Tears in the Darkness

by Michael Norman

  “They’re bombing Pearl Harbor!” the man shouted. “They’re bombing Pearl Harbor!”

  Bigelow didn’t believe him and turned his face to the bulkhead to sleep.

  The first public word of the attack came over KZRH commercial radio sometime after 2:30 a.m. A short while later, MacArthur and Admiral Hart alerted their commands, but the officers, for the most part, did not tell the men in the ranks until they awoke for breakfast.

  North of Cavite and Manila, some fifty miles up the dusty main highway, was Fort Stotsenberg, an army base adjacent to Clark Field. At the nurses’ quarters near the fort hospital, the women had just settled themselves down in the mess to their fruit, eggs, rolls, and coffee when someone reached up and switched on a radio and the familiar staccato of announcer Don Bell started to issue from the box.

  “Hey, listen to that!” one of the women said. “They’re having a war in Hawaii. And here we are in the Philippines, and we’re going to be left out of it.”15

  Less than two miles away, on a road just east of Clark Field, Corporal Zoeth Skinner of Portland, Oregon, part of a five-man crew in a half-track, a kind of tank without a top, was parked in the sun at the side of the highway. The tank battalions had a complement of half-tracks to cover their flanks and scout their points, and for several days the battalions had been on “maneuvers” near the field. In fact they had been deployed to protect the airplanes, but the crews thought they were on another pointless exercise. Then their platoon commander rolled up on a motorcycle.

  “Hey, fellas!” He was excited. “The war’s started. They’ve bombed Pearl Harbor!”

  Then he roared off.

  “Aw, that’s just part of the maneuvers,” one of the men said.16

  West of the road, across acres of bamboo and sugarcane, sat airplane hangars and barracks for the ground crews at Clark Field, among them the men of the 19th Bombardment Group. At morning chow an officer had climbed up on a chair and announced: “We’ve been attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, but there is no word yet on the extent of the damage.”

  Maybe “it wasn’t all that bad,” Ben Steele thought. Then, throughout the morning each new report brought a few more details: battleships had been hit, sunk, or badly disabled; casualties were rumored to be high; there was talk that the country’s formidable Pacific Fleet had been hard hit, perhaps crippled.

  The men at Clark Field could “hardly believe” what they were hearing. They had not expected war to “start so soon” or the enemy to sally that far from home.

  It just didn’t seem real. Shocking, perhaps, but not real, a war without pain or pounding fear, far away, five thousand miles to the east. So the men at Clark Field went to work. The flight crews reported to the flight line, the armorers to the armory, the pilots to their planes. And they waited. They waited and watched the sky. Seven o’clock, seven thirty, still nothing.

  They were also waiting for word to strike back. Air Corps commanders in the Philippines knew from intelligence reports that Japanese Army and Navy bombers would likely come at them from Japanese bases on Formosa, five hundred miles due north. And Major General Lewis H. Brereton, the commander of the Far East Air Force, and his staff had been prepared since November 27 (the day Washington warned all commanders in the Pacific that it believed Japan was ready to go to war) to bomb the Formosan airfields or the harbor at Takao, the likely place the Japanese would gather an invasion force.

  To his staff, Brereton was “a square-rigged, stout-hulled believer in action.” Earlier that morning, after he had learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor, he had rushed to MacArthur’s headquarters at One Calle Victoria in Manila and asked permission to arm and launch the nineteen new B-17 bombers of the 19th Bombardment Group standing by at Clark Field.17

  MacArthur’s chief of staff, Major General Richard Sutherland, told Brereton to wait for MacArthur’s approval. Brereton went back to Air Corps headquarters at Nielson Field and sat. And sat. At seven fifteen he could sit no more and returned to headquarters. Again Sutherland told the Air Corps commander, wait.

  AT CLARK FIELD, Ben Steele and his Air Corps comrades wanted to hit the Japanese on Formosa before the Japanese came at them. Most of all they wanted to get their bombers and fighters off the ground, where they were the most exposed and vulnerable.

