Strangely enough, many citizens of Honolulu remained unaware of the true state of affairs for at least an hour after the attack began. Accustomed to the roar of aircraft and explosions from Army and Navy exercises, they accepted the fearful racket as no more than unusually realistic maneuvers. The radio warnings were not specific enough to spell out the situation for the average civilian. Then, on the 0900 broadcast from KGMB, Webley Edwards had a flash of inspiration. He added to his formal announcement, “This is the real McCoy,” and the simple phrase carried conviction.1
Almost immediately a whole folklore centering on Hawaii’s Japanese sprang up like a crop of toadstools from the fertile soil of suspicion and hysteria. Even Kimmel succumbed to the atmosphere. “The Fifth Column activities added great confusion and it was most difficult to evaluate reports received . . .,” he wrote to Stark on December 12.2 The fact is, the Navy, the Army, and civilian Oahu did not need any fifth-column help to generate a state of confusion.
According to one tale, Japanese plantation laborers cut arrows in the cane fields, directing the attacking force to Pearl Harbor—a singularly illogical rumor. Missing Pearl Harbor from the air over Oahu would be like overlooking a bass drum in a telephone booth. The most troublesome fable—that the Japanese had poisoned the drinking water—may have originated on Ford Island. The pipeline there being out of commission, a resourceful supply officer took over the installation’s three swimming pools as emergency reservoirs. Of course, this water had to be boiled. “All such rumors and reports were checked as expeditiously as possible. None of the cases investigated proved to be authentic.”3
One of the Star-Bulletin’s reporters of Japanese ancestry “begged . . . to be allowed to go out on the street and cover the news.” Riley H. Allen, the editor, feared that the young man “might be shot or locked up.” Then Allen “finally decided that we would send him out to the Japanese consul and bring back what news he might find there.”4 This reporter probably was Lawrence Nakatsuka, who dropped by the consulate that morning in search of a story.
Like so many others on Oahu, the consulate’s members had anticipated a leisurely Sunday. Kita and Okuda had an engagement to play golf with a friend. At about 0900 Kotoshirodo, hearing the distant thundering, walked the short distance from his abode to the consulate “to find out what all the commotion was about.” He discovered Kita, Okuda, and others of the staff already assembled, looking worried. Yoshikawa appeared shortly, in shirt sleeves, hair mussed and clothes wrinkled. He remarked that it was a “noisy morning.” He wanted to go up to the heights to see what was happening, but Kita forbade him to leave.5
Kita refused to admit to Nakatsuka that a Japanese attack was in progress, let alone make a statement about it. The reporter hurried back to his office for a copy of the day’s extra and brought it to Kita as evidence. The blazing headline WAR! OAHU BOMBED BY JAPANESE PLANES was Yoshikawa’s signal for action. He and Tsukikawa dashed for the code room, where they began to burn material furiously.6
After leaving Short’s headquarters, Bicknell arrived at his office downtown, where he found his people issuing ammunition and small arms. Shivers was there, astonished and “scared all the way through,” like almost everyone else. He and Bicknell wanted to pick up Japanese suspects immediately but were unable to do so because the provost marshal could not provide the necessary trucks and MP guards. This delayed the plan for several hours. “Bob Shivers and I were running around like two wild Indian dogs,” Bicknell recalled.7
At about 1000 or 1100 Shivers asked Police Chief Gabrielson to put a guard around the consulate “for the protection of the consul general and the members of his staff and the consular property.”8 Gabrielson turned the assignment over to Captain of Detectives Benjamin Van Kuren and Lieutenant Yoshio Hasegawa. When they and a few colleagues arrived at the consulate, they found uniformed police officers with sawed-off shotguns already on guard. Kita stood in the driveway at the rear of the building, holding the Star-Bulletin extra.9
Van Kuren and his men trooped in through the back entrance. In the code room the police “found a wash tub on the floor” in which the Japanese were burning documents. The police also salvaged a brown “bellows type envelope” full of undestroyed papers. They brought their find to the FBI, which in turn gave it to Naval Intelligence for Rochefort to work on. Sometime that morning Bicknell went to RCA and commandeered the file of messages which the consulate had sent to and received from Japan.10
