The Strongest Fortress in the World
Tokyo, Washington, and Pearl Harbor, March–July 1941
Japan made no secret of its intention to drive Western powers out of their Southeast Asia colonies—the U.S. Philippines, French Indochina, Dutch Indonesia, British Malaya and Hong Kong, and the many Pacific island territories held by the West. Less than a month after Pearl Harbor became home to the American Pacific Fleet in May 1940, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared the country’s hegemony over a regional “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” Pacific Asia to be ruled from Tokyo, in effect Japan’s version of the Third Reich. Japanese army leaders steadily beat the drum for war—with slogans echoing Germany’s in Europe, including “Asia for Asiatics.” Popular books depicted Japan emerging victorious following a quick war with the U.S. and British.
Feeling emboldened by the fall of Paris in June 1940, Japan moved to occupy northern French Indochina (today’s Vietnam and Laos, primarily). After America responded by further boosting its support for Nationalist forces in China and embargoing shipments of scrap metal to Japan, Japan answered by signing onto the Tripartite Pact in September with Germany and Italy. Dealing with this roiling political environment and gathering information through the veil of Magic—the unreliable intercepts, decryptions and translations of Japanese radio cable transmissions—the White House struggled through diplomacy, threat of military force, tightened trade sanctions, and aid to the Chinese to “quarantine” Japanese imperial aggression.
Not everyone in Japan’s leadership oligarchy favored war, but extremists held sway within the military, and few officers and government leaders would dare to show weakness in confronting the West. Those who merely questioned Japan’s outward imperialism were “berated as ‘pro-Western,’” remarked a Japanese admiral in later years. “People got away with the most irrational nonsense,” he found, “so long as it was in the name of the ‘Way of the Gods.’” Among Japanese naval officers, he said, “those men with any sense who couldn’t go along with all this god stuff . . . tended to keep quiet.” Those who didn’t risked assassination. Surprisingly in the dangerous and often violent atmosphere of military extremism and feeble civil authority, one of the Japanese navy’s earliest and loudest critics of possible war with the West became its chief architect: Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
As deputy naval ministry chief in 1939, Yamamoto voiced his opposition to aligning with Berlin. He thought such an alliance would prove a definitive step toward war with the United States and Great Britain, rather than a way to frighten the colonial powers out of Asia. And war, he stated, “would be a major calamity for the world, and for Japan it would mean, after several years of war [in China] already, acquiring yet another powerful enemy. . . . It is necessary therefore that both Japan and America should seek every means to avoid a direct clash, and Japan should under no circumstances conclude an alliance with Germany.” He had plenty of experience with the Westerners on which to base his views.
Yamamoto knew the United States and its navy better than almost any other Japanese navy officer. Fluent in English, he had studied for two years in the U.S. and served two terms in the 1920s as naval attaché at the Washington Embassy. He was also an adviser to the 1930 London Naval Conference, and understood the intermeshing of American and British naval power. Vivacious and charismatic, he was a rising star, at one point considered likely to be the next head of the powerful Navy Ministry.
Alarmed by his antiwar views, though, extremists set out to bring Yamamoto down. The self-proclaimed League of Diet Members Supporting the Prosecution of the Holy War, a clandestine cell known for dealing mercilessly with its opponents, warned him to resign or face death. Fearing for the life of his protégé, the then–navy minister, Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, sent Yamamoto to sea and safety in late August 1939. Yamamoto took command of the Combined Fleet, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s main fighting force. Fifty-five at the time, Admiral Yamamoto was relieved to escape the political machinations and violent rivalries that roiled Tokyo.
Subject to “direction” and “instruction” from the Navy Ministry, answerable only to the emperor, Admiral Yamamoto stood at the navy’s operational pinnacle. He delighted in writing exultant poetry in praise of emperor, nature, and navy. On New Year’s Day 1940, aboard his flagship, Nagato, he rhapsodized:
Today, as chief
Of the guardians of the seas
Of the land of the dawn,
I gaze up with awe
At the rising sun!