  Word had come down that the Air Corps planes at Hickam Field in Hawaii had been parked wingtip to wingtip, an easy target for Japanese bombardiers. Enraged by the folly at Hickam, the Air Corps chief in Washington, Major General Henry H. Arnold, had called General Brereton in the Philippines and warned him not to make the same mistake at Clark.

  Sometime between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m., Major David R. Gibbs, the acting bomb-group commander at Clark, was handed an alert: enemy planes had been spotted over Lingayen Gulf northwest of Clark Field, headed toward Manila. Fearing Clark might be their target, Gibbs immediately ordered the squadrons of bombers into the air, but without bombs. MacArthur still had not given his permission to arm the planes for an attack on Formosa, so the bomber pilots were told to cruise high overhead.

  At last, around 11:00 a.m., MacArthur authorized a reconnaissance flight over Formosa to be followed by bombing missions later that afternoon, and the bombers from Clark were immediately recalled to arm them for the mission. The squadrons of pursuit fighters that had been flying protective cover over Manila and other parts of Luzon that morning were also brought down to refuel. By 11:30 most American warplanes in the Philippines were on the ground, being serviced and readied to take off again.

  After the crews and pilots at Clark Field finished this work, they went to lunch in shifts. Some of the aircraft were properly protected behind revetments, others dispersed, but many, too many, were parked in neat rows in the open on their ready lines, noses to the runway. From above they looked like toys on a large lawn, silver toys perfectly outlined against the greensward of Luzon’s wide central plain.18

  December 8, 1941, 11:00 a.m., 19,000 feet somewhere over the South China Sea

  in the cockpit of an Imperial Navy A6M2 Zero fighter

  It was not a lonely impulse of delight that had sent Sabur Sakai aloft to make tumult in the clouds. It was duty, a sense of obligation born of both politics and myth.

  The myth begins in heaven before the world was the world. Looking down one day, the celestial kami (gods) created a new domain: the Eight Great Islands at the Center Of The World, a misty land of emerald hills and jade valleys known to moderns as Dai Nippon, great Japan.

  The rest of the earth, so the Shinto myth goes, was mere matter, seafoam and mud, but Nippon, the issue of the gods, was sacred soil, superior to all other lands, the aegis of Amaterasu, the goddess of the sun.

  Amaterasu sent her grandson, Ninigi no Mikoto, to consolidate her domain, then she named her great-great-grandson, Jimmu Tenno, to rule there. By heavenly charge he became “emperor,” the first of Amaterasu’s earthly line. Grateful for the appointment, Jimmu Tenno made his “illustrious” foremother a promise: he and his semidivine seed would extend the rule of heaven “to embrace” the entire earth. Hakko-ichi-u, “the world under one roof,” they called it, the plan of a people blessed by heaven and ruled by the descendants of the goddess of the sun.19

  The myth of Amaterasu instilled in the Japanese an unfaltering feeling of uniqueness, Yamato-damashi, “the spirit of being Japanese.” The feeling, more powerful than any sense of self, stirred every Nipponjin, especially Japan’s fighting men, men like Petty Officer First Class Sabur Sakai.

  The twenty-five-year-old Imperial Navy fighter pilot, flying south with a squadron of Mitsubishi Zeros on the late morning of December 8, 1941, marveled at his luck. It was a perfect day for an attack, bright sun, clear sky.20

  Just before 11:30 a.m., Sakai looked down and saw “the Philippine Islands hove into view, a deep green against the rich blue of the ocean.” Then “the coastline slipped beneath” him, “beautiful and peaceful.”21

  It was the opening hours of what the Japanese would call
“the Greater East Asian War” or “the Great Pacific War.” The Japanese had marshaled four armies and fleets to strike American, British, and Dutch targets in the central and southwest Pacific, as far south and west as Malaya and as far east as Hawaii—a battle zone shaped like an immense fan some four thousand miles long and seven thousand miles wide with Tokyo as its pivot. The fan covered a large slice of the globe, all the way from Burma west to Hawaii, six major meridians of time into the heart of the vast Pacific.

  Sabur Sakai, stick in his right hand, throttle in his left, was part of this great effort, the effort to bring the world under one roof and, myth and religion aside, to take the territory and resources Japan claimed were hers by right and necessity. A holy war and a fight for survival rolled into one and draped with a cloak called honor.

