Pearl Harbour and Days of Infamy

by Newt Gingrich

  “As I said, she’s a civilian assistant to Collingwood. Her boyfriend was a fighter pilot. He got shot down yesterday, reported killed in action.”

  “Poor girl,” but James could sense there wasn’t much compassion in Margaret’s voice. “Things here OK?”

  “No,” Margaret replied coldly. “Someone drove by earlier, saw mom and me outside, and called us f-ing Japs. There have been rumors all day. Two men executed down on the beach, supposedly spies, rumors of lynch mobs downtown hanging a kid accused of signaling enemy ships with a flashlight. Men being rounded up and taken to jails. No, things are not OK.”

  “I’m sorry, honey, tensions are pretty high right now.”

  “What next?” Margaret replied, “A concentration camp? That’s the rumor going around.”

  “Just damn rumors” was all he could say, as she helped him up the stairs and into their cousin’s house.

  “Sit him down at the dining room table,” Dianne said, as if giving an order, “then boil a couple of towels, a sheet, some scissors, tweezers, a sharp knife, thread and needle.”

  “My mother knows what to do,” Margaret replied, still trying to sound polite.

  Her mother said nothing. She was already in the kitchen and came out a moment later with everything Dianne had requested.

  “I was prepared for him to come home,” she said slowly, looking straight at Dianne.

  “Did you boil everything then keep it covered with something sterile?”

  “Young lady, I was tending to injuries out in the pineapple fields before you were born,” Nan replied, and now there was a note of sharpness in her voice.

  “Well, you didn’t do a good job on the commander here. It’s infected.”

  There was a momentary standoff. James actually felt torn. This was his family, and yet he could understand the grief, the rage this girl was feeling. But still, this was his family.

  “Dianne,” he finally said, stepping between the two, turning to face her. “I know you are hurting about Jerry. We all have lost someone. But please don’t take it out on my mother-in-law or my wife.”

  She looked at him coldly. “I can leave if you want, sir.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Over in Kanoehe.”

  “You heard what the sergeant said back at the roadblock. It’s sealed off for now.”

  Tears started to stream down her face, but there was no sob, no shuddering.

  “Jerry might be over there. He was the best. He could have swum to shore or been picked up. And besides, he could outfly any damn Jap.”

  “You can’t go home now,” James replied, keeping his voice low, even. “You are welcome to stay here.” He hesitated.

  “But in my house, Dianne, I don’t want to hear the word ‘Jap’.“

  She stared at him, tears flowing. “I think I’ll go back to the base, sir.”

  “Young lady, lie down on the sofa. I’ll get you some tea with something in it once I’ve taken care of James.”

  It was Nan coming up to Dianne’s side.

  Dianne looked at her coldly, but Nan stared at her comfortingly and repeated in a welcoming voice, “Come on now.” Then Dianne just simply broke, and Nan put her arms around her. Dianne, far taller, cradled her head on the old woman’s shoulder, sobbing.

  Nan led Dianne over to the sofa, sat her down, helped her put her feet up, even taking off her shoes, and the girl turned away, facing the wall, crying softly.

  Margaret came into the room with a blanket and covered her, and James felt tears come to his own eyes as he watched the three women. How completely different war was for them, he thought. And there was fear as well. If things got worse tomorrow, if another strike hit-- and he far better than most knew just how utterly defenseless the island now was from attack by air or sea--would there be an escalation? Would some idiot set off a lynching frenzy? He knew the story of the two men being shot was not a rumor, but it had not been an execution. The kid being lynched, that had not been reported on the base, but he could easily imagine it happening. And the concentration camp? He didn’t want to think about that prospect.

  “Sit down, son.”

  His mother-in-law motioned to the dining room table, where she had already spread out a towel. She deftly cut the bandage off and he could not help but flinch as she peeled it away.

  She whispered something in Japanese, he couldn’t quite catch it, and Margaret was up by his side.

