The U.S.S. Arizona.
High over the Pacific, Nagumo’s airmen winged their way toward the target. Lining the center of the formation, at about 9,800 feet, streaked ten triangles of high level bombers under Fuchida’s personal command. Flanking to port, at some 11,000 feet, sped Takahashi’s two groups of dive bombers. To starboard, Murata’s four groups of torpedo planes roared at around 9,200 feet. Covering the entire force, fore and aft at 14,100 feet, snarled Itaya’s fighters.
As daylight broke, the sun with its rays bore an almost theatrical semblance to the naval flag of Empire. Fuchida was so thrilled that he half stood up, as if to honor the beloved symbol. He looked behind him and saw his huge air armada following him in perfect formation, the sun flashing silver from its wings. For a full two or three minutes he watched the magnificent scene. O glorious dawn for Japan! he thought, in a surge of pride in his country, his men, and his mission.
His moment of drama over, Fuchida returned to business. It was now after 0700, and he tuned in to KGMB, directing his pilot to home in on this beam. As he sped through the slowly brightening sky, a thick mat of fleecy clouds, spread below at about 5,000 feet, screened his flight. In fact, the covering was a little too good. He might overfly Pearl Harbor, alerting all defenses without spotting his target, or even miss Oahu altogether.1
Had Fuchida been omniscient, he could have added another king-sized worry to the rest of his problems. As though reluctant to abandon the Americans without one more chance, even while the Navy fumbled the submarine contact, fate now gave the ball to the U.S. Army.
Located near Kahuku Point on the northern tip of Oahu at 230 feet above sea level, Opana Mobile Radar Station was generally conceded to be the best of these sites. At 0400 Privates Joseph L. Lockard and George E. Elliott went on duty. The more experienced of the two in the radar field, Lockard instructed Elliott in use of the oscilloscope. At 0700 Lockard began to shut down the unit because that hour spelled the end of their morning’s work.
Suddenly the oscilloscope picked up an image so peculiar that Lockard thought something must be wrong with the set, but a quick check proved otherwise. He took over from Elliott, deciding that “it must be a flight of some sort.”2 Elliott went to the plotting board. As of 0702, the flight appeared at 5 degrees northeast of azimuth at 132 miles. It was enormous, “probably more than 50” planes. Elliott suggested that they phone the reading to the Information Center. At first Lockard demurred because the normal operating hours had ended. But Elliott persisted. This would be a good test for the Information Center, being a nonscheduled exercise. Lockhard then told him to go ahead and send it in.3 This conversation covered seven or eight minutes, and the scope showed the blip about 20 to 25 miles nearer Oahu.
Elliott called the Information Center and reached Private Joseph McDonald, the switchboard operator. Thinking that he was alone, the Information Center personnel having gone off duty, McDonald took the message. As he glanced around to check the time, he spotted Lieutenant Kermit Tyler, the pursuit officer and assistant to the controller on duty that morning.4
Tyler had pulled his first tour of duty as a pursuit officer on Wednesday, December 3—his only on-the-job experience before December 7. The duties of a pursuit officer were “to assist the Controller in ordering planes to intercept enemy planes or supposed enemy planes, after the planes got in the air.”5
Located at Fort Shafter, the Information Center lay several miles east of Pearl Harbor and about thirty miles south of the Opana Station. During duty hours a group of plotters stood around a large table, marking on the map information telephoned from the various radar stations. But they recorded only the position of the plane or planes picked up on the radarscope. They had no way of distinguishing friend from foe. The controller and pursuit officer on duty could look down upon these activities from a large balcony at second-floor level.6
On this fateful morning, however, neither the controller nor the aircraft identification officer was on hand. Tyler began duty at 0400 with “seven or eight enlisted men.” But at 0700 on the dot, the plotters “folded up their equipment and left.” Thus, when Elliott’s call came in, the only individuals still present in the Information Center were Tyler and McDonald.7
Impressed by Elliott’s report, McDonald suggested that Tyler take the phone. This time Lockard spoke with him. He gave Tyler “all the information that we had—the direction, the mileage, and the apparent size of whatever it was. . . .” Tyler remembered that Lockard called the blips “the biggest sightings he had ever seen.”8
It never crossed Tyler’s mind that this incoming flight could be enemy aircraft. It could have been planes from a Navy carrier. But almost immediately the report rang a bell in his memory. On the way to the Information Center that morning he had listened to some Hawaiian music. Tyler recalled that according to a bomber pilot friend, the station played this music all night whenever B-17s flew from the mainland to Hawaii, acting as a beam for the navigators.
