Early Sunday morning, Tom Nichols, sixteen, was delivering the Washington Times-Herald. One of his customers was the Japanese naval attaché, who lived on the top floor of the Broadmoor, a large apartment building at 3601 Connecticut Avenue. Upon rounding the hall the newsboy was startled to see two American Marines standing outside his customer’s door.1 One of the Marines took the paper and young Nichols left wondering what was wrong.
Readers of the New York Times were set at ease by Secretary Knox’s state-of-the-Navy message on this page: “I am proud to report that the American people may feel fully confident in the Navy. In my opinion the loyalty, morale and technical ability of the personnel are without superior. On any comparable basis, the United States Navy is second to none.”
At breakfast, Admiral Richardson observed to his wife, “We are on the verge of war, which may break out any minute.” Eight years before, while a student at the War College, he had written a thesis on Japanese policy. After breakfast he dug it up and found one of its “lessons” was: “That should it appear to her advantage to do so, she will strike viciously, effectively and unexpectedly prior to any declaration of war.”
Because of the emergency meeting Knox had set up Saturday night, Stimson telephoned his military aide, Major Eugene Harrison, to say that they would have to skip riding. “Come by and pick me up. We’re going to the office.” They arrived at the Munitions Building about nine-thirty. In the adjoining building Stark was already in his office and would soon finish reading the entire fourteen-part Japanese intercept.
Bratton had been frantically trying to locate Marshall for half an hour. For he had received not only the fourteenth part but another message instructing Nomura to deliver the entire message to Hull at 1 P.M. He was stunned. One P.M. Washington time would be about sunrise in Hawaii! The implication was staggering. He called Marshall’s quarters in Fort Myer only to learn that he was out horseback riding. He then guardedly telephoned Miles at his home. The general was impressed by Bratton’s tone and started off for the Munitions Building. As soon as Miles arrived he accompanied Bratton to Gerow’s office. Miles urged that the Philippines, Hawaii, Panama and the West Coast be alerted. But nothing could be done until Marshall showed up.
At 10 A.M. Captain John Beardall, Roosevelt’s naval aide, delivered to the President the fourteenth part. Still in bed, Roosevelt said, “It looks like the Japanese are going to break off negotiations.” He didn’t seem at all “perturbed” to Beardall. Roosevelt did nothing until noon except see Admiral McIntire, the nose and throat specialist, who treated his sinus condition. For a man who had thrived on action all his career, this was a curious reaction.
It took about an hour and a half for the one o’clock message to travel from the Munitions Building to the Navy Department, about the length of three blocks. This message alarmed Wilkinson, who wondered aloud if the Philippines and the Pacific Fleet should be alerted. “Why don’t you pick up the telephone and call Kimmel?” he suggested to Stark at approximately ten forty-five. Stark lifted the receiver, then shook his head and said, in effect, “No, I think I will call the President.” But the White House switchboard operator reported that the President was busy. Stark put down the phone and did nothing.
At 11:25 A.M. Marshall finally reached his office. But it took almost another hour before his warning message was filed. Stark had offered to send it by the Navy system, which was fast under pressure, but Marshall said he could get it out quickly also. He could have used a telephone with a scrambler device but he feared some eavesdropper might have a descrambler. The warning was taken to the message center with orders to send it by the fastest safe means. Since the War Department radio was temporarily out of contact with Honolulu, the vital message was sent by teletype to the Washington office of Western Union.
Just as the Hull-Stimson-Knox emergency meeting ended at noon, the Secretary of State was informed that Nomura requested an appointment with him at 1 P.M. Hull fixed the time for one forty-five. Stimson did not proceed to the Munitions Building to check with Marshall on the crisis. He had himself driven to Woodley for lunch.
At the White House, the President was telling Dr. Hu Shih, the Chinese ambassador, that he had sent a message to the Emperor the evening before. “This is my last effort for peace. I am afraid it may fail.”
