by Craig Nelson
The Pearl Harbor Survivors Association banquet in 1991 was held at the Sheraton Waikiki Hotel, which the Japanese owned. No representatives of Japan were invited to attend the ceremonies, however. “We did not invite the Japanese fifty years ago and we don’t want them now,” said PHSA president Gerald Glaubitz. “This is our own thing. We’ve been planning for almost five years. I’ve had widows call me and say, ‘You mean they are going to invite the people who killed my husband?’ ”
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In October 1948, Mitsuo Fuchida was consumed with thoughts about the path his life had taken. He had been a hero of the nation, and now he was nothing. After emerging from Tokyo’s Shibuya subway station, he saw an American giving out pamphlets written by a fellow airman. After hearing its title—“Watakushi Wa Nippon No Horyo Deshita”—Fuchida immediately read the four pages. He then bought a Bible to confirm Jacob DeShazer’s claims about human forgiveness. At the end of the Gospel of St. Luke, he found himself riveted when the tortured Christ said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” “It was,” Fuchida said, “like having the sun come up.”
Fuchida decided right then he had to become a Christian, and wrote to the publisher of DeShazer’s pamphlet, the Pocket Testament League. The letter shocked, Glenn Wagner, PTL’s president, who arranged to meet Fuchida in Osaka. There, the American minister told the Japanese convert that to be a Christian, he needed to read the Bible daily and to bear witness.
The two drove to the middle of Osaka in Wagner’s Chevy truck, which had been converted into a portable stage with a loudspeaker and a podium. After setting up, the frightened man, not knowing how the crowd would react, leaned forward into the microphone to announce: “I am Mitsuo Fuchida, a former navy captain who commanded the air attacking forces against Pearl Harbor on eight December 1941. But now I’m a Christian, and I want to let you know how I became one. All Japanese want peace, I’m sure of that. No one wants war again, no one less than I, who engaged in war as a naval officer for almost four years. I know the brutality and the cruelties of war better than many people. Now I want to work for peace. But how can mankind achieve a lasting peace?” As Fuchida continued, a large crowd gathered, and the onetime admirer of Adolf Hitler found a new purpose in life.
In 1950, Jacob DeShazer was speaking in Osaka when Fuchida approached to say how he had been affected by Jake’s pamphlet. The two then preached together in Osaka, converting almost five hundred Japanese to Christianity. The story of how the hero of Pearl Harbor had converted to faith was carried by every major Japanese newspaper.
The strength of his newfound faith notwithstanding, Fuchida would have difficulties adjusting to the tenets of Christianity. “Fuchida had two women; one was his concubine and one was his wife,” DeShazer said. “Some of the fellows didn’t think he was much of a Christian that he didn’t start straightening out and become a moral man: ‘You’ve got to get rid of one of those women.’ But it was a big problem for Fuchida. I guess eventually he realized it was wrong, and he got so he only had one wife, or one woman. I think he took the best-looking one.”
Eighteen years after the war ended, Fuchida met the B-29 pilot who had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Paul Tibbets recalled that a man “walked up to me, stuck out his hand, and he said, ‘I’m Fuchida. Shall we talk about it?’ I looked at him; he saw I didn’t understand; he said, ‘Man, I led the attack on Pearl Harbor.’ I said to him, ‘You sure did surprise us,’ and he said, ‘What do you think you did to us?’ We talked for thirty to forty minutes, and he said, ‘You did exactly the right thing because Japan would’ve resisted an invasion using every man, woman, and child, using sticks and stones if necessary. That would’ve been an awful slaughter.’ ”
On May 30, 1976, after living for many years in America, Fuchida died of complications from diabetes at the age of seventy-three. Today, his children and grandchildren reside in California.
Fuchida’s story wasn’t the only remarkable turn in the tide of this history. Fellow pilot Zenji Abe had been the leader of the Akagi dive-bombing squadron attacking Pearl Harbor. He next took part in the raid on Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians and in battles over both the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and in 1944 during the Battle of the Philippine Sea, he crash-landed onto a Pacific island, was taken prisoner, and spent fifteen months as an POW.