In the midst of all the drama at the consulate Mikami drove up in his taxi as arranged to take Kita and Okuda to the golf course—a supreme example of the business-as-usual mentality. He asked the guard to tell Okuda he had arrived. Gentleman to the last, the vice consul sent word not to wait; he “probably would be unable to play golf that day.”11
In the anchorage, oil oozing out of damaged vessels had caught fire, and the whole area around Battleship Row was aflame. “One of the most terrifying sights that day,” said Train, “was to see those burning waters move down the channel and go out with the tide. It was ghostly, eerie, threatening and dangerous. And worst of all, there was nothing to put it out with.”12 So menacing did the burning oil become around California that at 1015 her skipper, Captain J. W. Bunkley, with Pye’s approval, ordered Abandon Ship. But shortly afterward, when the fires cleared the vessel, Bunkley canceled the order.13 Nevertheless, California had become unsuitable as a headquarters, so Pye removed himself and his staff and reported to Kimmel’s office. The CinCUS reassured both them and himself: “I need you men.” Though badly shaken by his terrible ordeal, Kimmel thought only of striking back against the Japanese.14
On and off ship survivors fought the fires valiantly. Tennessee’s crew tried to move her away from Arizona, but the ship did not budge. Apparently West Virginia had wedged her close to the quays. For the rest of the day and night Tennessee kept her engines turning “in order that the screw current could wash the burning oil from the stern. . . .”15
Fire engulfed West Virginia except for a small area forward. Some survivors of the battleship crossed to Tennessee, using a 5-inch gun as a bridge. Alongside, the garbage scow YG-17 played her powerful hoses on West Virginia until the fires came under control16—a lowly scullery maid protecting a beleaguered queen.
Rescue crews swarmed over Utah and Oklahoma, cutting through the hulls, following the faint taps from inside as trapped crewmen pounded against the bulkheads. Not until Monday afternoon did Thesman and his men scramble out of Oklahoma. “It was a deep, powerful feeling . . .” he said, “like being dug up out of your own grave.”17
A burning passion consumed the Americans to ferret out the enemy’s flattops and exact a grim payment for the blood spilled this Sunday morning. But the hand of fate seemed to hover protectingly over Nagumo’s task force. At first the defenders had no idea whatever whence the attack came. Soon, however, Kimmel’s instinct told him that the enemy ships lay northward. At 1018 he advised his forces at sea: “Search from Pearl very limited account maximum twelve VP searching from Pearl. Some indication enemy force northwest Oahu. Addressees operate as directed Comtaskforce Eight to intercept enemy. Composition enemy force unknown.”18
A Japanese submarine intercepted this message and sent it to the task force. Aboard Akigumo Chigusa noted in his diary, “Looks like enemy might catch us.” But the Americans did not pursue this potentially profitable line of thought. From a direction finder at Heeia, Rochefort learned that the Japanese commander “bore either 357 or 178.” This indicated the attackers lay north or south—the readings would be the same for either direction—and “through a limitation of aircraft operations he could be expected to be within 200 miles.”19
McMorris’s War Plans Division was “inclined strongly to believe that the attack had come from both the northward and the southward. . . .” Because the American carriers at sea were “already in the southward area,” War Plans “felt that the chance of intercepting the northern route was probably quite remote, while the chance of intercepting the southern route looked, at least, to hold some promise. . . .”20 A mental flip of the coin landed on the wrong side. At 1046 Kimmel notified Halsey’s Task Force Eight, “D/F [direction finder] bearings indicate enemy carrier bearing 178 from Barbers Point.”21
When Coe reached his office on Ford Island, Ramsey told him “to get on the operational telephone, call Army Air, and find out where the hell the Japanese planes were coming from and try to get any other information” he could. Coe did his best, but everything was chaos, confusion, and demoralization at the time. “Lines were not manned,” he said, “and I could not get through to anybody.” Even had they found Nagumo’s carriers, they could not have done much about it. “We were simply not in a position to retaliate,” said Coe.22