Japan’s rising sun now shone on a diminutive, round-faced, boyish-looking fleet commander in chief. Yamamoto had two great weaknesses: sweets and gambling. Once insistent that all navy officers remain in top physical shape, he allowed himself to go plump gorging on the Nagato pastry chef’s concoctions—the navy facing few of the severe food shortages afflicting ordinary citizens. Gambling was an even more persistent vice for the admiral. He could not resist a bet and played poker, bridge, whatever game of chance he could bet on, even when aboard the Nagato.
But Admiral Yamamoto was the son of a samurai and a proud, self-made graduate of the august Etajima, the Imperial Naval Academy. While studying at Etajima, he was inducted into the fanatical Black Dragon Society. The Kokuryūkai prided themselves as latter-day samurais, ultranationalists who cut a fingertip off as proof of lifelong fealty, under penalty of death, to the emperor’s unassailable divinity. His dedication to the emperor was total, and like all Japanese military officers, he longed for death to defend the glory of Tennō (the holy emperor). Tennō’s position placed him in the role of chief planner for a war he did not favor. But expected to lead the fight, he thought he understood his enemy’s vulnerability. The gambler now waged the greatest bet in his imperial land’s history, a recklessly all-in bet that he believed was the sole hand a weaker Japan held that could trump the U.S.’s overwhelming military and economic strength.
Yamamoto specialized in naval aviation. Japan traditionally prepared its navy for massed battle between great armadas close to its island home ports. He did not think that strategy would prevail in a war with the Western powers. Japan lacked the industrial capacity, the manpower, and the oil reserves necessary to draw the British and Americans into a war close enough to the island nation’s strengths for total victory. He proposed a radical change in military strategy: The country needed to project force into the enemies’ strongholds, firepower sufficient to cripple them at one blow. Only through stealth and surprise would such a strike be possible. On January 7, 1941, in his Nagato quarters, he wrote out on nine sheets of naval stationery his “Opinions on War Preparations.” Addressed to the current navy minister, Admiral Koshiro Oikawa, Yamamoto set an audacious target for the main surprise attack: the very heart of American power in the Pacific Ocean, four thousand miles from Tokyo—Pearl Harbor, home of the Pacific Fleet.
A single devastatingly cataclysmic blow would, he explained, destroy much of America’s Pacific Fleet and render its principal base inoperable, stopping the enemy from projecting force against Japan while the country solidified control over conquered territory, building an Asian fortress as impregnable as Germany’s in Europe. Most important, he wrote, if successful, the attack would deplete American will to fight a remote enemy “to such an extent that it cannot be recovered.” He admitted, “The operation is a gamble,” but he was a gambler who understood the value of preparation, bluffing, secrecy, shockingly unexpected tactics. Like all Etajima graduates, he studied closely Japan’s celebrated surprise assault on the Russian fleet, resulting in decisive victory at Port Arthur in 1904 and in the war. He knew his American enemy’s propensity to ignore danger, to underestimate the East, to lack discipline and resolve. A surprise attack, he wrote, “will be the most effective way of holding the U.S. Fleet in check because this is what they will least expect.”
He laid out plans for a combined massive aircraft carrier task force and submarine assault on Pearl Harbor, launched with simultaneous attacks on American and British forces and occupations of the Philippines, Singapore, and other Asia Pacific strongholds. “We should do our very best at the outset of a war with the U.S., and we should have a firm determination of deciding the fate of the war on its first day.” He planned for the war to be won before the enemy even knew it was at war. While Germany held U.S. and U.K. forces in check in the Atlantic, Japan could consolidate its sway over East Asia.
He concluded his long memorandum on preparations for the war with the request that when his responsibilities for organizing the attack were complete, he be relieved of overall command and placed in charge of an air fleet for the actual attack. He desired “to attack Pearl Harbor so that I may personally command that force . . . [and] so that I may be able to devote myself exclusively to my last duty to country.” He knew the attack was potentially a suicidal gamble for his nation. If that bet failed, he would die happily for Tennō, his emperor, his nation, and people’s gods.
