by Toland, John
The next group of torpedo planes was Lieutenant Matsumura’s, from Hiryu. His first view of Pearl Harbor was a forest of masts against the garish rising sun. They’d made it! “Look for carriers!” he called through the voice tube to his observer. He dropped to 150 feet over a field of waving sugar cane. Helldivers were plunging down on Ford Island through clouds of smoke. “Bakayaro!” he muttered. How could they make such a mistake and obscure the main targets! Half a dozen planes converged on a big ship that looked like a carrier on the northwest side of Ford Island. “Damn fools,” he repeated. “Who can they be?” Before takeoff he had warned his men to leave this one alone. It was merely the thirty-three-year-old target ship Utah, her stripped decks covered with planks.
He circled out above the sea and turned back over Hickam at 500 feet so he could come in on Battleship Row. His path cut across a long line of torpedo planes from Kaga and Akagi—several were ablaze from enemy fire but continued on to ram their targets. He’d have done the same thing, he thought, as he skimmed through towering fountains of water. He went down to less than 100 feet and started a run on one of the ships in the outside row—it was West Virginia. Usually the pilot alone released the torpedo, but today, to make doubly sure, most navigator-bombadiers were also pushing their release buttons. “Yoi [Ready],” he called over the tube. Then: “Te!” (Fire!) As the torpedo was launched, he pulled the stick back sharply. “Is the torpedo running straight?” he called to the navigator. He was afraid it might dig into the mud.
Matsumura pushed in the throttle, but instead of making the standard left turn, climbed to the right. He kept looking back to keep his torpedo in view. In the oily water he saw American sailors; they seemed to be crawling in glue. He banked further and saw a column of water geyser from West Virginia.
This one moment was worth all the hard months of training. “Take a picture!” he shouted to the navigator, who thought he said “Fire!” and ordered the machine-gunner to open up. “Did you get the picture?” asked Matsumura. Without comment the navigator took a picture—of someone else’s column of water.
Lieutenant Mori, who had swept directly across Oahu, was still looking for a target. He hedgehopped over Ford Island, but finding only a cruiser on the other side, made a semicircle and came back just above the waves toward California at the southern end of Battleship Row. At the last moment a breakwater loomed between him and the target. He climbed, circling over Utah, which looked as if it had been twisted in two, again went down to 15 feet and came at California from a different angle. His radioman-gunner took a picture of the torpedo explosion as Mori prepared to make his left circle to the assembly point. But his path was barred by a heavy pillar of smoke at the end of Ford Island and he was forced to bank right directly into the oncoming torpedo planes from Akagi and Kaga; he narrowly missed collision and his plane rocked from the turbulence. Bullets ripped through Mori’s plane “like hornets.” One set the navigator’s cushion on fire, another grazed the hand of the machine-gunner, but none hit the fuel tanks.
The high-level bombers were going after the inner row of battleships and anything else that looked tempting. The battleships were obscured by smoke at first, but on the second pass the first five Soryu planes were able to unload their 1,760-lb. bombs on the badly listing Oklahoma. Squadron leader Heijiro Abe snapped a picture as his bomb smashed between two gun turrets, penetrated into an ammunition room and exploded. Great tongues of flame blasted out of half a dozen holes in the ship. A flood of tears obscured Abe’s vision. He was ready to die.
2.
Vitousek landed his Aeronca a quarter of an hour after the encounter with the two Zeros and phoned Army and Air Corps duty officers that he had seen Japs over Oahu. Nobody would believe him or even send out an alert.
The first bombs had already hit Wheeler Field a few minutes earlier, shortly after 7:50 A.M. Second Lieutenant Robert Overstreet of the 696th Aviation Ordnance Company, asleep in the two-story wooden BOQ (bachelor officers quarters), was awakened by a deep rumble. He thought it was an earthquake until he heard a voice shouting, “Looks like Jap planes!” and someone else saying, “Hell, no, it’s just a Navy maneuver.”
Then Overstreet’s door opened and a friend looked in, face white and lips trembling: “I think Japs are attacking!” Overstreet peered out the window and saw olive-drab planes overhead. One roared by so close that he could see the pilot and a rear gunner. On the fuselage and wing tips were flaming-red suns. He finished dressing on the run and outside the barracks came upon a group of fighter pilots.