After the war, Abe became an officer with Japan’s National Police Reserve. On learning years later that his country had not officially declared war before attacking Pearl Harbor, he “was shocked and mortified to know that. To conduct a successful mission, the attack had to be made in an unexpected way to the enemy, but delaying the declaration is immoral and against the Bushido spirit.” In the 1980s, he traveled across Japan in search of surviving First Air Fleet pilots and convinced them to sign a letter apologizing to the Americans at Pearl Harbor. He then flew to the United States, landed in Atlanta, and hired a taxi to drive him for the two hours it took to reach the home of a Pearl Harbor Survivors Association senior officer. He rang the doorbell, explained who he was in halting English, and showed the man the letter. The American sailor said that the Japanese pilot could take his letter and shove it up his ass and slammed the door. Crushed, Abe flew back home to Japan, but refused to give up. Instead he began the Japan Friends of Pearl Harbor and convinced a small group to go to Hawaii for Pearl Harbor’s fiftieth anniversary.
Zenji Abe: “The wartime leaders at that time told people to commit suicide if we were captured. They should have committed seppuku [suicide by disembowelment] when the war ended as they had the responsibility for causing the suffering of so many people. Their attitudes were immoral. I believe Japan and the world would have changed for the better if the Pearl Harbor attack did not happen, and the relationship between Japan and its neighboring countries would have been different if wartime leaders had acted morally. There was no ill feeling or hate before the war against the United States. Why did we make such a mistake? No more Pearl Harbors and no more Hiroshimas should be the watchword for those who believe in peace. Those persons who lost husbands and fathers and sons, of course, can never forget that day, and I am afraid that even [my] small story is like opening an old wound. I pray from the bottom of my heart for those who were killed in action and their bereaved families.”
In Hawaii, three Japan Friends of Pearl Harbor—Zenji Abe, Takeshi Maeada, and Heita Matsumura—met USS West Virginia marine bugler Richard Fiske, who not only survived Pearl Harbor, but also the battle of Iwo Jima, which killed sixty-eight hundred Americans and nineteen thousand Japanese. Fiske called Iwo Jima “thirty-six straight days of Pearl Harbor.” He had spent his postwar decades so filled with loathing for the Japanese that thinking about them made him physically ill.
Then Fiske met the men who had been his lifelong enemies in person and suddenly saw them as human beings, as soldiers like himself. Takeshi Maeda: “Mr. Fiske suddenly hugged me. He was maybe as tall or a little taller than me. And I saw tears coming out of his eyes. And I told him, ‘I’m sorry for sinking your ship.’ But he said, ‘No, don’t say sorry, because it was a war between two nations. And we were soldiers, and it was our duty to fight. And there is no need for you or I to be sorry.’ ”
Richard Fiske: “We didn’t even shake hands, we just hugged each other. I’ll never forget that. Bringing the Japanese veterans and the American veterans together . . . I think it’s one of the greatest things that ever happened. Because it shows the world that here are two opposites, and now they’ve clasped their hands in friendship.”
Before they departed, Abe put his arm around Fiske’s shoulders and said, “Richard-san, please do me this favor. Take this three hundred dollars and buy two roses and take them out to the Arizona every month and blow taps. This is my simple way of saying I am so very sorry.” Across the following decade, Abe sent Fiske money for flowers, and each month Fiske bought one white and one red rose to lay at the memorial’s wall of names, then blew both the American and the Japanese taps. Invit
ed by the three pilots, Fiske then visited Japan, where he blew his bugle at the Hiroshima Memorial and met the engineer who designed Pearl Harbor’s shallow-water breakaway torpedo fins.
In 1996, Emperor Akihito awarded Richard Fiske the Order of the Rising Sun for promoting Japanese-American friendship. At the last PHSA reunion he was able to attend before dying in 2004 at the age of eighty-two, a Japanese tourist touched Fiske’s arm and said in broken English, “I am so sorry,” then burst into tears. “The war’s over now,” Fiske replied. “Besides, my daughter married a Japanese boy, so what can I do?”