The wheels of war began to grind forward. After initial resistance, Japan’s military set in motion planning, training, force assembly, weaponry development, and operational organization for the never-before-attempted task of sending an air, sea, and underwater armada in secrecy nearly four thousand miles across the open ocean to within two hundred miles of the enemy’s island citadel. On X-Day, the designation for the as-yet-not-finalized date for the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan would launch a spectacular and devastating surprise aerial attack on the enemy fleet and its aerial defense forces, supplemented by submarine attacks carried out inside the enemy harbor.
Although only the top navy heads knew about Yamamoto’s audacious plan, “rumors of war” were bouncing about Tokyo, according to U.S. ambassador Joseph Grew. He heard them “from many quarters, including a Japanese one.” He learned from another country’s diplomat that “the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack at Pearl Harbor.” He scoffed at the notion: In his diary, Grew discounted the plausibility of such an attack plan, which, he noted, “seemed fantastic.” He sent word about the rumor to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who in turn asked War secretary Stimson about the possibility.
Stimson consulted with George Marshall, the army chief of staff. Five thousand miles in the other direction from Pearl Harbor, Marshall worried about the risk of some kind of attack on Hawaii, but anticipated an attempted landing. He wrote his commanding general there, “if no serious harm is done us during the first six hours of known hostilities, thereafter the existing defenses would discourage an enemy against the hazard of an attack.” Hawaii, he concluded, could readily defend itself against amphibious assault. And he did not concern himself with aerial vulnerability, not against a military installation protected by three major airfields and hundreds of fighter aircraft.
Some two months later, he again reviewed Hawaii’s vulnerability to attack with a view toward possibly transferring Pacific Fleet warships over to Atlantic operations. Marshall remained adamant that the Pearl Harbor defenses were “impregnable.” In a memorandum prepared for Stimson, he insisted, “due to its fortification, its garrison, and its physical characteristics . . . [Oahu is] the strongest fortress in the world.” Plans were moving forward to bolster the island’s air strength with additional new and technologically advanced fighters, patrol planes, and B-17 bombers. Stimson showed Marshall’s memo to the president. Marshall concluded: “With this force available a major attack against Oahu is considered impracticable.” He was as overconfident about Pearl Harbor’s defenses as Yamamoto was about a single devastating blow depriving America of the means and will to fight back.
The pilots of those attacking fighters and bombers would need to know their target intimately when X-Day came. Already in December 1940, Magic intercepts indicated that the Japanese Consulate in Honolulu was “a hotbed of espionage,” according to Major General Charles D. Herron, army commanding general in charge of the Hawaiian district. Report after report went out from there to Tokyo identifying schedules and routines for the Pacific Fleet. With planning for the attack on Pearl Harbor moving ahead fast, the Japanese navy needed a more capable and expert eye on the scene in Oahu. In April 1941, Takeo Yoshikawa departed Japan. As he watched Mount Fuji fade into the distance, emotion welled up inside him. “I did not expect to return alive. . . ,” Yoshikawa thought. His life had been spent in preparation for this one mission.
Takeo Yoshikawa grew up the son of a small town police chief on the island of Shikoku, southeast of Tokyo. He recalled his childhood in a proud age of “manly virtues” when “the death of a young man in battle was still likened to the fall of the cherry blossom, which alone among the flowers drops to its death at the height of its vigor and beauty. . . .” He was a devotee of Bushido, “the unquestioning and absolute loyalty of the samurai” to the emperor. He swam miles daily offshore, practiced martial arts, enriched his mind, all in expectation of serving his emperor. He, too, joined the Kokuryūkai, chopping away a finger digit.
Graduating at the top of his Etajima class in 1933, Yoshikawa thought himself “the envy of my classmates” and “squarely on the road to professional advancement.” He served on ships, trained in submarine warfare, and flew with the elite naval aviation service. Then disaster struck. A stomach ailment forced him from active duty. Finally, in 1936, he retired. Within a year, the navy, knowing he had been learning English, asked him to return, to develop U.S. Navy fleet expertise on the American Desk in the Third Division of the Navy General Staff, the Imperial Navy’s intelligence service. Even then he believed that war with America was “inevitable.”