Other arrows pointed northward. When Landon was bringing in his B-17 that morning, he noticed some of the Japanese planes winging away in that direction. After he reported to Hawaiian Air Force Headquarters, he tried to interest someone in his information, but it seemed to him that nearly everyone was more preoccupied with fitting liners into their helmets in anticipation of another attack than in locating the task force and hitting it before it could launch further strikes.23
The Opana Station plotted a clear northbound track, which the radar control center at Fort Shafter recorded at 1027 and 1029. But according to Martin, “there was no indication of that course being an important one at that time.” In fact, no one brought it to his attention “until they analyzed the history of the control chart” sometime later.24 Kimmel testified that because of the Army’s failure to inform the Navy of this intelligence, “the surface naval operations which ensued took a westerly direction with their aircraft scouting largely to the southwest. . . .”25
By 1127 Martin had four of Hickam’s A-20 bombers ready for takeoff. The Navy had no instructions for them, so Martin gave them the “mission of trying to find the carrier that was south of Barbers Point.”26 There was indeed a large vessel in that location, but it was the heavy cruiser Minneapolis, on her way home from the Fleet operating area.27 Her skipper instructed his radio room to advise Kimmel, “No carriers in sight,” but somehow it came out “Two carriers in sight.” Luckily the pilots heading toward her recognized Minneapolis.28
Another United States cruiser had a narrow escape that afternoon. The commander of “a squadron of seaplanes returned from Midway” reported a Japanese carrier and destroyer “well south of Pearl Harbor.” Examined by virtually every member of Kimmel’s staff, the pilot insisted that “he knew it was a Japanese carrier because he saw the Rising Sun painted on her deck.” What is more, she “had the plan of a heavy cruiser painted on her deck as camouflage.” The location being almost exactly that of Brown’s task force, CinCPAC immediately directed Brown “to get the carrier.” Brown replied that he believed his own cruiser Portland had been bombed. Scarcely able to credit this, headquarters radioed Portland: “Were you bombed this afternoon?” Back came the reply: “Yes, a plane dropped two bombs narrowly missing me astern.”29
When Allen finally lifted his B-17 off the runway at Hickam, he, too, followed official intelligence and headed south, despite his private conviction that his prey lay northward. In due course he sighted “this beautiful carrier,” which fired on him. So he went into a bomb run. But suddenly, in Allen’s words, “God had a hand on me because I knew this was not a Jap carrier.” He had spotted Enterprise. Allen pulled out of range and decided to try the northern direction; however, he had no luck. Then be turned back southward. Once more he saw Enterprise, now much nearer to Oahu, and two Navy Wildcat fighters looked him over suspiciously as he started back to Hickam.30 From the timing it appears that Allen’s initial swing south had been just long enough for Nagumo’s carriers to voyage beyond his reach.
Sometime after the first aerial hunting parties took off, the Hawaiian Air Force received a map recovered from the Japanese pilot shot down near Fort Kamehameha. “This map had approximately ten courses laid out on it to a point northwest of the Island of Oahu, which indicated that they either had left carriers there or expected to return to carriers in that direction. . . .” Accordingly Martin dispatched other planes northward in the afternoon. They, too, found nothing.31
The principal American effort for the remainder of the day was preparation to fend off another attack, particularly a follow-through amphibious landing. Oahu’s defenders could not imagine an aerial strike for its own sake and in effect were waiting for the enemy to drop the other shoe. Furthermore, in their eyes Fuchida’s fliers had left behind an amazing amount of unfinished business. Both Kimmel and Smith expected that all ships in the harbor would be destroyed and that “the naval base would go too.” But many of the ships were unscathed, the yards and docks relatively undamaged, and, above all, the tank farms intact.
