THIS MONTH IN 1941
ANNIVERSARIES THAT HAVE MADE HISTORY
The attack on Pearl Harbor
Complements the BBC Radio 3 series The Essay: Our Fathers’ War
It was the end of the Sunday morning shift on 7 December 1941, and for Privates Joseph Lockard and George Elliott, it had been uneventful – like almost any other shift at the Opana Mobile Radar Station. Situated near Kahuku Point on the northern tip of Oahu, the third-largest of the Hawaiian Islands, the station was operated on a part-time basis. Shortly before the clock struck 7am, Elliott reminded Lockard that he needed training in using the oscilloscope.
As Lockard looked at the radar display while he was preparing to teach Elliott, he gave a murmur of surprise. There was something unusual on the oscilloscope. “Must be a flight of some sort,” said Lockard. He and Elliott stared at the image. They agreed the aircraft, which were approximately 137 miles north of the island, numbered “more than 50”.
Elliott called the Information Center at Fort Shafter, 30 miles south, and spoke to Lieutenant Kermit Tyler, whose role was to assist the controller in ordering planes to intercept enemy aircraft. On this particular Sunday, Tyler was the only officer in the Information Center, with neither the controller nor the aircraft identification officer on duty. Lockard shared what he could see on his screen, describing the “direction, the mileage and the apparent size of whatever it was”. It was big, he emphasised: the “biggest sightings he’d ever seen”.
in-chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet, started planning
the raid a whole year before it took place
For a moment, Tyler was nonplussed. But then a thought struck him. For most of the night the local radio station had been playing Hawaiian music, and he had heard that this had a secret meaning: it acted as a radio beam for the American aircraft en route to the island from the mainland. The radio beam was classified information, so Tyler could not relay it to Lockard; instead he told the radar operator, “don’t worry”. The aircraft were American, of that he was sure.
Schemes and spies
Exactly 12 months earlier, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet, had conceived the idea of a surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. He expanded on his idea in a letter to Admiral Koshir Oikawa, the navy minister, declaring that if Japan’s imperialist ambitions in the Pacific were to be realised they must strike first, and strike with such ferocity that “the morale of the US Navy and her people… would sink to the extent that it could not be recovered”. The target he had in mind, Pearl Harbor, was home to the US Pacific Fleet.
“Admiral Yamamoto declared that if Japan’s imperialist ambitions were to be realised then they must strike first, and strike with ferocity”
Kichisabur Nomura (left) pictured with Cordell Hull,
November 1941. Their ‘negotiations’ with the
US secretary of state would prove a charade
It was an audacious plan – so audacious that the Americans had never seriously entertained the thought that Pearl Harbor might be targeted. But Japan knew all about the defences of Pearl Harbor because of Takeo Yoshikawa, their top spy, who had arrived in Honolulu the previous March posing as a diplomat. By May 1941, as General George Marshall, chief of staff of the US Army, was boasting to President Franklin D Roosevelt about the impregnability of Pearl Harbor, Yoshikawa was passing on to his superiors the identities and locations of enemy battleships. Throughout the summer of 1941 Japan and the US maintained diplomatic talks, but these were a charade for the Japanese. In November, US Secretary of State Cordell Hull received from the Japanese what he described as “an ultimatum” in which they demanded unlimited oil supplies, an end to the US freeze on its assets, and the discontinuation of aid to China. In exchange, all they offered was the partial withdrawal of their troops from Indochina. Yet even as the Japanese handed the offer to Hull, their task force was assembling in the remote Hitokappu Bay in the northeast of Japan, preparing a two-wave attack involving more than 350 aircraft.
“Tora! Tora! Tora!”
At 7.40am on Sunday 7 December, Mitsuo Fuchida got his first sight of the 96 vessels of the Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor. He was the commander of the first wave of aircraft – 183 in all (two had failed to take off ), composed of 43 fighters, 49 high-level bombers, 51 dive bombers and 40 torpedo planes. None of the three American aircraft carriers were in port, but that disappointment was assuaged when Fuchida saw how closely the enemy ships were positioned to one another. “I have never seen ships, even in the deepest peace, anchored at a distance of less than 500 to 1,000 yards from each other,” he recalled. “ is picture down there was hard to comprehend.”