He pursued what he called “hard and thankless” work, a scholar’s toil, learning everything he could about the U.S. Navy. Yoshikawa scoured every article, news report, book, and briefing by Japanese diplomats and intelligence officers from all over the world—anything that could give him information about the U.S. Navy. “I knew,” he claimed, “. . . every U.S. man-of-war and aircraft by name, hull number, configuration, and technical characteristics. I knew, too, a great deal of information about the U.S. naval bases at Manila, Guam, and Pearl Harbor.” He could identify a ship in silhouette much the way a father could pick out his son from behind. He read The New York Times and other American publications’ military correspondents’ reports and every book by Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. “It is all there,” he said of American naval strategy and facts, “if you will only take the trouble to dig for it.” He pursued his intelligence studies for three long years on the American Desk “with single-minded determination,” until he was the Navy General Staff’s acknowledged American expert.
At the end of 1939, his chief called him into his office. “Yoshikawa,” he intoned, “you are ready now.” Hearing those words, he bowed—“and in my heart I rejoiced.” Before long he would be sent out as a field agent, a spy. He was appointed a junior diplomat in the foreign ministry and worked there each morning to establish his professional identity, then continued his U.S. Navy studies in the afternoon. Finally, his orders came. He would go to Honolulu, where he would spy on the American fleet and bases and report back what he learned there. His mission, said the chief at Naval Intelligence in dispatching him to Pearl Harbor, was to “report on the daily readiness of the American fleet and bases.” He said gravely, “I do not have to tell you the importance of the mission.”
“Hai,” Yoshikawa answered. His assent was “unquestioning. . . . My whole being was dedicated to the mission.”
Even as Yoshikawa’s liner steamed into Honolulu Harbor on March 27, 1941, details of Admiral Yamamoto’s attack plan were still being formulated. Yoshikawa didn’t know when or where the first attack would occur, but his training and experience told him that his assignment presaged war—likely before the end of the year.
His diplomatic passport gave his name as “Tadashi Morimura,” posted as vice consul general at the large Japanese Consulate in Honolulu. The twenty-seven-year-old chancellor met immediately with the forty-six-year-old consul general, Nagao Kita, who had arrived earlier that same month from Japan. The senior diplomat had close ties to the navy and knew about his new chancellor’s spy mission. Yoshikawa took immediately to the bluff Kita, a friendly widower who enjoyed golf, drinking, and carousing. Kita gave his young deputy plenty of cash and freedom to come and go as he pleased. As time went on and tensions mounted, the brash young spy’s presence seemed to unnerve him, but he made sure nothing held Yoshikawa back.
Almost from the moment he took up his Honolulu diplomatic post, Yoshikawa effaced the hardened graduate of Etajima and samurai to become somebody he would not have recognized as himself, an alter ego he sometimes referred to as “Bobby Make-Believe.” He no longer walked with the sharp stride of the Japanese naval officer. He showed up late for work or not at all. Sometimes he staggered back to the consulate compound drunk. Women spent the night in his quarters. At times he spoke so freely with the consul general that many among the shocked staffers questioned just who this “Morimura” was. But with Kita’s blessing, the hard-drinking, lazy, geisha-escorting vice consul went about his business largely unsuspected.
He moved quickly to his task. “Of most importance,” he was sure, “would be the number of ships present at Pearl Harbor at any given time; the number of aircraft present at the airports in the main Hawaiian islands and their dispersal patterns; naval sortie and movement patterns from Pearl; air defense readiness; and reconnaissance activities and security measures mounted against attack.”
His diplomatic status amid the large Japanese and Japanese-American population—eighty-three thousand in Oahu alone and nearly that many more scattered among the other islands—made it easy for him to move about unnoticed. Most days he walked in from his apartment on the grounds to spend a couple hours scribbling notes at his desk outside the consul general’s office. He listened to the local radio and read the newspapers, which reported daily on ships in port and other local military activities. Then he strolled out to the taxi he kept on call. The driver pulled up, sometimes with one or two tittering geishas seated in back. And Deputy Consul Morimura disappeared.