Full of “fight and guts,” Kimmel began to pick up the pieces and prepare for all-out defense. He and his chief of staff feared that the Japanese might be landing on Oahu at the very time Fuchida’s planes blasted Pearl Harbor. Both officers, as well as other members of the staff, expected the Japanese to renew their attack and try to land into the bargain.32
One of the busiest men on Oahu was Mollison, working frantically to establish the Hawaiian Department’s emergency headquarters in Aliamanu Crater. Mollison called the job “a real backbreaker,” for the facility was rudimentary, being actually a series of old ammunition tunnels with neither housekeeping arrangements nor communications. Its condition stood as a silent witness to just how seriously the Army on Oahu took the necessity for an alternate headquarters. Mollison had to put his clutch into high gear to meet a 1430 deadline for occupancy.
He also felt responsible for Martin. The general lacked neither personal courage nor good sense; but his ulcer drained him of resistance, and the attack had shattered his morale. At about 1500 Martin turned to his chief of staff and stammered, “What am I going to do? I believe I am losing the power of decision.” Mollison then realized that his good chief had reached the end of his rope. Immediately he arranged for Martin’s admission to the Hickam Field hospital with orders that no one was to disturb him. But he had a private phone placed at Martin’s bedside so he could communicate with the general when conditions demanded.33
Curts soon recognized that one of the principal postattack problems was keeping down civilian hysteria in Honolulu. The city had been damaged by about forty hits from American guns which overshot their marks. Although only one Japanese bomb fell on the city, naturally the citizens believed themselves to be under direct enemy bombardment. Curts was seriously annoyed with the Honolulu radio stations. With the best of intentions, they were broadcasting a series of messages designed to instruct and calm the population but which had the opposite effect. Therefore, he phoned the stations to stop disrupting the populace and to “knock off the damned foolishness.”34
Shortly thereafter both KGU and KGMB went off the air, principally as a precaution against Japanese planes’ using their beams as homing devices. But the silence was almost worse than the news flashes. Now the noncombatants had no information at all. This was particularly tormenting for the service wives clinging to their radios as a connecting link, however thin, with their loved ones caught in the Pearl Harbor inferno.
Naval and military radios also helped spread alarm and dismay. False reports came in thick and fast: At 1133 the destroyer Sicard “observed another horizontal bombing raid.” The Japanese had long gone, so possibly the destroyer mistook Martin’s bombers heading out to scout as more enemy planes. Some chilling invasion reports began to pour in: “Enemy troops landing on north shore. Blue overalls with red emblems.” Later it developed that this rumor originated when the Japanese shot down a small training seaplane and the dungaree-clad mechanic aboard “dropped to safety.” Other frightening reports raced through message centers: “Parachutists are landing at Barber’s Point,” “Enemy transports reported four miles off Barbers Point,” “Parachute troops landing on North shore,” “Enemy sampan about to land at Naval ammunition Depot,” “Enemy landing party off shore Nanakuli. Friendly planes firing on them.”35
At Kaneohe, Beauty Martin, “anticipating a Jap landing party,” instructed each man “to bring two suits of whites to the mess hall to be dyed. There was no dye available but the uniforms were dipped in very strong, boiling hot coffee. They came out a dark brown.” Avery, for one, did not regret the loss of the coffee. The attack had a peculiar physiological effect on him. From Sunday morning until Thursday morning he neither slept nor took “a morsel of food, nor a drop of liquid of any kind,” yet he remained “alert and energetic.”36
On Ford Island white-faced wives and children of officers filled the Bellinger’s air-raid shelter, an abandoned gun emplacement. The thought nagged at Mrs. Bellinger: What if this caves in and we’re covered up? Will I be able to stand it?37
As soon as Colonel Dunlop could snatch a moment, he returned home to satisfy himself about the safety of his wife and his eighty-one-year-old mother-in-law, Mrs. Lucy Ord Mason, who resided with them. A living link with America’s past, she had lost her husband as a result of the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890. She refused point-blank to seek shelter in the basement. These young Japanese whippersnappers did not scare her, and she would not abandon her twelve canaries, which she loved dearly.