Fiske’s fellow sailor aboard West Virginia, Mess Attendant Doris Miller, received a commendation from Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and the Navy Cross from Chester Nimitz, with Nimitz saying, “This marks the first time in this conflict that such high tribute has been made in the Pacific Fleet to a member of his race, and I’m sure that the future will see others similarly honored for brave acts.” Utah’s Clark Simmons pointed out what many felt about this at the time: “This was a very courageous young man, and it was always believed that he should’ve gotten the Congressional Medal of Honor. And the only reason why he didn’t get the Congressional Medal of Honor was because he was black.” After news of Miller’s heroism reached the continental United States, the African-American community began a campaign to pressure President Roosevelt to allow Miller admittance to the Naval Academy. In his follow-up letter to Navy Secretary Knox, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins pointed out that “the greatest honor that could be paid Mess Attendant Miller by the United States Navy would be for it to abolish forthwith the restrictions now in force against the enlistment of members of Mess Attendant Miller’s race so that black Americans can serve their country and their Navy in any capacity.” Such a step “would serve dramatic notice that this country is in fact a democracy in an all-out war against anti-democratic forces.”
Instead of being enrolled in the Naval Academy, Doris Miller was promoted to cook 3rd class and, in the spring of 1943, was assigned to escort carrier Liscome Bay. By November, Liscome Bay was battling in the Gilbert Islands when, at 5:10 a.m. on the twenty-fourth, she was torpedoed. The shell ignited her bomb magazine, and she sank. Of her crew, 272 survived, and 646 died, including Doris Miller. But that is not the end of his story. By combining the story of his heroism with the stories of other black military heroes over the years (such as the Revolutionary War’s Crispus Attucks), civil rights organizations were able to battle segregation as being both contrary to American values and a hindrance to the nation’s war efforts. The campaign was so successful that poet Langston Hughes was able to say, after Truman desegregated the military in 1948, “When Dorie Miller took gun in hand, Jim Crow started his last stand.” In 1973, frigate USS Miller was named in his honor (with Dorie’s mother in attendance at its christening), and in 2001, Disney’s Pearl Harbor movie cast Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr. in the role of Doris Miller. Today, a group in Waco, Texas, is trying to raise $1.35 million for a Miller memorial; their plans can be seen at http://www.dorismillermemorial.org.
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The story of Pearl Harbor is the story of a hundred what ifs? What if FDR’s partial embargo hadn’t been secretly manipulated into a total embargo? What if one Japanese leader had succeeded in forcing the belligerents to make peace in China and give up their fantasy of Dai Nippon Teikoku? What if Prime Minister Konoye had held his summit with President Roosevelt? What if the American president had succeeded in negotiating at the last minute with the Japanese emperor?
The answer to the key and eternal American questions—Why didn’t the United States know? Why didn’t our intelligence work? Why couldn’t our military defend us?—is that in the end, Japanese emotion won out over rational action. Starting with the fundamental theory—that killing thousands of Americans in a surprise attack would trigger the United States to falter and surrender—and ending with the decision to wage war—during which dozens in Tokyo, from graduate students to finance, foreign, naval, and prime ministers, told the army that fighting the United States was nonsensical—Japan’s course to Pearl Harbor was irrational in the extreme. Sense, in the end, did not carry the day.
Two cognitive psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, used clinical research to understand how human beings make decisions. They found that people are overwhelmingly irrational instead of rational, and their findings have upended cornerstone beliefs about economics, politics, and sports. As Michael Lewis explained, “In their most cited paper, cryptically titled ‘Prospect Theory,’ they convinced a lot of people that human beings are best understood as being risk-averse when making a decision that offers hope of a gain but risk-seeking when making a decision that will lead to a certain loss. In a stroke they provided a framework to understand all sorts of human behavior that economists, athletic coaches, and other ‘experts’ have trouble explaining: why people who play the lottery also buy insurance; why people are less likely to sell their houses and their stock portfolios in falling markets; [and even why] professional golfers become better putters when they’re trying to save par (avoid losing a stroke) than when they’re trying to make a birdie (and gain a stroke).”