  The atavists in the army, and there were many of them, liked to use history and an old injury to advance their agendas and aims. They looked back a century, to July 8, 1853, when the ambitious Commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed into Edo (Tokyo) harbor with four black-hulled warships and orders from the president of the United States to open Japan, a closed and feudal society, to the West. Those black ships and Perry’s implied threats shamed the Japanese, and to recover their honor and preserve their independence, they moved quickly to make themselves modern.

  In the four decades that followed, they cast aside the feudal shogunate, the moribund military autocracy that had governed Japan since the twelfth century, and replaced it with a constitutional monarchy. Then, with help from the French, British, and Prussians, they created a modern, Western-style army and navy. They also set up new industries, built transportation networks, and established a national system of public schools. But in their rush to strengthen their emerald domain and safeguard their precious sovereignty, the parvenus who were racing to embrace the present also held hard to the past, for at heart they were traditionalists, aristocrats, many of them, who did not want Japan to lose its soul—that deep sense of divine origin and the ancient impulse to loyalty and sacrifice that they believed held their society together. They borrowed from the West, these reformers of the Meiji Restoration, as that great change came to be called, borrowed some of the West’s social science and many of its machines and fashions, but their aim always was to keep Japan Japanese. “Eastern ethics, Western science,” was the adage of the day, though Eastern ethics apparently included the West’s inclination for empire and the notion that a strong arm was needed to acquire it.

  After the turn of the twentieth century, Japan found itself in conflict with Russia over concessions in Korea, just across the Sea of Japan and strategically important to the Japanese. Most military observers of the day predicted that the Russians would swiftly overwhelm the force Japan sent against them, “The Eagles had . . . already fixed their talons on the carcass,” wrote one British officer. Nippon, however, struck fast, and its troops, as fierce as any the West had ever seen, defeated the mighty Russians at Port Arthur.22

  In just fifty years Japan had transformed itself from a feudal overlord-ship into a modern military and industrial state, and now it was ready to share in the swag and booty of empire, to grab territory and force concessions in China and domains south, just as the Europeans had been doing in the Pacific since Magellan’s famous sorties in the first decades of the sixteenth century.23

  Japanese diplomats, pressed to defend their country’s aggression, claimed necessity. Japan had suffered a series of recessions, and by 1929, the year of widespread financial collapse, the economy was faltering. Ultranationalists in government, aided by right-wing army officers, pressed for a military solution. And by 1937, the army had provoked so many military “incidents” on the Asian mainland that they got what they wanted—a full-scale war. By the end of 1938 the Japanese had more than a million troops fighting in China.

  Alarmed, America began an economic war of nerves with the Japanese. Using embargoes of vital materials such as scrap iron, machine parts, and aircraft, America hoped to force Japan to pull back from China. When nothing worked, President Roosevelt in July 1941 froze all Japanese assets in the United States, in effect creating an embargo of the commodity Japan needed most—crude oil. And since America was Japan’s chief source of oil, the boycott left the Imperial Army and Navy in a crisis.

  The Japanese decided to take what they needed, and what they needed was in the hands of the British and the Dutch. War planners in Tokyo knew well that by striking the East Indies they would provoke Europe’s ally, the United States, into a fight. They also knew that they could not defeat the industry-rich Americans; the United States with its vast resources and its capacity to manufacture whatever war matériel it needed would eventually wear them down. Japan’s only chance was to win as much as they could as quickly as they could, then sue for peace and the status quo. Keep the Americans off balance for six months, seize the mineral-rich colonies in the southwest Pacific, then set up a ring of defenses to protect their gains.