The inevitable touch of comedy which lurks around the corner from tragedy arose in the Dunlop household that morning. Mary Lee Henderson, attractive wife of Major Swede Henderson, slept through the entire attack. At about 1030 she dashed over to the Dunlops’ home and dumbfounded her neighbors by asking, “What has happened?”38
In a way, women such as Navy nurse Ruth Erickson who had specific duties cut out for them were better situated than the wives. The chief nurse worked out a schedule of rounds which sent Ruth off duty at 1600. Neither she nor many of her associates felt tired. “We were riding on nervous energy and wanted to keep right on going,” she emphasized39
In his report for the Navy’s surgeon general, Admiral McIntire, Fleet Surgeon Captain Elphege A. M. Gendreau paid tribute to the men and women of his command: “I can only say: ‘a hard job damned well done.’ As for morale: ‘God help the enemy!’” Then Gendreau expressed the eerie sense of unreality which so many had experienced that day: “I still expect to awaken from a bad dream or see the end of a war ‘movie.’”40
From the bridge of Argonne, flagship of the Service Force, moored at the edge of 1010 Dock, Quynn looked across the harbor, watching California sink steadily into the shallow waters. Thick black smoke engulfed the battleship like a shroud. Several tugs, puffing and blowing, pushed at her sides to keep her from capsizing. As the fitful wind blew the angry clouds of smoke, Quynn caught a glimpse of the Stars and Stripes still fluttering gallantly from California’s stern. Quynn did not leave his post for seventy-two hours. Throughout that time he took courage and resolution from the sight of his country’s banner—“proof through the night that our flag was still there.”41
Caught in the grandfather of all traffic jams and held up by roadblocks, RCA messenger Fuchikami could not deliver until 1145 Marshall’s warning to Short concerning Japan’s “one o’clock” message. Duly decoded, it finally reached Dunlop at 1458.42 As he read it, an ironic, macabre amusement welled up in him, and he could not suppress a bark of laughter. The damn thing won’t do any good now, he said to himself. He handed it to an officer nearby. “Get this to General Short at once. Take it right to him.”43
According to Major General Robert J. Fleming, Short received a copy of this message directly from the Signal Center prior to its transmission through adjutant general channels. Fleming, then a major, was assigned to the department G-4 and functioned as Short’s personal troubleshooter. He was in the emergency headquarters when Lieutenant Colonel Carroll A. “Cappy” Powell, the signal officer, asked Fleming to hand the message to Short. Powell explained that having had “a couple of run-ins with the general,” he did not want to be the one to give Short this dispatch because “General Short would probably go through the roof and land all over him.” He thought that Fleming “would probably be safer from the flak. . . .” Fleming delivered it, and as Powell anticipated, “Short about went through the roof.”44
Marshall’s message came too late to be of any use to the Hawaiian Department. Yet Short later admitted that even if he had received the information by scrambler telephone, the fact that the Japanese were destroying their code machines, as indicated in the text, would have meant more to him than the mention of a specific time. But at least he could have asked Marshall what it meant to him. While scramblers were “not considered as safe as code,” they were “reasonably safe.”45
When Kimmel read a copy of Marshall’s message thereafter, he flung it into the wastebasket in baffled fury. The Army’s messenger, Captain William B. Cobb, talked it over with Davis, the Fleet air officer, and they tried “to account for the delay in transmittal.” Kimmel considered the incident a prime example of fumbling vital intelligence.46
That afternoon painters coated the windows of Kimmel’s headquarters black, so that the admiral and his staff could work late without showing a light. Unfortunately they painted on the inside of the panes. With the windows closed against the cooling breeze, the choking fumes and heat almost blinded and sickened these tormented men, already exhausted and heartsore.47