“We’ve got to get down to the line and tag some of those bastards,” Lieutenant Harry Brown shouted. But the closely grouped planes on the ramp were already on fire. “Let’s go to Haleiwa,” he said. This was an auxiliary sod field on the north coast, where a few P-40’s and P-36’s were kept. Brown and several other fighter pilots piled into his new Ford convertible and careened off. Lieutenants George Welch and Kenneth Taylor were right behind in another car.
As bombs continued to fall, Overstreet pushed his way through a crowd milling in confusion toward the permanent quarters area. Brigadier General Howard C. Davidson, the fighter commandant, and Colonel William Flood, the base commander, were standing in pajamas by their front doors, staring up in the sky, faces aghast.
“Where’s our Navy?” Flood muttered. “Where’re our fighters?”
“General, we’d better get out of here!” Overstreet shouted. “Those planes have tail gunners.” At that moment Davidson noticed to his horror that his ten-year-old twin daughters were roaming the lawn, picking up empty Japanese cartridges as if it were an Easter egg hunt. Davidson and his wife rounded up their children; then he set off for the ramp to get some of his planes in the air. But those salvaged from the flames had no ammunition and the ordnance building, containing a million rounds of machine-gun ammunition, was ablaze. All at once the big hangar was racked by salvos that sounded like an endless string of giant firecrackers.
Fifteen miles to the south, at Hickam Field, two aircraft mechanics were walking toward the flight line. Jesse Gaines and Ted Conway had gotten up early to get a look at the B-17’s due from the States. They’d never seen a Flying Fortress. At 7:55 a V formation of planes appeared in the west. As they began to peel off, Conway said, “We’re going to have an air show.” Then Gaines noticed something fall from the first plane and guessed it was a wheel. “Wheel, hell—they’re Japs!” cried Conway.
As Gaines said, “You’re crazy,” a bomb exploded among the closely packed planes. The two started for the three-storied barracks, “Hickam Hotel.” Gaines saw some gas drums and ducked behind them for protection. He felt something kick him in the rear. “Don’t you know better than that?” a grizzled sergeant barked. “Those damn drums are full!” Gaines headed for the ramp. Looking up, he saw bombs wobble down, each one aimed directly at him. He scrambled in terror, first one way, then another.
Colonel James Mollison, chief of staff of the Hawaiian Air Force, was shaving when he heard the first bombs fall. He dashed to his office and phoned Colonel Walter C. Phillips, General Short’s chief of staff, that the Japanese were attacking.
“Jimmy, you’re out of your mind,” said Phillips. “Are you drunk? Wake up!” Mollison held up the receiver so that Phillips could hear the explosions. Phillips was convinced, in fact dumfounded. “I’ll tell you what,” he shouted. “I will send you over a liaison officer immediately.” Then the ceiling crashed all around Mollison.
Two miles to the north, in the center of Pearl Harbor, the first bomb was falling on the naval air station at Ford Island. From his seat in a parked PBY, Ordnanceman Third Class Donald Briggs decided a plane from the carrier Enterprise had spun in. Then the ground erupted all around him as a dozen more explosions followed in rapid succession.
In the first few minutes the Navy bases at Kaneohe and Ford Island, and the Army bases at Wheeler, Bellows and Hickam, as well as the lone Marine base, Ewa, were crippled. Not a single Navy fighter and only some thirty A
rmy Air Corps fighters managed to get into the air.
A moment after the first bomb fell, the Pearl Harbor signal tower alerted Kimmel’s headquarters by phone. Three minutes later Rear Admiral Patrick Bellinger broadcast from Ford Island:
AIR RAID, PEARL HARBOR—THIS IS NO DRILL.
At 8 A.M. Kimmel radioed Washington, Admiral Hart and all forces at sea: AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NO DRILL. Even as these messages were going out, flames and billows of black smoke were rising from Pearl Harbor.
Not far from Battleship Row, Boatswain’s Mate Graff of the oil tanker Ramapo scrambled down the ladder into the crew’s quarters and yelled, “The Japs are bombing Pearl Harbor!” His shipmates looked at him as if he were joking as usual, and when he said, “No fooling,” someone gave a Bronx cheer. “No crap. Get your asses up on deck!” Yeoman C. O. Lines clambered topside to the fantail just in time to hear a dull explosion and see a plane dive toward California, the first of the seven big vessels in Battleship Row.