He worked strictly alone. Never able to “find anyone whom I could trust sufficiently,” he shared nothing about his mission with others, except for Kita.
He rented small planes to fly over the islands and from a distance could make out the hangar and airstrip configurations at Hickam and Wheeler army airfields. He walked nearly every day through Pearl City to the end of the peninsula. From there he could survey the Pearl Harbor basin and ship moorings, berths for the hundred-vessel Pacific Fleet scattered among the lochs, Battleship Row and docks, as well as the dry docks, munitions house, oil tanks, and other facilities. He could watch Ford Island, the naval air installation in the middle of the Pearl Harbor basin.
Buzzing off Ford Island’s airstrip and the Pearl Harbor waters were reconnaissance planes of Patrol Wing 2, mostly PBY flying boats that pushed off the aprons for water takeoffs. Inland the Army’s Wheeler and Hickam airfields together were home bases to 233 fighter planes, P-36s and P-40s, with 21 new B-17 bombers scheduled to arrive soon from Boeing’s assembly plant in Seattle. These aircraft formed a daunting Pacific Ocean spearhead of the American military more than two thousand miles from the nation’s West Coast. Who would dare approach such a massed force?
From vantage points around Oahu, Yoshikawa watched the incoming and outgoing reconnaissance flights pass overhead and noticed that they almost never flew north. Later stories about Japan’s master spy on Oahu claimed he even swam at night into Pearl Harbor itself, using a breathing straw to avoid detection while passing among the carriers and battleships of the Pacific Fleet, testing the basin bottom, searching for torpedo screens. Seeing that Ford Island protected Battleship Row from torpedo attack, he sent word that bombs and torpedoes would both be necessary to hit ships at Pearl. He noted the regularity with which the ships moved in and out of port and how most boats in the fleet tied in routinely for the weekend. Routine left the ships vulnerable.
Yoshikawa went on long ocean swims. His Shikoku Island boyhood came in handy as he swam for miles outside the breakers beyond Oahu’s rugged shoreline. A speck rising and falling on the shimmering swell, he observed the shore batteries and watch posts otherwise not visible to him. He made note of underwater obstructions, tracked tides, measured how far out the shelf around the island dropped away. He took glass-bottom boat tours of Kāneʻohe Bay on the other side of Oahu to determine whether the U.S. might use it as a secondary anchorage; it was, he saw, not deep enough.
Asked by Tokyo to find out whether the navy blocked the entrance to Pearl Harbor with antisubmarine nets, he disguised himself as a laborer—unshaven, barefoot, and in an Aloha shirt—and tried to walk out to the harbor entrance. Sentries turned him back, one even leveling a gun at him, but looking from afar he guessed, wrongly, that the Americans left the mouth wide open. He tried to have his taxi driver enter Hickham Field but, lacking proper identification on the car, they were turned back. He never photographed and rarely sketched what he saw, storing details safely in memory to write out when he got back to the consulate.
“The key information” Yoshikawa wanted were potential targets, “always the number and type of ships present at Pearl Harbor and the number and type of aircraft present at the various island airfields. . . .” That information provided a valuable supplement, confirming information gathered by Tokyo’s many listening posts, which picked up nearly all American radio traffic in the Pacific.
Each week he hiked the Aiea Heights and Tantalus Mountain above Honolulu. From those high vantage points he could spend hours watching the fleet ships sortie from Pearl Harbor, like fish in a bowl, and see how aircraft flew in and out of Ford Island and the timing of their reconnaissance flights. Most days ended at the Shuncho-Ro Teahouse in Alewa Heights below Aiea. He insisted on the upstairs room with the owner’s convenient telescope that gave him a view of the brightly illuminated harbor. The geishas who worked there entertained American military personnel regularly and, with his clever prodding, would unknowingly gossip about the men they met, accidentally dropping bits of useful information.
Many nights, the friendly Japanese owner would let her regular patron simply stretch out on a mat to sleep off the evening’s effects. Left alone in his watchtower, he thought the blazing lights of the harbor “a magnificent sight indeed.” At dawn he watched first-light sorties, gathering “much useful information on ships present and deployment patterns,” he later commented.