During the attack everyone had been so busy he had scarcely had time to think. Yet a cataclysmic fury gripped most of those who experienced the awful ordeal or witnessed it close to hand. “If I could have gotten my hands on any one of those Japanese,” gritted Chief Crawford, “I would have crushed him like an insect.”48 Gunner’s Mate Beck recalled, “There was a deep, powerful thirst for revenge on the part of every enlisted man. I wouldn’t have given any Japanese a second of mercy after Pearl Harbor.”49
Nightfall added the primal fear of darkness to the horrors and confusion of the day. “It fell suddenly like a heavy veil and with all its mysteries forced a dangerous intimacy, a threat from any direction at once,” reminisced Quynn.50 Brigadier General George P. Sampson, who was Short’s assistant communications officer in 1941, remembered: “The night of December 7 was worse than the day because by then the people had had time to think. Their thoughts rubbed shoulders with their friends’ and neighbors’, and their fears were multiplied in the thinking and speaking about the attack.”51
With pride smarting and nerves scraped raw, the defenders of Oahu lived through that night as a man might move through a haunted house—half-fearful, half-defiant, jumping at shadows, lashing out savagely at everything that crossed his path. “Things were so bad a dog wasn’t safe on the streets,” Guzak recalled. “The word was: ‘Don’t move at night! Anything that moves will be shot.’”52 As bone-weary Curts groped his way through the blackout from Kimmel’s headquarters to his room in the BOQ, various guards challenged him six or seven times with the order “Halt and be recognized!” Fortunately for him, he did and was.53
A report came to Fielder’s office about midnight that someone was signaling with a blue light just back of Fort Shafter. Investigation revealed “an elderly Japanese dairyman milking cows.” He had put blue cellophane around an old lantern because the blackout regulations permitted only blue light. As the palm fronds swayed back and forth, “it made the light seem to go on and off as if a flashlight was being flashed in rhythm.”
The whispering campaign grew so bad that in a few days Short directed Fielder to go on the radio to refute the rumors. Fielder’s particular favorite came from a man who asserted that “a dog down on Ewa Beach was barking in code to a submarine off shore.” Added Short’s G-2: “The guy that reported it was perfectly serious and actually believed it.”54
Kaneohe was a nightmare. One of the two AA batteries was set up next to Avery’s bungalow. Manning the guns were young “reservists with less than 90 days of Regular Army experience.” The ordeal began when Avery heard a sentry’s “fear frenzied voice screech, ‘Halt!’” Then the man pulled the trigger.
That touched off a crazy spree of firing by both batteries. . . . At what, neither they nor anyone else knew. Every soldier who had a rifle was firing furiously. The Air Station siren sounded General Quarters but no one had a battle station to man so it didn’t matter. . . . Our phone rang; the Administration Bldg. wanted to know if we were under attack by landing parties. Nobody knew. . . . After a full ten minutes of this reckless, pell-mell firing their officers finally regained control and got the firing stopped—momentarily. . . . The alarm on our base aroused the curiosity of many civilians who drove their cars along that road to see what was happening . . . the two AA batteries now brought their guns to bear on those autos and riflemen sniped at them until all were driven from the road. No casualties! Sometime around midnight . . . a searchlight battery on the hill overlooking the town of Kaneohe began sweeping the skies. The AA batteries now found it expedient to shell the searchlight batteries.55
The hotel where Navy wife Kathleen Bruns Cooper stayed with a friend was blacked out, and someone wisely organized a first-aid group, which kept the women constructively occupied. At about 2200 a tremendous noise threw the whole hotel into an uproar, An antiaircraft shell had fallen about fifty yards across the street on the campus of Punahau High School. By good fortune, no one was hurt, but it formed a huge crater. Kathleen and her friends thought the enemy had returned. She and other Catholic women gathered in a room to say the rosary. At the end of each decade the non-Catholics chimed in, “Me, too, O Lord!”56
Colonel Dunlop helped organize the removal of about 400 women to a large cave then under construction outside Fort Shafter as headquarters for the Coast Defense Forces. Although no creature comforts had been installed and the ground was covered with rubble, about ten feet of rock overhead provided protection from bombs.
