The foul weather was their friend. Oppressive clouds and churning seas helped cloak their advance across the Pacific far from the shipping lanes and under radio silence. Their audacious undertaking required surprise, and they managed to maintain that across four thousand miles of ocean and twelve tense days. Six aircraft carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, and nine destroyers—the strike force was the cream of the Imperial Japanese Navy. On December 6, 1941, the eve of the attack, a relic sacred to all Japanese sailors was brought forth: the ensign from the flagship at the 1904 Battle of Tsushima Strait, the glorious victory that had announced to the world that Japan’s sea force had come of age. The Tsushima battle ensign was hoisted anew in hope that it would wave over another great triumph on the morrow.
And so on December 7 the early Sunday morning calm of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was shattered by the roar of nearly two hundred Japanese aircraft—torpedo bombers, dive bombers, fighter planes—bringing hell on the wing to the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Within minutes the placid moorings of Battleship Row between Ford Island and the harbor shore erupted in deafening explosions followed by fire, shouts, and billowing blackness. An armor-piercing bomb plowed into the forward magazine of the USS Arizona and ripped her apart with seismic force, setting off fires that burned for days and raining black, acrid debris down on Ford Island and the harbor. The Arizona, a Pennsylvania-class battleship of 1915 vintage, had come out to Pearl Harbor in 1940 as part of the fleet sent to be a forward deterrent to Japanese aggression. Now the Arizona became the first victim of that aggression on the “day of infamy” that brought the United States into World War II. Her captain, Franklin Van Valkenburgh, died with her, as did Rear Adm. Isaac C. Kidd, commander of Battleship Division I; he was the first flag officer to die in the Pacific war. Both would receive posthumous Medals of Honor. Seven more bombs struck the Arizona as she sank, and destruction rained down on the six battleships arrayed alongside her. Down went the California, slammed by two bomb hits. Three torpedoes smashed into the Oklahoma and capsized her. The West Virginia sank, as did the Nevada, the only one of the ships to get under way before being hit. The Maryland and Tennessee suffered damage as well. The Japanese attacked in two waves, taking out airfields and buildings as well as the unfortunate seven vessels on Battleship Row. Hickam Airfield, headquarters of the Pacific Air Forces, was hit hard; soldiers died at their breakfast. More than half of the Army, Navy, and Marine aircraft sitting on Hickam and Ford Island airfields were destroyed.
As the inferno raged all around, the senior surviving officer on the Arizona rallied his remaining crew and sought to contain the flames tearing through his sinking ship. Lt. Cdr. Samuel G. Fuqua later received the Medal of Honor for his lifesaving actions on that blackest of days. A sergeant of the Arizona’s Marine detachment later said that Fuqua’s “calmness gave me courage, and I looked around to see if I could help.” Fuqua managed to get the survivors clear by just after 10:30 AM, and the Arizona was abandoned, still flaming, still smoking, settling into the berth that she occupies to this day.
The battle ensign of Tsushima had brought good fortune to the Japanese, who lost fewer than thirty planes while bringing cataclysmic destruction to the foe. Most of the 2,403 American servicemen who were killed that morning were Navy personnel, and the 1,177 men (out of a crew of 1,512) who perished on the Arizona formed the majority of the Navy’s losses.
Japan’s tactically brilliant but strategically ill-conceived gambit brought the unfettered wrath of America roaring into the war. The carnage of Pearl Harbor left a lasting mark on the national psyche, and the location of the tragedy continues to reverberate with the metaphysical aftershocks that untimely deaths bestow. It is little wonder that Pearl Harbor has been ranked as one of America’s “Top Ten Most Haunted Battlefields.” From Ford Island to the Arizona’s resting place to Hickam Field, and in the maze of military buildings in between, reports have surfaced for years of rampant and varied paranormal activity. Voices speak in empty rooms. Footsteps sound where no living foot now treads. A glowing mass of humanoid phosphorescence drifts among the residential quarters of the naval complex. The sad, lost ghost of a young boy wanders in an eternal quest for his parents. Shadowy wraiths of uniformed men tread on Ford Island. Worst of all is the muted, faded noise of explosions, of bombs falling, auditory scars that never healed, the echoes of infamy.
