve done is that these men cut off their feelings, and they almost were aware of it. They couldn’t feel anything after a certain point. And yet they did have feelings. If a friend was killed, they would still be overwhelmed, but in order to go on, they would see things, and it would almost be like looking at a photograph. It’s called emotional numbing. . . . Often the only feelings they can feel are more intense feelings of rage, and when they’re very stimulated, like a lot of vets who are numb are drawn to more daredevil activities as a way of feeling something. . . . We don’t know whether that numbing is due to a natural occurring opiate which is released in the body . . . but the fact is that this is a very common complaint, and it’s a common complaint of the families, that these men are cut off from their feelings. They say that they just can’t feel closeness for anyone, they can’t really be touched, although when they talk about World War II vets and losses there, they get very flooded emotionally. Somehow that overwhelms them.

  “War is one of those experiences that most people, unless you’ve been in war, you don’t have a parallel experience to relate to, and a lot of combat vets, whether it’s World War II or Korea or Vietnam, they feel that either there’s not going to be an interest in what they have to say, or they’ll be judged by their activities, or they’re just simply not going to be understood, so there is a lot of withholding. I think as the World War II vets are aging and they’re becoming more aware of their mortality as they see their numbers decrease, I see them reaching out more and feeling a need to talk more about their experiences with their families.”

  • • •

  Six days after Japan’s surrender, Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP) Douglas MacArthur, a descendant of Matthew Perry, began to transform a destroyed state of 70 million into a modern democratic nation. Daily outside the American embassy, forty to fifty people went through the garbage, scavenging for food. When the US Congress was chary about giving foreign aid to the starving Japanese, MacArthur, worried about civil order and rioting, said, “Give me bread or give me bullets.”

  Soon after assuming command, the general was photographed with the emperor at the imperial palace; MacArthur, dressed informally, towered over Hirohito. The picture had two messages: the war is over and Japan lost; but the Americans in charge are standing by the emperor. Hirohito’s desire to remain on the throne aligned with military theory of what should now be done. Army Chief of Staff Eisenhower was informed that “as complete a research as was possible” looked for evidence linking Hirohito to war crimes, but nothing was found, and that if the United States indicted him, the country would collapse. MacArthur’s domestic strategy was to present the emperor as having been betrayed by militarist fascists, with Hirohito now leading the way to democratic reform and such American ideals as broadening education, emancipating women, shutting down the secret police, encouraging labor unions, and promoting agricultural reform. Because so many of the Japanese people were sick of fourteen years of war, the American aid was welcomed, and the reforms exceedingly popular. The emperor, meanwhile, attended a ceremony at Hiroshima’s ground zero, dressed not in divine imperial robes but in a black suit and homburg, to pledge to his people that the nation would never again pursue policies that would lead to another Great East Asia War.

  Thirty-nine Japanese leaders were arrested and charged with war crimes on September 11. When American MPs arrived at Hideki Tojo’s house with his warrant, they heard a gunshot. A doctor had used charcoal to mark his chest so Tojo could shoot himself in the heart, but the bullet landed in his stomach. As the Americans rushed in, Tojo, thinking he was dying, said, “I am very sorry it is taking me so long to die. The Greater East Asia War was justified and righteous. I am very sorry for the nation and all the races of the greater Asiatic powers. I wait for the righteous judgment of history. I wished to commit suicide but sometimes that fails.” Given surgery at an army hospital, Tojo recovered and was detained at Sugamo Prison, where he was also given a new set of dentures. The American dentist who cast them arranged for “Remember Pearl Harbor” to be written on his teeth in Morse code.

  Allied military courts held over 2,200 legal proceedings to prosecute an estimated 5,600 Japanese, convicting 4,400, and executing close to a thousand, the main venue being the eleven-nation, eleven-judge Intern
ational Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), which ran for two and a half years from April 29, 1946, to November 12, 1948. Twenty-eight Japanese military and political leaders were charged with Class A “crimes against peace,” and more than 5,700 Japanese nationals were charged with Class B and C crimes, mostly entailing POW abuse. Justice Radhabinod Pal issued a 1,235-page dissent in which he held that the IMTFE was nothing but a victor’s idea of justice, a form of institutional revenge.