Faced with evacuation and realizing that she and her daughter, Ruth Dunlop, might not return home for some time, Mrs. Mason gave her canaries enough food to last them for four days. Then she moved into the cave with Ruth and others.57 Among them was Mrs. Short, who had been unable to leave Honolulu the preceding Friday as planned. She had anticipated sailing aboard an Army transport to the mainland for a holiday visit to Oklahoma City with their son, a West Point cadet. But the sailing had been postponed.58 Now she and Mrs. Dunlop with other wives worked like galley slaves to clean up the forbidding cave and improvise sanitary facilities.59
That afternoon the women at Schofield received notification to gather at a certain barracks. After about three hours several buses pulled up, and the women hustled aboard. Among them was the wife of Major General Durward S. Wilson, commanding the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division. The drivers had no more idea of what went on than their passengers. The buses bumped at a snail’s pace over unlighted roads. Tracer bullets laced through the night and contributed to the general hysteria, for naturally enough the women thought this to be enemy fire from the many landing parties reported. The bus in which Mrs. Wilson found herself became lost and, once back on the road again, stalled in a traffic jam for a full hour. By this time most of the women had abandoned all pretense of self-control and cried and screamed like the terrified children. Some knelt on the bus floor, moaning disconnected prayers. Mrs. Wilson wondered ruefully if the driver, between the traffic and the passengers, did not want to blow his brains out.60
Not all the stories of that night were those of terror and confusion. Calhoun testified:
. . . there were between 300 and 400 bed patients in the Naval Hospital. That night at supper when they got ready to change them, practically every patient who was able to walk was absent. He had returned to his ship or any ship he could catch and had gone to sea. They did not return to the hospital for several days.61
Unhappily more than one American survived the attack only to fall to their own trigger-happy comrades. Even rescue boats still trying to fish men out of the oily waters were harassed and endangered by nervous marines, who constantly challenged them and blazed away if they were slow in answering. One of the most tragic incidents of the night occurred when six of the Enterprise pilots returned from searching for the Japanese carriers. “And once over Hickam,” said Shoemaker, “all hell broke loose.” He added:
For by this time guns of every kind were spotted all over Hickam and the gunners, trigger-happy to begin with, were told to shoot to kill. So the planes ran into a blizzard of antiaircraft fire over Hickam. And by the time they got to the Navy Yard and the battleship Pennsylvania they were baptized again. The planes came in with their running lights on and made a perfect target.62
Bosun’s Mate French saw these planes approach Ford Island. “Everything in Pearl Harbor opened up on them,” he said. “They didn’t have a ghost of a chance and they flew in at only twelve hundred feet or a thousand feet. They had their running lights on, and the gunners should have known that they were our planes.”63
One crashed, but the pilot parachuted to safety. Ensign James G. Daniels saved his life over Ford Island by flying straight for the gunners and dazzling them with his landing lights long enough to swoop out of range. Then he tried again, this time without lights, and touched down safely.64 Shoemaker saw three go down in flames.