The S.S. Lurline, thirty-two hours out of Honolulu on its return trip to California, was loaded with a passenger list of 784, including the president of the University of Hawaii and the “Petty girl” model. Church services were being conducted by Commodore Berndtson in the ship’s lounge.
A thousand miles northeast of Honolulu, the 2,140-ton American freighter Cynthia Olson was carrying lumber to Honolulu. None of the twenty-five crew members was aware that the ship was being trailed by a Japanese submarine. The I-26 had left Yokuska on November 19 as part of the advance expeditionary force with orders to destroy American commercial and military shipping once war broke out. She had spotted Cynthia Olson the previous morning and her skipper, Captain Minoru Yokota, was preparing to attack.
At about 7 A.M. Honolulu time a radio operator on the Lurline picked up an S.S.S. signal from the Cynthia Olson, meaning she was being attacked by a submarine. Leslie Grogan tried to raise Pearl Harbor and San Francisco but to no avail. Finally he reached the U. S. Coast Guard Radio Station at Point Bonita, California.2
At 7:55 A.M. two aircraft mechanics at Hickam Field sighted a formation of planes. As they began to peel off, Ted Conway said, “We’re going to have an air show.” His friend noticed something fall from the first plane and guessed it was a wheel. “Wheel, hell, they’re Japs!”
Dive bombers were roaring down on Ford Island. A sailor on the deck of the nearby battleship Arizona thought they were Army fliers on maneuvers. He shook his fist at an oncoming plane. “You’re going to catch hell!”
Karl “Buzz” Boyer, radioman at NPM, the Wailupe naval radio station six miles east of Pearl Harbor, was receiving a Morse code message from the Marine Air Base twenty miles northeast: “We’re being bombed and strafed; we’re under attack.”
“Go to bed and sober up,” signaled Boyer.
“This is no drill. This is for real,” came the frantic response.
Boyer took the message to his chief, who was crowded at a window with the rest of the staff, looking down on Pearl Harbor. They all thought Army planes were on milk runs, until they saw smoke puffs from anti-aircraft guns. Ashen-faced, the chief read the Marine message. “Get on the line to Washington. Don’t bother to code it.”
At seven fifty-eight Boyer tapped out in the clear the signal heard around the world:
AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NO DRILL.3
Secret Agent Takeo Yoshikawa had been eating breakfast when the windows started to rattle and several pictures dropped to the floor. He ran into his back yard. Above was a plane with Japanese markings. They did it! he told himself. Perfect, with so many ships in the harbor! Clapping his hands, he rushed to the back door of Consul General Kita’s official residence. “Kita—san!” he shouted. “They’ve done it!” Kita came out and said excitedly, “I just heard ‘East wind, rain’ on the short wave!4 There’s no mistake.” Dense black clouds were rising from Pearl Harbor. The two men, tears in their eyes, clasped hands. Finally Kita said, “They’ve done it at last.”
Locking himself and a clerk in the code room, Yoshikawa set about burning code books in a washtub. But within ten minutes someone shouted, “Open the door!” The door caved in and Lieutenant Yoshio Hasegawa of the Honolulu police burst in with several men. They began stamping on the smoldering code books.
Admiral Halsey’s task force, which included the carrier Enterprise, was on its way back to Pearl Harbor after ferrying a squadron of Marine fighters to Wake Island. Sixteen scout bombers from Enterprise were approaching Pearl Harbor. Lieutenant j.g. Earl Gallaher, pilot of the lead plane, coming in at 500 feet, saw planes at 4,000 feet with wheels down. He called over the intercom to his radioman in the rear, “What the hell is the Army doing out here on a Sunday morning? Did we miss something on the board?”
There was some smoke ahead but they were always burning cane fields. Gallaher touched down at the Marine field near Barber’s Point. As he taxied up a Marine sergeant jumped on the wing and shouted, “Get the hell off the ground! Can’t you see what’s going on?” Now Gallaher noticed grounded planes burning all over the place. He took off fast and, once airborne, broadcast to Enterprise: “Pearl Harbor is being attacked by the Japanese and this is no shit!” He began orbiting off Barber’s Point at low level followed by his wing plane and five other Enterprise planes that had joined up with him. Several times Japanese fighter planes came down for a look but never fired.