  China held thirteen tribunals of its own, resulting in 504 convictions and 149 executions. The Soviet Khabarovsk War Crime Trials indicted some members from Unit 731, Japan’s biological and chemical warfare unit, but MacArthur granted immunity to unit chief Shiro Ishii and those of his team who surrendered to the Americans, in exchange for their germ weapon research, which Ishii had conducted on living human beings.

  At one point in the tribunals, Tojo was asked about the Son of Heaven’s role on the road to war and empire. He admitted that nothing in Japan could be done, by either the government or the military, without Hirohito’s consent. That afternoon, US Army officers sent Japanese workers to the onetime prime minister’s cell to make sure he corrected this testimony the next day.

  One serviceman forced to testify against many of his colleagues was Mitsuo Fuchida. During reconstruction, the hero of Pearl Harbor had bought land just outside Osaka from his father-in-law to became a farmer, raising wheat, rice, vegetables, fruit, grapes, chickens, rabbits, and ducks. This new life wasn’t going well; his only success was in selling eggs to a nearby American army camp.

  In wartime, Fuchida had been nationally famous, regularly speaking to crowds of cheering countrymen. Now, they treated him like a leper. He was disgusted by the military tribunal, especially the hangings of those convicted of mistreating POWs. This, he thought, was an entirely trumped-up charge, as weren’t all POWs treated horribly around the world?

  • • •

  After Jacob DeShazer had recovered somewhat from his years as a POW, he decided to get an education in religion and public speaking and then return to Japan as a missionary. At college, he wrote an essay, “I Was a Prisoner of Japan,” explaining what had happened to him during the war. He and his new wife, Florence, were accepted by the Free Methodist Church for missionary service and arrived in Japan on December 28, 1948, having no idea that Christian organizations in Japan had distributed over a million copies of “I Was a Prisoner of Japan.” Prince Takamatsu invited DeShazer to the Temple of Heaven, where Jake was able to thank the prince for the emperor’s sparing of his life, and over the next thirty years, the DeShazers would build twenty-three churches, helped in part by their association with a Japanese celebrity, a story that would make headlines around the world.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  * * *

  LEGACY

  “After the attack of Pearl Harbor, there were still about four more years of the war,” Raleigh’s Yeoman 2nd Class Gene Telecky said. “I had a job to do and I didn’t give Pearl Harbor much thought at the time.” After serving in Australia, New Guinea, and Okinawa, Telecky retired from the navy in 1960, but it took many years before he could talk about what had happened to him on December 7: “Our kids were already married before I could even tell them about it.”

  San Francisco’s Mal Middlesworth was an eighteen-year-old marine during the attack: “I saw the Oklahoma roll over, and I saw the Arizona blow up. I looked over, and the officer of the deck had tears running down his cheeks. But it was too much for my mind to understand.” Middlesworth was asked by his grandson about his moment in history, and when he started describing his experience, his son sat down. “I said, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘Dad, you’ve never told me anything about what you saw.’ ”

  Many have stories like Telecky’s and Middlesworth’s. For a great number of World War II veterans, the war was both the greatest moment in their lives and a horror that would scar them for the rest of their days. After surviving Arizona, Vern Olsen volunteered for aircraft carrier Lexington, which was blown up at the Battle of the Coral Sea: “[After December 7] I was pretty shook up. Shook up for two years. I lost a lot of weight. I was a bundle of nerves. Then I got sunk again in the Coral Sea. Then I lost everything all over again on the Lexington—money, billfold, all down below in the lockers.”

  Something little discussed alongside America’s championing of the “greatest generation” is this suffering that they carried, in silence, for decades. Novelist J. D. Salinger told his daughter, “You really never get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely . . . no matter how long you live.”

  Sterling Cale had spent three hours on December 7 swimming in the stew of body parts that was Pearl Harbor, hauling the dead and wounded onto a barge. Six years later at a family picnic, a sudden wave came in, grabbing their plastic picnic table and their two-year-old son and pulling them out to sea. Cale jumped into the ocean to save his boy, the first time he’d been swimming since December 7, and immediately went into shock, freezing, unable to move his shoulders, his arms, his legs. Luckily the family’s dog, a K-9 Corps veteran, heard the child’s screams and swam out, grabbed his pants in its teeth, and brought him to safety. For the rest of his life, Cale would get nauseated if he even came close to a shoreline and could never take a walk along a beach or ever go swimming again.