  He looked down at the stump. It was swollen; the edge of the wound she had stitched up was puckering, red, a slight discolored discharge leaking from it.

  “It’s infected,” she sighed. “James, why didn’t you go to the hospital?”

  He shook his head.

  “Mom, you don’t want to know what that place was like. There’s thousands of guys hurt worse than me.”

  “I’m going to have to cut it open and clean it out again.”

  “Shit.”

  “Watch your language,” she replied, trying to force a smile. “Let me help.”

  He looked over his shoulder. It was Dianne standing behind them. “I was studying to be a nurse. I’ve helped with worse than this before.”

  His mother-in-law hesitated, then nodded. He could feel Margaret’s hands on his shoulders tighten up ever so slightly. She wasn’t happy about this, but he said nothing as Dianne went into the kitchen and scrubbed her hands for a couple of minutes before coming back out, not bothering to dry them, just shaking them to get the moisture off.

  She looked at the wound, and James remembered what she had said earlier, that she had quit the training program because she had a weak stomach.

  He felt decidedly weak himself as his mother-in-law carefully cut the stitches off. The wound opened up slightly.

  “This will hurt,” she said, and she spread the wound open. The pain was electric rushing up his arm. For a moment he thought he would faint, as his vision narrowed.

  “Keep it open, I’ll clean it out,” Dianne said, picking up a torn sheet from the tray his mother-in-law had brought out, and she swabbed the wound clean, fresh blood beginning to leak out near the stump of the bone.

  “Did you probe for any fragments?” Dianne asked.

  “I didn’t see any.”

  Dianne picked up a pair of tweezers and looked at Margaret.

  “You better hold him tight. This will hurt but I have to do it.”

  James nodded, bracing himself, and he felt the tweezers slipping in. He arched, cursing, Margaret holding him down.

  “I think there’s a bullet or fragment in there,” Dianne said.

  He felt something grating, dear God this was bad ... He could barely focus. It was as bad as the amputation; at least then they had him shot up with a local and some morphine. He regretted his bravado; he should have stayed at the hospital.

  “Got it,” and she was holding a metal fragment with the tweezers, a small jagged piece of steel, about the size of a dime. “My God,” Nan whispered.

  She let the tweezers drop on the table, reached into her purse, and pulled out two packets of Sulfa.

  “Pour sterile water in, clean it out good. Then pour these in across the inside of the wound. Then carefully stitch it up. Cover it with sterile gauze and bandage it lightly, then we can check it again in the morning.”

  “You are an excellent nurse,” Margaret whispered. “Thanks.”

  Dianne was already halfway into the kitchen.

  “No, I’m not. I went to school one semester, kept throwing up. Saw that probe thing in a Dr. Kildare movie.”

  She raced the last few feet to the kitchen sink and began to vomit, and then started crying again.

  Margaret poured him a stiff drink, which he gulped down even as Nan stitched the wound closed again. Margaret gave him another drink, and then she helped him to a bedroom, where as if he were a child, she helped him undress.

  She kissed him on the forehead, told him to go to sleep, and left the room, the door still open. He could hear crying out in the
living room.

  The window was open to let in the cooling breeze. The air was pure, but he could still hear, and sleep would not come. Distant rumbles of explosions, a siren of a cop car or an ambulance, someone shouting in the distance, a couple of gunshots . . . and out in the living room he could still hear soft voices and crying.

  A distant flash reflected on the opposite wall of the room; long minutes later there was a faint rumble, but in spite of the pain, exhaustion and the liquor had taken hold and he was asleep.

  Aboard Hiei, 31 miles southwest of Oahu 17:52 hrs local time

  Captain Nagita never heard a warning. No one saw the four torpedoes, fired from but a thousand yards out, streaking in. One circled wide--yet another failed gyroscope in the American Mark XII design. The second hit fifty yards forward of the stern. Those directly on the other side of the bulkhead heard the terrifying bang of its impact, but there was no explosion; as with so many of the American torpedoes, its magnetic mechanical detonators failed. But numbers three and four struck amidships, and the fourth one, just under number two turret, did detonate.