So Tyler felt sure that Opana had picked up a flight of the big bombers. His first reaction was one of relief that the Flying Fortresses were coming from the right direction. In one respect Tyler was perfectly correct: Landon’s flight from California was approaching rapidly about 5 degrees off the Opana sighting. Of course, for security reasons Tyler could not explain his belief to Lockard and Elliott, so he merely replied, “Well, don’t worry about it.”9
This was about 0720. At this point the Opana scope showed Fuchida’s first wave bearing 3 degrees, 74 miles away. Once more Lockard wanted to shut down, but Elliott insisted that they continue. So they kept on observing, posting their findings to an overlay chart and keeping a running log, until they lost the blips “due to distortion from a back wave from the mountains. . . .” At 0739 they made the last report of this particular sighting as 41 degrees, 20 miles.10
Lockard made one big mistake: He did not tell Tyler that the sighting contained more than fifty planes.11 If he had, Tyler could scarcely have mistaken it for a flight of B-17s. Such a number would represent a good slice of the entire American inventory of this type of bomber.
Technically speaking, Tyler erred in not telephoning Major Kenneth P. Bergquist, operations officer of the Fourteenth Pursuit Wing. But from the practical standpoint, it made little real difference. Because of Short’s Alert No. 1, an alarm at this stage would have meant exactly the chance given by Ward’s submarine contact and no more—an opportunity to disperse planes, to break out ammunition, and move up to No. 2 or 3 alerts. Neither at the time nor later in the day did anyone in the Army notify the Navy of the Opana sighting. This was a serious error because this clear track would at least have revealed the direction of the Japanese carriers and saved the Navy’s later searchers a long, weary wild goose chase.12
While these events took place on land, destiny continued to play cat-and-mouse with the United States at sea. At 0703—exactly one minute after Fuchida’s air flotilla appeared on the Opana screen—Ward “established sound contact on enemy submarine.” The destroyer dropped more of her “ash cans” and at 0706 “sighted black oil bubble 300 yards astern.”13 Outerbridge was certainly proving his right to the proud title of destroyer captain.
At this moment Fuchida’s pilot was actually homing in on the same continuous stream of languorous Hawaiian tunes which guided Landon’s B-17s. Meanwhile, the reconnaissance plane from Chikuma hovered over Pearl Harbor, and the pilot sized up the terrain below. Oahu could not have presented a more peaceful, harmless appearance. At precisely 0735, satisfied that he had absorbed all he could, he relayed his information: “Enemy formation at anchor; nine battleships, one heavy cruiser, six light cruisers are in the harbor.” Three minutes later he sent off to Nagumo an on-the-spot description of the meteorological conditions over Pearl Harbor: “Wind direction from 80 degrees, speed 14 meters, clearance over enemy fleet 1700 meters, cloud density 7.” His mission fulfilled, he banked his aircraft gracefully and set out to rejoin the First Air Fleet.
Immediately following this message came less palatable news from the Tone patrol. The pilot confirmed the previous day’s observations. “The enemy Fleet is not in Lahaina Anchorage,” he reported. This disposed once and for all of the Japanese hope of trapping the American warships in Lahaina’s deep waters. The alternative plans Genda and Fuchida had so painstakingly worked up and reviewed at Hitokappu Bay could be ruled out. Fuchida and his airmen could concentrate exclusively on Pearl Harbor. His mission over Lahaina completed, the scout combed a wide stretch of sea south of Pearl Harbor in a venturesome effort to gain some news of the undiscovered American flattops.14 But the search did not go far enough to discover Enterprise some 200 miles at sea to the west.
At precisely 0733 RCA in Honolulu received Marshall’s warning message from Washington. It was already three minutes past the deadline hour of 1300 Eastern Standard Time. Fuchida’s first wave had reached a point exactly 15 degrees, 35 miles from the Opana Radar Station. The message found its way into a pigeonhole marked for Kahili, the district which included Fort Shafter. RCA messenger boy Tadao Fuchikami picked it up along with the rest of the cables in the Kahili slot. It was not marked priority, nor did anything in its appearance indicate it to be out of the ordinary. Messages in hand, Fuchikami mounted his motorcycle and roared on his way.15
By this time 1300 in Washington had come and gone, and the Japanese Embassy still struggled valiantly with the fourteen-part message. By 1230 it had decoded Part 14, but Okumura had not yet finished his clean copy of the remainder. Ready to leave for his appointment, Nomura “impatiently peeked into the office where the typing was being done, hurrying the men at work.” Perhaps no one but a hunt-and-peck typist with an ambassador breathing down his neck could fully appreciate Okumura’s sensations. It soon became evident that the deadline would overtake the typing, so Nomura requested and received an extension from Hull.16
Over the Pacific, Fuchida peered intently through his high-powered binoculars.17 By now he should be within sighting distance of Oahu. As his eyes followed a pointing sunbeam through a chink in the clouds, he ejected a sharp “Ha!” of gratification. There it was—foam-fringed, lushly green, its gray-purple mountains wreathed in ghostly mists: a breathtaking sight in the morning sun. “This is the north point of Oahu,” Fuchida told his pilot. As they sped onward, Fuchida gave the order Tenkai (“Take attack position”) and instructed Mutsuzaki to watch out for enemy interceptors. So suddenly had they reached the island that each group barely had time to deploy. Fuchida picked up his rocket pistol. Until this moment matters had gone almost uncannily well for the Japanese. By the law of averages it was long past time for something to go wrong. Oddly enough, none other than the careful Takahashi, leader of the dive bombers, “goofed.”