Gallaher reported that the Japanese were retiring on a northwesterly course from a rendezvous point about halfway between Oahu and Kauai. They must be making a beeline for home since they were probably low on gas. He wanted to go after the enemy carriers and led the way toward Ford Island to refuel and load bombs.
Gallaher’s message to Enterprise that the Japanese task force was to the northwest was not heeded. Other messages from Pearl Harbor gave conflicting reports. The Navy could not get a cross bearing and, when Layton reported that there was no way to tell whether the enemy was to the north or south, Kimmel was understandably irked. To make matters worse, a garbled message was received from a ship reporting two carriers south of Oahu. Orders were given to search south for what turned out to be two American cruisers.
Ironically Rear Admiral J. H. Newton’s Task Force Twelve was not far from the Japanese at a point between Oahu and Midway. Signalman First Class Thomas Thalken, aboard the heavy cruiser Astoria, recalled that they began an immediate search for the Japanese, heading northeast by north at flank speed. This meant that they would approach Kido Butai in several hours. Scout planes were launched. Then came the report from Pearl Harbor that two enemy carriers were south of Oahu. But officers on the bridge of Astoria were convinced this was a false lead. Thalken was ordered to signal Chicago, Newton’s flagship, “Ignore Pearl Harbor. They don’t know what they’re doing.” But Task Force Twelve obeyed orders and turned south away from the Japanese.5
At Kaneohe Naval Air Station on the eastern (windward) side of Oahu, they were preparing to withstand a second strike, this one a landing to seize the entire island before the Americans could organize for defense. A group stood in the hangar area discussing what to do next when one man, turning pale, shouted, “Oh, my God—there they come!” He pointed northward toward the seaward entrance to Kaneohe Bay. “Then,” recalled Lieutenant Murray Hanson, “we saw it, too: the foremast and conning tower of a Japanese battleship coming around the point heading straight for our station!”
There was frozen terror a few seconds until someone said, “Oh, hell, that’s Chinaman’s Hat.” A prominent landmark seen every clear day had become a battlewagon. Such group hysteria was common that day.
The area around Honolulu was still smoldering by the time an RCA6 motorcycle messenger, Tadao Fuchikami, managed to get through roadblocks and wreckage to deliver a telegram addressed to the Commanding General, Fort Shafter. And it was seven hours after the attack started before Marshall’s message was decoded. The department signal officer didn’t have the stomach to deliver it. He asked Colonel R. J. Fleming, a close friend of Short’s, to do so. “If he jumps on you, you’re used to it.” Fleming brought it to Short. He read it, threw it on the desk. “This is a hell of a note!” He was angry but didn’t take it out on Fleming. A copy was immediately sent to Admiral Kimmel, who told the Army courier that it wasn’t of any use to him, then crumpled the paper and threw it in the wastebasket.
At 2:26 P.M. WOR interrupted its broadcast of the Giants-Dodgers football game with the first news flash. Much of America heard the news of Pearl Harbor a moment before the 3 P.M. CBS broadcast of the New York Philharmonic concert.
Ralph Briggs was on an extended four-day pass to Cleveland as a reward from Chief Radioman DW for having intercepted the “winds” execute. DW himself had received a large bouquet of roses from Captain Safford with a note expressing his personal appreciation for the splendid job done by the Station M team in intercepting the crucial message. Briggs’s first reaction was, “Good, we’ve done our job. Now our Navy will get the bastards!”
Laurance Safford, exhausted after two months’ worry and almost sleepless nights, had slept around the clock. He was in his bathrobe eating breakfast when a friend telephoned that the Japs were bombing Pearl Harbor. He was so angry that he felt tempted to take his .38 and shoot Noyes and Stark.
His fellow cryptanalyst, William Friedman, could only pace back and forth and mutter to himself repeatedly, “But they knew, they knew, they knew.”