  During their long day of struggling to survive, Captain Nagita had first been filled with pessimism. The air strikes had all but finished off his beloved ship, and yet somehow, his damage control teams had managed to keep her afloat and even stabilized the list.

  There had been a buildup of deadly fumes below decks during the afternoon, and yet he had ordered full watertight integrity to be maintained, anticipating at least one more air strike from the island, or an enemy carrier. A brief coded message had been sent from Yamamoto, wishing them luck, but also saying they must rely upon their own guns since there were no longer planes to spare for her protection.

  He had sworn a solemn oath that if he ever got his ship out of this, when he returned to Tokyo, he would try and find a way to reach the Emperor himself to denounce this flagrant abandonment of one of Japan’s most precious lines of defense, the guns of a battleship, recklessly thrown away by a commander obsessed with airplanes.

  But with dusk settling, as he listened in on radio reports of a final and feeble American attack on Akagi, he felt assured that there would be no more air strikes, though the threat of submarines was all but certain. At least one of the Imperial fleet’s own subs was now slowly circling him, helping to stand guard, though. And a half hour ago he had ordered watertight conditions above the flooded-out zone of the ship to be unsealed, ventilator fans turned back on, to clear out the noxious fumes which had killed dozens of his men fighting to contain the still-smoldering fires.

  The flash of the fourth torpedo blew into the bowels of the ship, having first burst through a fuel blister that had been drained out, the precious oil pumped over to a port-side fuel tank to help with counterbalance. The explosion was not contained by the bunker oil, which would not have flash burned, and it therefore broke into the main compartments of the ship, racing through an open corridor. There was a momentary wave of thousand-degree heat that incinerated a score of men caught in its path and in that one-second burst blew into a doorway open to a magazine of five-inch shells. The magazine was nearly empty; most of the ammunition had been expended during the night bombardment and antiaircraft fire repelling the air attacks. The shells were standard. The huge brass cartridges were kept open, and the number of prepackaged powder bags called for were first stuffed inside the cartridge by a loader, then another man fitted the actual shell atop the cartridge, sealing the unit shut, and set the fuse. It would then be loaded into a hoist that took it up topside to the gun turret.

  Nearly half a ton of powder bags were exposed, either inside open shells or in racks, some properly sealed, some opened during the heat of battle and then not secured afterwards as crews turned to damage control. The junior officer in charge of that magazine was new to his post and had not followed correct procedure to secure the magazine and properly dispose of two powder bags that had broken open in the heat of action, during which his crew was expected to prepare and put in the hoist up to eight rounds a minute. The broken five-pound bags were now resting on the floor.

  The torpedo flash burst into the open doorway of the magazine, open because the air was being vented out, and scant milliseconds later the two open bags of powder flashed, setting off a chain reaction within the room so that even as the explosion from the torpedo reached its limits, the partial vacuum left in its wake now caused a backflash of flame. The explosion from the five-inch magazine crashed through two bulkheads and into the main ammunition hoist for number two turret. Topside, not only the bulk of the turret, but the deck itself provided so much armor that a direct hit from an incoming shell or 500-kilogram bomb most likely would not have penetrated into the hoist for the three-quarter-ton shells and powder bags.

  But six decks down, the explosion met little resistance. It blew into the hoist, most of the fire and heat soaring up, but enough going down that it flashed into one of the four main magazines for the fourteen-inch guns.

  The two aft turret magazines had been flooded as a precaution, but not the two magazines forward.

  Captain Nagita barely had time to register the fact that they had taken at least one torpedo hit, and then the entire forward half deck of the battleship Hiei burst asunder, the fireball, like that of the Arizona, racing thousands of feet heavenward.

  Unlike with the Arizona, there was no mud only thirty-five feet down to settle into; they were in nearly two hundred fathoms of water.