According to plan, one flare from Fuchida’s rocket pistol would signal that surprise had been achieved, while two flares at two- or three-second intervals would indicate that the enemy was alert. At a single flare Murata’s torpedomen would start their downward glide, while Itaya’s fighters dashed ahead to seize control of the air. The slow torpedo bombers thus would have a clear path to their targets. The dive and high-level bombers would follow quickly. But if the Japanese faced an alert enemy, the torpedomen would wait until the dive and high-level bombers had diverted the attention of American gunners to the skies above the battleships, Then with the help of the fighters, the torpedomen would launch their deadly fish.
At 0740, assured of surprise, Fuchida fired a single shot. Then he noted that Lieutenant Masaharu Suganami, one of the fighter group leaders, must have failed to observe the signal because his planes did not take their proper formation. Therefore, after waiting for about ten seconds, Fuchida fired another rocket to alert Suganami. Takahashi saw this second shot. Misjudging the time interval between flares, he took it for the double signal and swooped down immediately with his dive bombers for the attack run on Ford Island and Hickam Field. Murata saw what had happened. Although he knew that Takahashi had erred, he had no choice but to lead his torpedomen to the target as quickly as possible. However, Takahashi was well on his way. Thus, it happened that bombs instead of torpedoes struck the initial blow.
Fuchida fairly ground his teeth in angry frustration as the precise tactical plan he, Genda, and Murata had so painstakingly worked out shattered against that unpredictable element—the human equation. But he soon saw that the order in which they attacked mattered little. The fact of success was assured; the only remaining consideration was its degree. At that moment Fuchida could look down the valley toward Pearl Harbor as if sighting along a gun barrel. As he did so, the fluffy morning clouds parted like stage curtains. Fuchida adjusted his binoculars. Caught in the circle of his vision lay the full power and glory of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
What a majestic sight! he thought. Almost unbelievable! He counted seven battleships at their moorings. The scout plane, as well as the consulate, had reported nine. Where were the other two? Actually eight battlewagons were in Pearl Harbor. Fuchida did not see Pennsylvania in drydock, and the Chikuma scout, like Yoshikawa, had counted the target ship Utah as a battleship. Fuchida experienced one pang of disappointment. He had been hoping against hope that the early-morning report might be mistaken, that Kimmel’s carriers would be in Pearl Harbor. But they were not.
At a point somewhat off Lahilahi Point, at 0749 Fuchida arrived at zero hour. With chills chasing each other up and down his spine, he gave Mutsuzaki the attack signal, To, to, to, the first syllable of totsugekiseyo (charge). Then he ordered the radioman to rap out the order for all pilots. Aboard Nagato in the Inland Sea, a staff officer burst into Ugaki’s cabin with the news, and Yamamoto’s chief of staff bounded for the Operations Room.18
Fuchida’s radio was still clicking when the first wave broke into its component parts. Fuchida swung around Barber’s Point, and sure beyond all possible doubt that they had indeed achieved maximum strategic surprise, at 0753 he sang out, “Tora! Tora! Tora!” (“Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!”)—the code words which told the entire Japanese Navy that they had caught the Pacific Fleet unawares.19
Aboard Akagi, Kusaka was not in the least ashamed of the tears which coursed down his wind-burned cheeks, impassive Zen Buddhist though he was. Nagumo could not have uttered a word had life and honor depended on it. Incredibly, miraculously, they had brought off Yamamoto’s madcap venture! With silent instinct, each man stretched out his hand to the other, and in their eyes were all the words they could not speak.20
The U.S.S. Arizona.
The U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor after the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941 (Official U.S. Navy Photo).
Capt. Kanji Ogawa, Asst. Chief, 3rd Bureau, Naval General Staff.
RADM Minoru Maeda, Chief, 3rd Bureau, Naval General Staff.
Lt. Cmdr. Itaru Tachibana, Intelligence Officer, 3rd Bureau, Naval General Staff.
Takeo Yoshikawa, Chancellor, Honolulu consulate.
Nagao Kita, Consul General at Honolulu.
Lt. Cmdr. Alwin D. Kramer, Translation Section, Communications Division, Navy Department.
Robert L. Shivers, Special Agent in Charge, FBI, Honolulu.
Cmdr. Laurence F. Safford, Chief, Security Section, Communications Division, Navy Department.
Lt. Col. George W. Bicknell, Asst. G-2, Hawaiian Department, and Special Envoy Saburo Kurusu.
Members and staff of the Navy Court of Inquiry, July 24 to October 19, 1944. (Slinkman Studio).
Members and staff of the Army Pearl Harbor Board, July 20 to October 20, 1944.
His Imperial Majesty Hirohito, Emperor of Japan, March 30, 1936, in coronation robes (Wide World Photos).
General Hideki Tojo, War Minister, Konoye Cabinet; Premier, October 18, 1941.
Kichisaburo Nomura, Japanese Ambassador to the U.S. (left), with Secretary of State Cordell Hull (center) and Saburo Kurusu, Japan’s special envoy for a “final attempt at peace,” arriving at the White House on November 17, 1941 (United Press International Photo).