Pearl Harbor
by Frank "Tommy" Sharp
Tension had been rising between Japan and the United States for years. Japan’s position in the Far (Kennedy, 1994) East over the “China Incident” (Marco Polo Bridge) was more perilous by the hour from which it couldn’t extract neither honor nor victory. It was fatally dependent on immense shipments from the United States of scrap iron, oil and aviation gasoline, getting 90 percent of her oil from the United States. Such assistance was highly unpopular in America.
(Commanger, 2001) President Roosevelt, late in 1940, imposed an embargo on outgoing supplies to Japan. This blow was followed by a “freezing” of Japanese assets in the United States. Japan was an overpopulated island nation with insufficient natural resources. With Britain, France and the Netherlands tied down with war in Europe, Japan looked at the irresistible and golden opportunity of lightly defended Asian colonies of British Malay and Dutch East Indies with their invaluable supplies of oil, rubber and tin. The main objective of the surprise attack on the American Fleet was to destroy the only naval base in the Pacific that could interfere with her simultaneous attacks on the Philippines, Hong Kong and Malay.
(Brewster, 1998) In the history of warfare no major naval base had ever been attacked in broad daylight by a carrier force and a number of high military officials considered Pearl Harbor the greatest concentration of American military might in the world, and to be impregnable. Success depended on the strictest of secrecy. Thus, no declaration of war was made.
So on November 27, the Japanese put to sea a massive task force of the Navy’s six newest and largest carriers and accompanied by battleships, light cruisers, destroyers, fleet submarines, supply ships and tankers. The die was cast. They sailed hidden by a weather front that made for limited visibility. There was complete radio silence. The destroyer Ward attacked a tiny two-man Japanese submarine trying to slip into Pearl Harbor. They knocked it out with two shots and by dropping a depth charge. No submarine net had ever been laid across the entrance to Pearl Harbor and Battleship Row.
The attack was led by Captain Mitsuo Fuchida on his flagship carrier Akagi. He was 39 years old and a devoted admirer of Adolf Hitler even to the point of his trim tiny black mustache of trying to look like him. He switched on his radio direction finder and soon picked up a station in Honolulu playing light, soothing music. By turning his antenna he found the exact location and corrected his fleet direction since he was off 5 degrees. Like a flock of geese, a battalion of 189 bombers moved gracefully through the skies on this historic mission.
At the same time on the East Coast life goes on; it was now noon on this “Black Sunday” and FDR, wearing a loose knit pullover, was sorting through his stamp collection and chatting with an aide. In New York, concertgoers dressed for Carnegie Hall’s afternoon fare: a program featuring Arthur Rubinstein and the New York Philharmonic that would be broadcast live on CBS, as people filed out of morning church to set the table for the day’s big meal.
(Arthur Zich and Editors of Time Life, 1977) There were warning signs that something was amiss. The US Army Corp of Engineers had broken the Japanese purple code and the FBI had tapped their telephones, and shortly before December 7 they were burning all of their important documents and everything else inside their Honolulu consulate so as not to be detected by burning outside. Admiral Kimmel and General Short were playing golf when the attack struck.
A mobile radar station had been set up just weeks before and only a few operators had been trained. During December the hours were supposed to be 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. On the morning of December 7, they picked up a suspicious blip at 6:45 and reported it to Fort Shafter. At 7:02 he was surprised to see a larger blimp on the screen. They tried to call the information center but the line was dead on his headphone so he switched to the administration line and got through.
Lieutenant Kermit Tyler was an Air Corps pilot assigned to the Aircraft Warning System and finally answered the call and mistakenly thought it was a flight of B-17s expected in from California — then in one of the more memorable phrases of World War II, said “Well, don’t worry about it.”
Then he hung up. Only a few of the antiaircraft guns were manned and the ammunition for them had been locked up below deck. The Japanese had developed torpedoes with new wooden fins that kept them from going too deep in the harbor’s swallow waters.
When the first wave of planes swept across the bay, nearly everyone thought it was just stunting Navy pilots acting up again. Bedlam broke out as exploding ships lit up the skies all at once and horns were blaring everywhere.
On the Oklahoma everyone jumped as the loudspeaker cracked and shouted: “AIR RAID! NO DRILL!” Forward of the overturned Oklahoma, the California was punctured by two torpedoes. Oil spewed from her sides like blood. But her guns opened fire and kept firing throughout the raid as the California sunk into the mud. The West Virginia also began to sink into the mud while her guns blazed. Then came a thunderous explosion as the battleship Arizona blew up. In an instant the Arizona became a towering flame 500 feet tall. A few years ago, when I visited the Arizona, the oil was still leaking! She sank so fast that she had no time to turn over. More than 1,000, almost four-fifths, of her crew died. In a little more than an hour and 45 minutes the Japanese had destroyed 188 planes and damaged 159 others and had sunk or seriously damaged 18 ships of war.
(Morison, 1965) So President Roosevelt declared war on Japan on this “day that will live in infamy.” The Navy and Army commanders (Kimmel and Short) were relieved of active duty shortly after the attack.
About six months later, Admiral Nimitz was ready to pay back in kind with their own medicine. It was an elegant but simple plan: he would hide his three carriers until Nagumo’s planes hit Midway. Then he would launch his planes and destroy the unprotected fleet. It was the Japanese, not the Americans, who would sail into an ambush!