  The explosion raced down the main corridors, through open doorways, up and down ventilation shafts; anything that could burn-- secondary magazines, wood, bedding, paint on the walls, uniforms and the men wearing them--flashed.

  Even before the last of the debris from the main explosion had finally splashed into the ocean, Hiei was going down, its captain and all but a hundred or so of its crew dead. A few compartments aft near the stern, with watertight doors secured to contain smoldering fires in the next compartments, actually held, the men behind them surviving, along with a couple of dozen men laboring in the starboard side engine room. For them, the force of the explosion hit with such violence that most were knocked unconscious, the rooms they were trapped in as black as the deepest cave, except for the dim glow of a few emergency battle lamps that still worked.

  The aft end of the ship, in spite of the thousands of tons of water still on board from the hits, and counterflooding, for a brief instant actually lifted clear of the ocean and then plunged down, as if pulled into the ocean by a primordial monster concealed beneath the waves.

  The wreckage of the ship started its long dive to the bottom, internal explosions still igniting, but the increasing pressure of the water flooding in containing the burst.

  The few men still alive and tragically still conscious might have grasped what was happening. What had been a forward bulkhead was now the floor they lay upon. As the ship reached a depth of four hundred feet, the overpressure of the ocean caused the remaining bulkheads to implode, those farther forward bursting first. Those farthest aft could hear the implosions marching closer and closer, like the sound of terrible iron shutters being slammed shut, crushing all within.

  Those who were Buddhist called upon his name, some called for their mothers, a few, secretly Christian, called upon Christ. And then their bulkheads collapsed as well. At that depth the water pressure was over four hundred pounds per square inch. Life was crushed out before they even had time to drown.

  U.S.S. Gudgeon 17:55 hrs local time

  The cheering finally died down.

  “Boys, we got ourselves a battleship,” Captain Lubbers announced over the public address. “Now secure for silent running. Those destroyers out there will be pissed as hell.”

  There was still some back slapping, handshakes all around. All knew that if their cruise had been cut short by but two days (they all had groaned when told they were staying out to sea) they would have been inside Pearl Harbor yesterday. Now it was payback time instead.

  As all hands quieted down, t
he sound echoing through the ocean rumbled past their hull, sound traveling far quicker and farther at sea.

  There were muffled explosions, and then a strange metallic sound, almost like a tin can being crushed under foot.

  “Bulkheads collapsing as she goes down,” one of the torpedo men forward whispered.

  There was a moment of silence, then that crushing tin can sound again, louder.

  “Poor bastards,” someone said softly.

  “The hell with them, they started this,” a petty officer replied coldly.

  Hickam Army Air Force Base 17:59 hrs local time

  The engine was rough, sputtering. According to the fuel gauges, he was empty. His mixture was set so lean it would barely fire at this altitude.

  David spared another quick glance to the southwest. The fireball that had been there minutes ago was gone; the only light now was twilight of the setting sun. He didn’t give it another thought. He was trying to stay alive, and anything beyond that was blocked off.

  He was lining up on the base leg of the pattern; amazingly, there was now a radio hookup, clearing him to land on runway three. He pulled full flaps, trying to keep his approach so high that if the engine cut, he still had enough air speed to nose over, go into a glide, and reach the threshold. In a few more seconds he’d be there. He held off on landing gear until safely within range--too much drag otherwise.

  Behind him were two Dauntlesses, both more or less shot up, but not declaring an emergency, and a B-17, Gloria Ann, that incredible lone survivor after but two days of war. She had two wounded and one dead on board, but was told to stay in pattern so the small boys could land first, their fuel nearly exhausted.

  “This is X-ray One, on final,” and he banked over hard, leveled out, throttle back, flipped the switches for landing gear. Keep the nose down.

  “X-ray One, your landing gear is not deployed!” He spared a quick glance down at his instrument board. One gear was showing green, the other no light at all. “I got green on one.”