The navy patrol seaplane base in Kaneohe Bay, on the east coast of Hawaii, was hit first at 7.53am – exactly the same moment that Fuchida radioed to the task force: “Tora! Tora! Tora! (Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!)”, the codewords to confirm the enemy had been caught unawares. One flight of Lieutenant Commander Shigeharu Murata’s torpedo bombers targeted the west side of Pearl Harbor, while the other headed for ‘Battleship Row’, where Arizona, California, Vestal, Maryland, Nevada, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia were anchored.
Adone Calderone was having breakfast on West Virginia when an 848-kilogram torpedo struck the forward ammunition magazine at 8.01am.
“We were sitting there, having a cup of coffee, and pretty soon, wham!” he later recalled. Several more ‘whams’ followed as torpedoes struck the port side, ripping gaping wounds in the hull through which water gushed. Calderone was sent below into a compartment to help counterflood West Virginia to stop it capsizing. As he and six others worked to save the ship, the waters around them rose.
“I looked at that and said, ‘Well, this is it,’” said Calderone. “We were trapped.” Then one of the men remembered there was an air vent in the adjoining compartment that led to the top deck. Calderone swam through the long thin tube until, his lungs feeling as though they were about to burst, he reached the deck. He was greeted by a scene of devastation. “There was fire all over the place,” he recalled, as Japanese fighters “machine-gunned anything they could”.
aftermath of the attack. Only later would the true
death toll become apparent
West Virginia remained afloat, but the end of Arizona, anchored at quay F-7 on Battleship Row, was witnessed by Admiral Husband Kimmel as he arrived at his HQ at 8.10am. In mute horror he saw Arizona “lift out of the water, then sink back down – way down”, taking with it 1,177 of its 1,512-strong crew. A similar fate also befell Oklahoma, with the loss of a further 429 men.
At 8.40am, the second wave of Japanese aircraft neared Hawaii. The 54 horizontal bombers of Lieutenant Commander Shigekazu Shimazaki’s flight had in their sights the US airfields at Hickam, Kanehoe and Ford Island, while 78 dive bombers under the command of Lieutenant Commander Takashige Egusa began attacking what remained of the Pacific Fleet. The instructions for the 36 Zero fighters were to shoot up whatever they could at Kanehoe, Hickam, Ford Island, Wheeler Field and Bellows.
Although some of those on the ground bravely fought back (Guy Avery, an aviation machinist’s mate third class, recalls one man shooting down a Zero armed only with an automatic rifle), it was too late. At 9.55am, Lieutenant Saburo Shindo circled Pearl Harbor and radioed his assessment report to Commander Minoru Genda: “Inflicted much damage.”
A day of infamy
Of the 350 aircraft that attacked Pearl Harbor, just 29 failed to return, with the only other Japanese losses being one fleet and five midget submarines. Theeuphoria was the overriding emotion among the task force, but Mitsuo Fuchida told Admiral Chūichi Nagumo, commander of the First Air Fleet, that they should refuel and return to destroy the dockyards and fuel storage tanks.
during a ‘fireside chat’ on 9 December 1941 – one
day after the US declared war on Japan
Nagumo ignored the advice; at 1pm, he told the task force to turn “to the north at 26 knots”. at evening in Washington, President Roosevelt informed his cabinet that 18 vessels had been sunk, capsized or damaged, 188 aircraft destroyed, 2,403 people killed, and 1,178 wounded.
Furthermore, Japan had invaded Thailand and British Malaya and carried out a wave of deadly aerial attacks against Guam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore and Wake Island.
Late into the night, Roosevelt finetuned the speech he would make the next day to a joint session of the US Congress. He wanted to keep it short and to the point so that congress would back his declaration of war. The address lasted seven minutes, and it was broadcast live across the country. “Yesterday,” he began, “December 7th, 1941 –a date which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.”
In Pearl Harbor, Adone Calderone and his crewmates surveyed the wreck of West Virginia. One-hundred-andsix of their crewmates were dead, and the survivors were still in shock. But gradually the shock dissipated, to be replaced with anger. They would have their revenge against Japan. “We didn’t win at Pearl Harbor,” reflected Calderone, “but they didn’t win the war.”
Gavin Mortimer is a historian and author. His books include Guidance from the Greatest (Constable, 2020) and an upcoming biography of SAS founder David Stirling, due for publication in 2022
LISTEN
Writer Michael Goldfarb will be marking the 80th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks with a series of essays on BBC Radio 3 – Our Fathers’ War – starting on 29 November: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006x3hl