Captain Paulus P. Powell, formerly in charge of the Japanese desk in Naval Intelligence, told his wife the radio report of the attack was a gigantic hoax. “Because knowing what he does about the situation, Admiral Kimmel would never have the fleet in port.”
Tricycle, who had passed a detailed plan of the attack to the F.B.I., was triumphant upon learning the news on board a tramp steamer. “What a reception the Japanese must have had! I paced the deck, no, not paced it, I floated above it exultantly.”
Another who had warned the United States, Kilsoo Haan, got a telephone call from Maxwell Hamilton of the State Department. He demanded that Haan’s December 5 warning of a Pearl Harbor attack that weekend not be released to the press. “If you do,” he warned, “I can put you away for the duration.” Haan reluctantly promised to hold the report until the end of the war.
At their meeting that morning Stimson, Hull and Knox had all thought America must fight if the British responded to an attack on the Kra Peninsula. “But now,” observed Stimson, “the Japs have solved the whole thing by attacking us directly in Hawaii.” His first reaction was “relief that the indecision was over and that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people. This continued to be my dominant feeling in spite of the news of catastrophes which quickly developed. For I feel that this country united has practically nothing to fear while the apathy and divisions stirred up by unpatriotic men have been hitherto very discouraging.” Later he told his military aide, Major Harrison, that they could “never have gotten the country to war without Pearl Harbor.”
That afternoon Knox noticed that the President was “white as a sheet, visibly shaken.” Yet later in the day James Roosevelt found his father “sitting in a corner with no expression on his face, very calm and quiet. He had out his stamp collection he loved so much and was thumbing over some of the stamps when I came in. ‘It’s bad, it’s pretty bad,’ he said without looking up.”
At about 6:40 P.M. Roosevelt telephoned Henry Morgenthau to tell him that there would be a Cabinet meeting at eight-thirty. Morgenthau reported that they were freezing all Japanese funds. “And we’re putting people into all the Japanese banks and business houses tonight and we’re not going to let the Japanese get in there at all.”
“That’s good.”
The one with the keenest memory of the Cabinet meeting was Frances Perkins. She had just come down from New York in the same plane with Henry Wallace and Postmaster General Frank Walker. All three had been so involved with work that they didn’t know of the Japanese attack until her chauffeur picked them up at the Washington airport. “That’s impossible,” all three said when told about Pearl Harbor.
The Oval Office was filled. The President, sitting at his desk, didn’t notice the three newcomers. He was studying papers, cigarette holder in mouth. Everyone sat down about 9 P.M. Mrs. Perkins was surprised that he hadn’t spoken to anyone. “He was living off in another area,” she recalled in a taped interview. “He wasn’t noticing what went on on the other side of his desk. He was very serious. His face and lips were pulled down, looking quite gray. His complexion didn’t have that pink and white look that it had when he was himself. It had a queer, grave, drawn look.”
She recalled that his face was never relaxed, not for a minute. “It remained tense and screwed up around the mouth. His upper lip was pulled down and his lower lip sort of pursed in, an expression that I’ve seen him have many, many times.… It was the sort of expression that he sometimes used when people were making recommendations to him and he was saying, ‘Oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes,’ without the slightest intention of doing anything about it.…
“In other words, there have been times when I associated that expression with a kind of evasiveness. The fact that he wore his expression all evening means nothing. It was an observation from which I cannot rid my memory. My picture memory keeps that expression on his face throughout the evening. He never relaxed that expression once, and none of us felt like making the kind of joke or sally that would sometimes relax his face when he had that expression on. It always had remained in my deep memory as being anything but an emotional disturbance as far as I was concerned, but a deep emotional experience, which I never would rely upon, and I don’t think anybody should. Nevertheless, it is the strange emotional crises of human nature that give one some of one’s insight, and they are part of the imaginative function of the brain, which Aristotle described.”