Pearl Harbor, along with 9/11, has proven that intelligence agencies and defense departments need to expand their thinking about future threats, the greatest of which will be just as out of the blue as these two tragedies. How do we plan for an irrational outburst that defies logical analysis? Can we defend ourselves with emotional intelligence?
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The history of Pearl Harbor is as remarkable as any moment in a nation’s memory, but the history of the American reaction to Pearl Harbor is the founding force of the United States today. The impact was so profound that it could easily be said that the America we live in was born, not on July 4, 1776, but on December 7, 1941, a transformation so remarkable that by 1950, Life magazine said, “In retrospect Pearl Harbor seemed clearly the best thing that could have happened to the US.” Publisher Henry Luce’s 1941 essay “The American Century” predicted that, by the war’s end, America’s values and point of view would be spread across the planet. The New York Times concluded: “The world changed because, with the lockstep of history, the first Japanese bomb became the Hiroshima bomb, the death of the battleship age led to the birth of the nuclear age, the thrust of Asian imperialism destroyed Western empires, and most of all because a world in which a nation might be defeated and survive became inexorably a world in which a nation might conquer and die. . . . History is a sequence of ironies and of these one of the greatest is that a nation that did not want world power, that did not understand and perhaps still does not understand world power, was thrust into world power by the very nations—the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in Asia—for whom it was their sustaining dream.”
Before Pearl Harbor, many Americans were convinced that they was protected by two oceans and a hemispheric distance from wars in Europe and Asia. President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed, “Our borders are unfortified. We fear no one; no one fears us.” In the years preceding Pearl Harbor, America’s international role was essentially that of Great Britain’s uncertain and conflicted little brother, knowing he had to do something about totalitarianism, but wishing it were otherwise.
After December 7, even onetime fervent isolationist Senator Arthur Vandenberg accepted “that oceans are no longer moats around our ramparts. We learned that mass destruction was a progressive science which defies both time and space and reduces human blood and flesh to cruel impotence.” The attack on American soil galvanized and united a United States torn apart by partisan squabbling and helped Americans to start thinking of themselves as citizens of the country and of the world. Being forced to wage war on two oceans and three continents meant an end to America’s Great Depression—1933’s unemployment rate of 24.9 percent became 1942’s rate of 1.2 percent—as well as a transformation of the country from a timid and withholding isolationist into a global superpower. In 1940, the American State, War, an
d Navy Departments were all housed together in a small building next to the White House. By January 15, 1943, War and Navy had moved into the world’s largest building—the Pentagon. Today’s US Department of Defense employs 2 million people and annually spends about $600 billion—more than the next eight largest defense services combined.
December 7 created the democratic alliance that ultimately defeated Italian, German, Japanese, and Soviet totalitarianism, saving the world from dictatorship. Rage against the Japanese for Pearl Harbor led the United States to destroy Japan’s oil shipping, merchant fleet, and military forces, excise her colonial territories, firebomb her cities into dust, and in the final episode of World War II’s enormous cost in human suffering, unleash nuclear weapons for the only time in the world’s history of warfare. After the Japanese slaughtered between 5 million and 20 million Asians over a decade of imperial conquest, the global cataclysm killed over four hundred thousand Americans, over 2 million Japanese, over 5 million Poles, over 5 million Germans, nearly 6 million Jews, and over 26 million Russians, for a total of between 60 million and 80 million.
After Congress finished investigating what had gone wrong at Pearl Harbor—investigations detailed in the appendix below—legislators joined with President Truman to reform the nation’s security, Truman saying that Pearl Harbor might not have happened “if there had been something like coordination of information in the government. . . . The military did not know everything the State Department knew, and the diplomats did not have access to all the army and navy knew.” Their answer was the National Security Act of 1947, merging the Departments of War and Navy; making the air force independent of the army; and creating the first peacetime intelligence bureaucracies in American history. Army’s underfunded and understaffed Signal Intelligence was transformed into the immense National Security Agency, while Roosevelt’s Office of Strategic Services became the Central Intelligence Agency.