  For over fifty years, Ensign Ike Sutton would wake up in the night, screaming. He had run Admiral Bloch’s launch, pulling the dying and the injured out of the flaming water and ferrying them to Hospital Point. His lifetime of nightmares came from remembering the faces of those who’d died because he’d waited for the boat to be full before making his way to the hospital.

  Servicemen weren’t the only ones scarred by the war. By June 1942, the man overseeing the War Relocation Authority, Milton Eisenhower, said he couldn’t sleep at night and quit. On December 17, 1944, after the presidential elections that year had concluded, the government announced that the nation’s security no longer required the internment of Japanese Americans and ended the WRA. But when the camps closed down, many of the internees did not want to leave since now they had nothing to go home to—their property had been stolen in many cases, and they were afraid they would be beaten or killed wherever they went. Internee Peter Yoshida: “We went to the Japanese church to retrieve our furniture and found that people had pried open the building and looted all of the contents. As a result, we had nothing. Everything we owned was gone, except the suitcases we were allowed to take with us.” In 1971, when Chief Jusice Earl Warren was asked about the internment policy for an oral history project, he burst into tears.

  • • •

  Bomber crewman Mark Ferris survived Hickam barracks on December 7, then spent the rest of the war as an army reporter. After V-J Day he became editor of the Gardena Tribune, and in 1957, Ferris was assigned an article on the meaning of December 7. A Tribune reporter asked forty-two people on the street what had happened on that date. No one knew. An outraged Ferris told other Pearl Harbor survivors about this and asked them to get in touch. One year later, he and ten men began the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, with Ferris as the PHSA’s first president. At its peak, the association counted eighteen thousand members, and it could easily be said that Pearl Harbor would not today hold the special place it does in American hearts if not for their efforts.

  • • •

  For all the American engineering miracles of resurrection at Pearl Harbor, three ships could not be brought back to life. Starting July 15, 1942, crews spent nearly eleven months parbuckling USS Oklahoma using twenty-one derricks attached by steel cables to shore-mounted hydraulic winching machines. After cofferdams encircled the hull and she was dewatered and refloated, Oklahoma made it to dry dock on December 28, where she was judged too old and too beat-up for any use by the navy. Her cannon and superstructure were chopped off and she was sold to a California scrap company, but on her way across the Pacific, the convoy was hit by a bad storm and Oklahoma sank all over again
on May 17, 1947. The USS Missouri has taken her place at the Ford Island docks as a museum, and a memorial to Oklahoma’s 429 lost crewmen can be found just outside the Missouri’s entrance.

  USS Utah, born in 1909, had served in Mexico and Ireland before being converted into a target ship in 1931. When she was torpedoed, turned turtle, and sank on December 7, Utah took sixty-four men with her. Utah was parbuckled with seventeen winches, but she, too, had little value, so after freeing her from berth, the wreckage was allowed to remain in Pearl Harbor as a war grave, and in 1972 a white concrete walkway leading to a brass plaque at her sunken hull was erected as a memorial.

  During efforts in 1942 to resurrect Arizona, meanwhile, divers discovered a foot-wide crack in her back, meaning she would be impossible to raise. Arizona’s superstructure was excised and her remains left—including nine hundred or so crewmen, with twenty-three sets of brothers—to rest in peace.

  On December 7, 1946, Honolulu businessman Tucker Gratz rode out to where the Arizona wreckage lay to memorialize her dead with a wreath. Gratz was upset to find, floating there, the exact same wreath he had laid the year before and began actively politicking the navy to create a memorial. The American military prefers to commemorate victories, not defeats, so it took five years for Gratz to get just a simple flagstaff at the site. Over the years, the flagpole was followed by a platform, and on the platform was set a plaque, and then next to the plaque, an obelisk. Finally in 1958, a memorial design was approved by President Eisenhower, and that same year Rear Admiral Samuel Fuqua, who had won the Medal of Honor for his profound bravery aboard Arizona, appeared on the television program This Is Your Life. His story spurred Americans to give money, and the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor was dedicated on Memorial Day 1962 by the Pacific War Memorial Commission, whose chief was the patient, but relentless, Tucker Gratz.