Back at the consulate the walking encyclopedia of the Pacific Fleet crafted his observations into reports. Week after week the code clerk prepared the cables in J-19 cipher, which went out under Kita’s diplomatic imprimatur through a commercial radio operator in town to Tokyo. They were confident that their elaborate and changing codes kept their messages secret.
One U.S. Army intelligence official later lamented that “all hands knew that espionage was going on” through the consulate. Military watchers assigned to the consulate even knew about Morimura’s daily taxi excursions. The officer later complained, “He went all over the goddamn place.” He could do nothing about it. His orders were not to stop him. The War Department expressly forbade anything that might further poison already toxic relations with the Japanese. Nobody wanted to strike the match that lit the bonfire of war.
The FBI Honolulu bureau chief, Robert L. Shivers, did not face such strictures. He considered the two-hundred-plus consular agents “definitely a source of potential danger.” Bureau headquarters in Washington sent him instructions “to conduct very thorough, complete investigations of all the Japanese consular agents.” He assigned five field agents to the task. He personally questioned Kita and Morimura several times at the consulate.
“Go ahead, Mr. Kita, cruise around the island and see what you can see,” Shivers mocked after hours on a visit to the consul general’s office.
“Oh, no,” Kita replied with a Cheshire cat grin. “Then you would follow me and chase me.” Shivers did not know that Kita was not the one whose cruising around the island he should have stopped.
Spies and war warnings were far from the mind of an eight-year-old tomboy living smack in the middle of Pearl Harbor. Charlotte Coe, her five-year-old brother, Chuckie, and about a dozen other “Navy Juniors” made the northern end of Ford Island their seaside playground. “We felt free as birds,” she said. Charlotte’s family had lived on Ford Island since November 1940. Her father, Lieutenant Commander Charles F. Coe, a navy pilot, served as operations and plans officer, number three in the chain of command for the Naval Air Station’s flight group, Patrol Wing 2. He came to Ford Island as part of the previous year’s transfer of the Pacific Fleet to Honolulu. The commanding officer, Admiral Patrick N. L. Bellinger, lived next door to the Coes’ house, one of the nineteen plantation-style bungalows in the loop of married officers’ housing known as Nob Hill.
Charlotte and Chuckie went to school on Ford Island, took a ferry to shop in town, and otherwise ran free—outside the restricted airstrip in the center of the island. From their house’s water-facing veranda, the Coes overlooked the East and Southeast Lochs toward the pineapple groves and cane fields around Pearl City and up the lush green flanks of the Aiea Heights beyond. Closer across the lochs’ oily green waters was the Navy Yard, with its piers and dry docks and prehistoric birdlike cranes, storage yards, munitions house, and oil tank farm. Mostly what they saw were ships: Less than two hundred yards away, the hulls of the USS Arizona, Nevada, and Oklahoma rose up high and pitched like gray cliff faces out of the still water. The children lived so near those ships that evenings while lying in bed, Charlotte could hear voices from movies the sailors were watching on the main decks.
When officers off the ships ferried by gig to shore, Charlotte and her flock of friends rushed out the long pier off Nob Hill to meet them. Walking onto Ford Island often represented the officers’ first steps on dry land, sometimes after weeks at sea—and often after months away from their mainland homes and families. The children swarmed them like raucous seabirds.
“They missed their own families,” the skinny, freckled Charlotte realized. The long-serving officers delighted to hear the laughter of children again. When he returned from cruises, Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, commander of the Pacific Fleet battleship force, had his steward hand out matchbooks with covers emblazoned with his flagship Arizona’s insignia to the waiting children. With his lantern jaw, cleft chin, and steely look, Kidd appeared intimidating, but when he stopped in to see Charlotte’s father at their house, his face lit up at the sight of Charlotte and Chuckie. The little girl kept the Arizona matches he gave her with the other “ships” in her “fleet.”