Throughout the night Ford Island continued to be plagued by false information from the Hawaiian Department’s radar. “They were intermittent reports,” Shoemaker recalled, “just enough to shake one up good. And there wasn’t a goddamn thing we could do about it.”65
Offshore, Commander Stout stood near the bridge rail on the starboard side of his destroyer Breese, watching the flakes of phosphorescence as porpoises played near the ship. “It was as black as the inside of a hat,” he said, “and we were running on dead reckoning. The whole area was blacked out. We would look ashore and not see a damn thing except the waves washing in.” At a short distance Stout observed what he thought was another porpoise. Then he noticed that there were two of them, and instead of swerving, they came straight for Breese. “It was a fish, all right,” remarked Stout, “but not the type of fish I thought it was.” He increased speed and turned seaward, escaping the torpedoes. But he never picked up the submarine which launched them, so he did not try to attack it. “There was no use dropping depth charges just for the hell of it,” he explained, “because people were jittery enough as it was.”66
A number of enemy submarines were lurking in Hawaiian waters, particularly I-69 under Commander Katsuji Watanabe. He was the youngest standard submarine skipper in the Pearl Harbor operation and “most brave.” At 1830 he received orders, apparently from Shimizu, to shift from his area some 17 miles southwest of Pearl Harbor and survey the central sector—a radius of about 8.5 nautical miles with Pearl Harbor at its center.
At 2000 Watanabe reported sighting four destroyers, which attacked him with depth charges at close range, apparently doing no damage. In fact, Watanabe had a hair-raising few days ahead of him. On December 8 I-69 became caught in an antisubmarine net and remained underwater for thirty-eight hours before Watanabe managed to break her loose.
He helped start a legend when at 2101 on December 7 he “saw a very large flame heaving heavenward—a flame like a ship exploding in Pearl Harbor. After this very heavy antiaircraft followed.” The time of this incident makes it virtually certain that he saw one of the Enterprise aircraft shot down and heard the AA fire which preceded and followed the tragic accident. Watanabe’s account of his sighting, together with a report “from one of the midget submarines on the success of the attack” received at 0041 December 8, convinced the Japanese that not only had the midget attack been a huge success, but one of them had sunk Arizona. This story was widely touted in the Japanese press during the spring of 1942. No minisub inflicted any damage whatsoever upon any ship in or out of Pearl Harbor. The report is interesting, however, as showing that at least one midget was still on the prowl as late as 0041 December 8.67
Sakamaki and Inagaki had spent a thoroughly frustrating, exhausting day. Time after time they tried to penetrate Pearl Harbor, but at every attempt their uncontrollable minisub ran into the coral reef, finally destroying the second torpedo’s mechanism. At last both men fell into a stupor from the foul air and from being knocked around in the collisions. Toward midnight Sakamaki awakened and opened the hatch to breathe deeply of the clean sea air. With the coming of dawn, the engine sputtered into silence. Sakamaki saw what he optimistically thought was Lanai Island near the rescue point. Actually he had drifted to a position off the Kaneohe-Bellows Field area.
After a final, futile effort to get the submarine moving, he and Inagaki set the fuse to scuttle the craft and dived overboard. The water was colder and rougher than Sakamaki anticipated; moreover, he was weakened from exhaustion, poisoned air, and almost unendurable nervous tension. He caught sight of Inagaki’s head bobbing nearby, then lost it forever. He listened in vain for the charge to explode. Sick disappointment gripped him as he realized that he had failed even to destroy the submarine. Then a breaker seized him, and consciousness fled in a swirl of darkness. He came to lying on a beach. Raising his tired eyes, he saw an American soldier gazing down at him. Sergeant David M. Akui had just bagged the United States’ Prisoner of War No. 1.68
Throughout the night Quynn kept his sleepless vigil on the bridge of Argonne. Pearl Harbor was still a mass of smoke and flame. Men were trigger-happy, overcharged with imagination and fears. In the distance, a sentry barked. Later a few shots rang out here and there—at whom scarcely anyone knew. The muffled boom of exploding depth charges reverberated through the darkness, set off against any midget submarine that might be in the harbor.
The next morning, when dawn spilled over the horizon, Quynn looked hopefully toward California. As the early mists cleared and the billows of smoke died down, he saw that she had not capsized; she had not sunk beyond recall. Though slowly settling, she stood on a fairly even keel. And from her stern the Stars and Stripes caught the breeze and proudly rippled into life.69