  SURPRISE WAS ESSENTIAL. Surprise had helped Hideyoshi in Korea in 1592 and had carried the day against the Russians at Port Arthur in 1904. Officers of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy also knew well the words of the Kendo master Miyamoto Musashi: “You win in battles with timing . . . the timing of cunning . . . a timing which the enemy does not expect.” Surprise leaves an enemy low, outwitted, taciturn. America “will be utterly crushed with one blow,” an Imperial Navy admiral told the commanders of the Pearl Harbor task force at a briefing before the battle. “It is planned to shift the balance of power and thereby confuse the enemy at the outset and deprive him of his fighting spirit.”24

  But a surprise attack, a modern coup de main, demanded careful planning, constant practice, strict secrecy, a willingness to sacrifice, and a lot of luck.25

  The Japanese have seven gods of good fortune, and on December 8, 1941, these seven kami were with them. The attack on Hawaii left much of the Pacific Fleet burning or at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The surprise sorties against the other targets in the Pacific were stunning victories as well. Still, of all the units on the attack that day, the force with the most luck was the 11th Air Fleet, Sabur Sakai and his fellow pilots in the fighters and bombers that had soared into the air from bases on Formosa to bomb Clark Field in the Philippines.

  The battle plan had originally called for the Formosa squadrons to take off at 2:30 a.m., which would have put them over the target just after first light, roughly the same moment that the Pearl Harbor attack force, some five thousand miles to the east, was diving on Honolulu’s airfields and on the battleships of the American Pacific Fleet. But a rare and very unseasonal “thick pea-soup fog” rolled in from the Straits of Formosa that morning. And standing on the tarmac in their flight suits, Sabur Sakai and his comrades could not see more than five yards in front of them.

  Through the fog came a voice from the loudspeakers on the control tower: “Takeoff is delayed indefinitely,” and with that announcement, every pilot instantly understood that the element of surprise had been lost, for surely the Americans at Clark Field and at the other U.S. bases in the Philippines would have heard of the attack at Pearl Harbor and would be prepared for them, or perhaps the enemy was on its way to attack Formosa and the Japanese airfields there.26

  Sakai and his fellow pilots, cupping their hands to their ears and listening for the sounds of American bombers overhead, waited for the fog to lift. Five o’clock, six o’clock, seven o’clock. At last the fog gave way to mist, mist to blue sky, and by eight forty-five, all squadrons were headed south.

  The attack was now six hours behind schedule and Sakai was sure “after the long delay . . . [the enemy] would be awaiting us in great strength.”

  Just after noon the formation of fifty-three bombers and forty-five Zeros came roaring in from the South China Sea and the Zambales mountains. Below them, on the plains of Pampanga Province, was Clark Field, the main air base of the United States Army Forces in the Far East, General Douglas MacArthur’s army in the Philippines. When
Sakai looked down, he saw “some sixty enemy bombers and fighters neatly parked along the airfield runways . . . squatted there like sitting ducks.”27

  The Japanese airman was astonished. Why, he wondered, weren’t the Americans in the air, “waiting for us?”

  The bombers made their passes first. To Sakai, whose squadron of fighters was circling above, protecting the bombers, the attack on Clark Field looked “perfect.” He watched from his cockpit as “long strings of bombs tumbled from the bays” of the bombers “and dropped toward the targets.” When they hit, “the entire air base seemed to [rise] into the air with the explosions. Pieces of airplanes, hangars, and other ground installations scattered wildly. Great fires erupted and smoke boiled upward.”28

  Now the Zeros took their turn. They “circled down to 13,000 feet . . . still without enemy opposition.” Then, with his two wingmen in tow, Sakai nosed over, “pushed the stick forward and dove at a steep angle for the ground.” He picked out two American B-17s sitting on the runway unscathed by the explosions and “poured a fusillade of bullets into the big bombers.”

  Later, safely back on Formosa, the Japanese pilots were elated. “Now,” said one, “we have dealt a spectacular blow!” But, overall, they were surprised by their success and “bewildered” by their luck. They told their debriefing officers that they had “found the enemy’s planes lined up on the target fields as if in peacetime.” It was almost “as if the enemy did not know that war had started.”29

  THE AMERICAN PILOTS and ground crews were eating their lunch when they heard the drone of planes overhead. Some of them rushed outside and looked up.

  A few, veteran pilots mostly, knew immediately it was the enemy, but many on the ground, the uninitiated and unknowing, mistook the formations for “friendlies.” The planes, flying in giant V formations, were perfect in their spacing, their precision, their unerring course, “beautiful,” some men thought, and stirring against the vault of powder blue.30