Hickam Air Force Base, where so many perished so suddenly that morning, has been haunted ever since. Hallways ring to the sound of invisible stomping feet in concert with invisible keychain jingle-jangle. A bathroom faucet turns itself on. Big, sturdy glass doors open inexplicably and proceed to flail closed and open and closed and open again with mad rage.
But the mostly submerged hulk of the battleship Arizona is the epicenter of Pearl Harbor’s haunted quadrant. The flag still flies above her, and all passing Navy ships salute it. Since 1962, when the memorial span was built to straddle her sorrowful mass, thousands have made the pilgrimage to pay tribute. Hundreds of sailors are entombed in the sunken leviathan, which to this day still bleeds oil from her old wounds. To any visitor it is a place of profound, powerful solemnity. To those sensitive to the presence of spirits it is a cacophonous nexus of voices, explosions, and resident souls who are both observable and communicative.
One psychic who visited on a sunny day of picture-book tropical beauty recalled, “I seemed to be the only one aware of the many hundreds of spirits calling out to anyone who could see them. The heavy sadness there broke my heart and seemed so at opposites with the peaceful day.” Her first inklings came near the memorial entrance, where she saw “pixilated lights dancing near a palm tree. I knew that a spirit was coming forward.” Soon, as if other spirits were keying in on her attuned presence, “more distortions began to appear all around me and I began hearing desperate whisperings.” They clamored around her, so “eager to get news to their loved ones” that she experienced extrasensory overload. She came to the conclusion that the individuals in the vociferous ghost crew either had “the need to finish some important business” or had in some cases simply “left behind a residual energy imprinted on the area at the time of their passing.”
If such is the forcefulness of the haunted vibrations above the wreck, one can imagine how powerfully the aura must radiate below the surface, down in the mangled topography of the grave ship. It is simultaneously an overpowering and ethereal sensation, one well known to Dan Lenihan, who from 1983 to 2001 made multiple dives around the wreck for the National Park Service’s Submerged Resource Center. The first field seasons of the Arizona Preservation Project in the 1980s focused on examining the wreckage and producing line drawings. The 608-foot battleship was at the time the largest underwater object ever mapped. “For the diver, Arizona emerges from the gloom as some surreal metallic structure of monstrous proportions,” Lenihan later wrote. He noted that the members of his underwater team, Navy divers and Park Service divers alike, all went from being “at first overwhelmed with the ship” to eventually becoming “obsessed by it.” The wreck can enthrall even the most dispassionate scientific mind. Here lie the giant remains of a giant tragedy. It is more than just a mass of steel to be measured, quantified, and analyzed. It is a crypt, twisted and torn, exuding despair, inspiring reverential awe. “There’s something,” observed Lenihan, “about experiencing the scene of a violent act while swimming underwater.”
The ship has exerted her haunting power virtually since smoke still rose from her battered form. The first reports of hauntings at the Arizona wreck site began during World War II. Sailors passing the wreckage in the harbor spoke in hushed tones of how the ship had been cursed from the beginning because she was christened with a bottle of water instead of wine (the tradition-violating gesture a nod to puritanical Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels’ banning of all drinking in the Navy). There were sightings of a ghost patrolling on the exposed deck at low tide, a ghost on lookout at the flagpole, a nocturnally active ghost still visible in the predawn grayness. Sailors’ lore quickly ascribed all these appearances to one particular spirit, that of a guilt-ridden officer of the deck who, on the morning of the attack, had abandoned his station momentarily to attend to some triviality and died in the initial explosion that sank his ship. But is it reasonable to believe that all of the many spectral appearances belong to a single entity at a spot so heavily laden with the burden of massive violent death, a spot where more than a thousand young men were killed in one grim morning? One only has to recall the multitude of desperate souls who inundated the psychic who ventured into their sphere. It is also worth noting that, regardless of the time of day or angle of perspective, the Arizona can have a strange effect on photography, and that camera-wielding tourists at the memorial frequently find eerie orbs and shadowy shapes hovering in their snapshots.