Then the children raced off. One of their favorite places to play lay beneath Admiral Bellinger’s house, Quarters K, at the head of the loop. Built on a small rise, the commandant’s house next door to the Coes’ place sat atop a former artillery battery emplacement dug into the rise. The big underground chamber had a wide opening facing the harbor and concrete-lined interior rooms where shells and gunpowder had once been kept behind barred gates. Charlotte and her friends tried to scare each other inside the cool, dark fortification they called “Our Dungeon.” The “Dungeon” would one day save Charlotte’s life.
From Admiral Bellinger’s front door, they might spy the top of the USS Utah’s birdcage conning tower rising along the northwestern shore of the island. That was where the Utah moored when the big carriers were at sea. Her resident sailors did not think they were living in anything like an Aloha paradise. The Utah was once the pride of the U.S. Navy; today she was the butt of other gobs’ jokes. Her life began as the greatest of the Great White Fleet, one of the last dreadnoughts President Teddy Roosevelt had ordered up for his “Big Stick” Navy. Little more than a decade later, she was outmoded; then she became dispensable. The navy ordered her bombardment guns removed, turrets fixed in place; her once gleaming white hull was repainted in standard dark gray. With her former four stacks piped into a single funnel, outmoded birdcage conning tower, and untidy timber-shielded deck, she was not a pretty or tight ship.
The recommissioned Utah was now a floating bull’s-eye, a target under steam. Pilots and gunners for aircraft operating off carrier decks practiced bombing runs against her. Sandbags stuffed into the air vents and gangways shielded the 521 seamen when the heavy water and smoke bombs burst against the decks. When she wasn’t taking hits in target practice, antiaircraft trainees from other ships came on board to fire back blanks at the Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo planes and PBY seaplanes zooming in on her. While the sparring went on, belowdecks the sailor’s life was steamy, smelly, tedious, noisy, potentially dangerous, yet entirely routine aboard the superannuated battleship turned seagoing shooting range.
The crew was almost as motley as the ship. Most were reservists, barely having set their sea legs. Twenty-two-year-old Don Green of Burlington, Iowa, described himself as “a man of the land at sea by dislocation.” He had started at college and joined the navy reserves to supplement his income until his call-up. His darkly ironic sense of humor at finding himself in the middle of the Pacific sometimes went over the heads of what he called “the men of the sea by profession.” Green as Green was at sea; happily for him he was a former semipro baseball player and had been recruited to play first base for the USS Utah’s baseball team almost as soon as he stepped on board. The ball field on Ford Island was a relief from life aboard a floating dartboard.
Berthed close by, twenty-five-year-old John Vaessen was a shipyard worker and electrician from Sonoma, California, who joined the reserves, sending most of what he made home to his mother. When he was called up, several regulars assured him that a posting aboard the Utah was like winning the lottery. The ship never steamed too far from shore and never in foul weather, and people around the country paid to vacation in its Honolulu home port.
Reality fell well short of the imagined prize. With little money in their pockets, Vaessen and his shipmate friends found themselves unwelcome anywhere beyond Honolulu’s raucous and beery Hotel Street, with its bars, shooting galleries, and whorehouses. Sometimes the managers of the hotel bars and better restaurants would take one look at their navy whites and not even let them through the door. “People weren’t looking to serve you,” he found; “they were looking to turn you away.” And liberty ashore wasn’t so free in any case. The MPs were always ready to haul in men caught out late, too drunk to stagger back to base or ship, or too rowdy in uniform.
Pete Tomich, like most regulars aboard the Utah, wanted as little as possible to do with reservists like Vaessen and Green who now filled out the majority of the crew, just as they did on all the other ships scattered around Pearl. They were poorly trained, given too much responsibility too quickly, and had little sense of what it meant to be part of the United States Navy. At age forty-eight, Tomich was the ship’s chief water tender—its head plumber—in charge of the steaming, hissing hell of the boiler room, the ship’s fiery powerhouse. With no children and no kin in his adopted land, Austro-Hungarian immigrant Tomich called the navy his family, the Utah his home. The sweltering steel chamber encased deep in the Utah’s bowels that others saw as an inferno worthy of Dante was his life.