Above her, in tandem formation, were Maryland and Oklahoma. A torpedo couldn’t hit Maryland because she was berthed inboard, next to Ford Island. But the outboard ship, Oklahoma, was hit by four torpedoes within a minute. As she listed to port, Commander Jesse Kenworthy, senior officer aboard, ordered the ship abandoned over the starboard side. Inexorably the ship settled, its starboard propeller out of the water. Below, more than four hundred officers and men were trapped alive in the rapidly filling compartments. Next in Battleship Row came Tennessee and West Virginia. Like Maryland, Tennessee was inboard and protected from torpedo attack. On West Virginia’s battle conning tower, Captain Mervyn Bennion doubled up. A fragment, probably from an armor-piercing bomb that had just hit the nearby Tennessee, had torn into his stomach. Lieutenant Commander T. T. Beattie, the ship’s navigator, loosened the skipper’s collar and sent for a pharmacist’s mate. Bennion knew he was dying, but his concern was how the ship was being fought. Fires swept toward the bridge.
Next in line came Arizona and the repair ship Vestal. The torpedo planes had missed Arizona, but a few minutes later high-level bombers found her with five bombs. One of these plunged through the forecastle into the fuel-storage areas, starting a fire. About sixteen hundred pounds of black powder, the most dangerous of all explosives, were stored here, against regulations. Suddenly the volatile stuff exploded, igniting hundreds of tons of smokeless powder in the forward magazines.
Arizona erupted like a volcano. Those on nearby ships saw her leap halfway out of the water and break in two. Within nine minutes the two fragments of the great 32,600-ton ship settled in the mud as sheets of flame and clouds of black smoke boiled above her wreckage. It didn’t seem possible that a single one of the more than fifteen hundred men aboard could have survived. Ahead was the last ship in Battleship Row, Nevada. She was down several feet by the head from a torpedo in her port bow and a bomb in the quarterdeck.
All along Battleship Row, men were jumping overboard and trying to swim the short distance to Ford Island. But the surface was coated with a layer of oil, six inches deep in some places, and this finally burst into flames, killing most of those in the water.
On the other side of Ford Island, torpedo bombers were still assaulting one of the least important ships in the harbor—the ancient target ship Utah. At 8:12 A.M. she rolled over, keel sticking out of the water. Men on Ford Island could hear a faint knocking inside the hull.
Only one ship in the entire harbor was under way. This was the destroyer Helm, scurrying at 27 knots through the channel toward the mouth of the harbor and the relative safety of open water. The antitorpedo net, opened hours earlier for Condor, was still unaccountably agape, and the Japanese midget submarine with the faulty gyrocompass was trying to stab its way blindly into this opening and go after a battleship. The commander, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, surfaced to get his bearings. Ahead were columns of black smoke. “The air raid!” he called to his aide. “Wonderful! Look at that smoke. Enemy ships burning. We must do our best too, and we will.”
At 8:15 he saw Helm knife out of the harbor, but he held his fire. His two torpedoes were marked for bigger game. He submerged and again aimed blindly at the harbor mouth. He hit a reef, backed away, tried again. This time he ran up so far on the reef that his conning tower stuck out of the water. An explosion shook the little boat violently. Something hit his head and he blacked out. When he came to, the tiny inner chamber was filled with acrid white smoke. He felt dizzy, sick. He reversed his engine. The boat refused to budge. On his stomach, he wormed his way up the narrow forward passage to begin the agonizing job of transferring 11-lb. ballast weights to the stern. At last he felt the submarine stir.
Helm continued to fire at the midget as it slid off the coral and vanished beneath the surface. SMALL JAP SUB TRYING TO PENETRATE CHANNEL, radioed the destroyer.
Inside the harbor, another midget was slowly rising to the surface just west of Ford Island. It was sighted at 8:30 and several ships opened fire. The midget launched her two torpedoes, one detonating against a dock, the other against the shore. Then the destroyer Monaghan rammed into the midget and dropped depth charges over the spot where it had disappeared.
Fighter pilot Shiga and his squadron of Zeros were lagging 8,000 feet above Hickam, waiting for enemy fighters to come up, but the only American plane in sight was a little yellow ship flying over the sea just east of the field. Shiga ignored it. Moments later he saw six huge four-engine planes coming in for a landing at Hickam.