“There are ghosts on the Arizona, whose presence you feel when you are alone, particularly in the hours at dusk,” Lenihan wrote. “But they don’t frighten me. I feel a strange kinship with them; they make me sad—sad that they never got to be heroes, or fools, or anything else.” Reminded of the film Unforgiven, in which Clint Eastwood’s character ruminates about the taking of human life, Lenihan offered a paraphrase for the Arizona’s dead: “That bomb took away not only what they were but everything they were ever going to be.”
In one day at Pearl Harbor, Japan succeeded in destroying the battleships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Tsushima’s battle ensign indeed waved once again on a day of Japanese victory. But it was a hollow victory. Most of the American battleships would be salvaged, repaired, and put back into the fight. Furthermore, the ships that would prove most crucial in the coming Pacific struggle were away from Pearl Harbor that fateful day. Japan would come to regret not waiting to strike until the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carriers had returned to the target zone.
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In the emerging conflict, the aircraft carrier would prove to be the most valuable chess piece in naval warfare. The flood tide of Japanese conquest was halted at last in the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 7–8, 1942), history’s first carrier-versus-carrier duel, and the first sea battle ever fought in which the combatant warships never saw each other. The turning point in the Pacific followed at the Battle of Midway (June 3–7, 1942), another clash of carriers that produced one of the U.S. Navy’s greatest and most decisive victories. The fate of the war was dictated in a titanic showdown over a tiny atoll a thousand miles west of Hawaii. Japan desired Midway as a perimeter extension; the United States sought to hold it at all costs and roll back the Japanese advance. Japan lost not only the battle but four carriers and a host of its finest pilots as well. After Midway, Japan would never again know the dominance it had held in the opening months of the Pacific war.
Midway Atoll is no longer under the aegis of the U.S. Navy; it is administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Where thousands of Navy and Marine personnel once dwelled there remains a ghost town of abandoned, decaying buildings and empty streets. A handful of residents—contract workers and their families, mainly, plus wildlife refuge staff—share the remote outcropping with thousands of seabirds. As the locus of one of the most important naval engagements in history, Midway is, fittingly, a national historic landmark, though an isolated and rarely visited one, a speck in the vast Pacific expanse. But those who do live or pass through here offer consistent descriptions of a frequently seen ghost, a cigarette-smoking specter in military uniform.
Described as “a quiet, contemplative man,” he has been spotted outside the former bachelor officers’ quarters, near the old theater, and around the old water tower. A contract employee who spied him in front of the old BOQ showed up at work “mad because the military guy didn’t return his greeting.” But no “military guy” was stationed on Midway anymore. Another contract employee and his wife living in a house near the old barracks had to move because she became so upset by the specter’s presence, especially after talking to others who had seen him. Their new quarters were as far away from the ghost’s haunting grounds as it was possible to get. A couple of American jetliner pilots who were transporting an empty plane to Thailand also encountered the spectral smoker when they stopped at Midway to refuel. One of them remarked to the manager of the wildlife refuge, “I didn’t know you still had military here.” They too were upset because the man had not returned their greeting.
It was nothing personal. He is simply a stoic ghost, prone to meditative tobacco smoke and long gazes seaward, where mighty aircraft carriers once cut across the waves and their bombers filled the sky, determining the course of history.
Where the Midway ghost fixes his eternal stare, the carriers rose to their epochal moment. They would grow in number to meet the Pacific challenge. And some would become part of naval history’s haunted fleet.