They were the first of the dozen Flying Fortresses from California. At the sight of the high-flying Zeros, Major Truman Landon, the squadron commander, thought, Here comes the U. S. Air Corps out to greet us. Then came the distant blinking of machine guns, and a voice shouted over the intercom, “Damn it, those are Japs!” Landon’s planes scattered. One started north for Bellows while the rest hastily made for Hickam. Four of them landed safely, but one was shot in half by ground troops as it touched down.
Shiga and his men strafed Hickam in single file, raking a long line of parked planes, then hedgehopped for the sea to avoid AA fire. They turned and swept back. To Shiga’s surprise, not one of the planes just strafed was burning. If they had been Japanese they would all be on fire. After three passes at Hickam, Shiga decided to hit Ford Island, but since it was covered with smoke, he led his men to the Marine field near Barbers Point, to the southwest. They left most of the parked fighters in flames.
The torpedo bombers were already droning away from Pearl Harbor. Lieutenant Mori had been driven off course by AA fire after hitting California and found himself over Honolulu. He banked away from this forbidden civilian area and headed for the assembly point. Just off the mouth of Pearl Harbor, his navigator said, “Mori-san, some strange-looking plane is on our tail.” He turned and saw a little yellow biplane tagging along behind. “Scare it away,” he told the radioman-gunner, who loosed a warning burst.
After Lieutenant Matsumura hit West Virginia he too flew south just in time to see Helm fire at Sakamaki’s midget sub. He started for the destroyer, then remembered he had no torpedo. He saw a big passenger plane (it was one of the Flying Fortresses) and bore in so his machine-gunner could knock it down. It was too fast and Matsumura gave up the chase. He told the radioman-gunner to report the attack and got the sheepish answer, “I can’t. I shot off our antenna.”
One plane alone circled above Pearl Harbor. It was Fuchida assessing the damage. Battleship Row was a holocaust; every battleship still afloat was burning.
Now from the east a second wave of raiders—eighty dive bombers, fifty-four high-level bombers and thirty-six fighters—approached Oahu. At 8:55 A.M. Lieutenant Commander Shigekazu Shimazaki gave the signal for attack and the 170 planes shot over the mountains east of Honolulu and headed for Battleship Row and Drydock No. 1, where the eighth battleship, Pennsylvania, was berthed.
A principal target was Nevada, moving slowly past Arizona, which still belched huge tongues of flame. Gun crews shielded ammo from the intens
e heat with their own bodies. Already suffering from one torpedo hit, Nevada drew up to the toppled Oklahoma. Several men stood up on the sides of that ship and cheered as Nevada made for open water. But the attackers were finding the range, and six bombs hit within a few minutes. The bridge and forestructure of the battleship erupted in flames. Nevada turned to port, and with the help of two tugs, was beached not far from Pennsylvania’s drydock.
To the southeast the second group of six Flying Fortresses approached Waikiki Beach, and Captain Richard Carmichael, the squadron commander, began pointing out the sights to his co-pilot. He thought the planes ahead were part of some Navy maneuver until he saw flames and smoke at Hickam. Anxiously he called the tower for permission to land.
“Land from west to east,” said Major Gordon Blake. “Use caution. The field is under attack.”
As Carmichael lowered his wheels he became the target of violent AA fire from below. He broke off his approach and turned north to Wheeler. This field, too, was under heavy attack, and he had to make for Haleiwa. It was twelve hundred feet long, and by the time the mammoth B-17 skidded to a stop he had used every foot of it. All six of his planes landed safely: two at Haleiwa, one at Kahuku Golf Course and three at Hickam. When his first Flying Fortress touched down at Hickam, two sprucely dressed captains stepped out. “Get your ammo, load up and get ready to go!” shouted someone. The captains stammered that they were in no shape for battle. All their guns were packed in cosmolene and would take hours to clean.
At Wheeler the men were still groggy from the first attack when the second hit. Lieutenant Overstreet began arguing with a sergeant from the Base Ordnance Office about rifles and pistols.
“I doubt if I’m authorized to give you any without a hand receipt,” said the reluctant sergeant above the din of exploding bombs.
“Hell, man, this is war!” Overstreet yelled. He got the guns.