She recalled that his pride in the Navy “was so terrific that he was having actual physical difficulty in getting out the words that put him on record that the Navy was caught unawares.… It was obvious to me that Roosevelt was having a dreadful time just accepting the idea.” He could have been condemning himself for the men and warships lost—because Kimmel had not been warned the attack was coming.
Mrs. Perkins was obsessed by Roosevelt’s strange reactions that night. “I had a deep emotional feeling that something was wrong, that this situation was not all it appeared to be. That stuck with me all that evening and all that night. So much so that when I went home to my apartment I couldn’t rid myself of it. I sat down and wrote in lead pencil on some snatches of White House paper.… I described this look on the President’s face, and the curious emotional disturbance that I had, which carried with it the impression that something was wrong. I don’t know why I wrote it down, except perhaps to remind myself in the future—not for historical purposes, but for the purpose of helping me, or somebody else, to understand the situation. The necessity of reviewing it has never risen in my experience. So when I find these notes among my papers, I not only remember them clearly, but am also still somewhat put to it to know why I did it, why I wrote them down. At the moment they seemed important to me, as though I ought to put down, while it was clear in my mind, in case I should ever need to call upon it to help me explain something upon which I might have to act, or upon which others might have to act.…
“I don’t know what disturbs me about the whole thing, but something was wrong. Obviously he had to play a role of some sort. I don’t think that I ever in my own mind cleared it to the point of saying that he played a false role that day. His surprise was not as great as the surprise of the rest of us.” In her book, The Roosevelt I Knew, she would reveal none of these misgivings.
“I’ve been asked if it might not be possible that the President, recognizing that this thing had happened, felt a certain element and wave of relief that the long tension of wondering what would they do and when they would do it, and would we have to go to the defense of Singapore without an apparent attack upon ourselves, and should we go to the relief of Singapore, all these conflicts which had so harassed him for so many weeks or months, were ended. You didn’t have to think about that any more. That very wave of relief might have produced in him that psychological atmosphere reflected in his facial expression of tenseness and calmness, and yet a sense that something was wrong, that there was slight evasion here.”
As the meeting was breaking up Walker, who was very close to Roosevelt, said under his breath to her, “You know, I think the boss must have a great sense of relief that this has happened. This is a great load off his mind. I thought the load on his mind was just going to kill him, going to break him down. This must be a great sense of relief to him. At least we know what to do now.”
“Yes,” she said. “I think so.”
Long into the night Roosevelt worked with Hull and Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, who were trying to persuade him to use one of their proposed war messages. “The President was very patient with them,” recalled Hopkins, “and I think in order to get them out of the room perhaps led them to believe he would give serious consideration to their draft.” After chatting with Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan and Edward R. Murrow of CBS, they all had sandwiches and beer. Finally at 12:30 A.M. the President “cleared everybody out and said he was going to bed.”
Across from the White House the benches in bleak Lafayette Square were deserted for the first night in weeks. On the other side of the square the Veterans Administration Building remained one of the few in Washington without lights burning. And the traffic along Pennsylvania Avenue on either side of the White House was jammed. “There is a slight deliberation in the movement of the cars,” reported Jerry Greene of the Time-Life-Fortune News Bureau. “The driver, passengers in each turn their heads, stare with unmoving lips at the White House from the time they come within range until they are beyond.” Hundreds were walking past the tall, iron picket fence protecting the White House grounds. “They move along quietly, talking if at all in whispers, subdued murmurs. Silence on the Avenue, despite the mob of cars, the mass of people, is apparent, deep enough to gnaw at the nerves.” Everybody, it seemed, was “watching the White House quietly, without noise, waiting, hoping somehow to see a visible sign of retaliation.”
In the White House, not far from the President’s room, Mrs. Hamlin, the old friend of the Roosevelts, was trying to sleep. “I heard voices and steps far into the night.”
At his home in Virginia, General George Marshall said nothing except that he was tired and was going to bed. “I sat there trying to think of something I could do or say that might help him,” remembered Mrs. Marshall. “But words are futile at a time like that, so I passed his door and went into my room. I knew he would rather be alone.”
The next morning Stimson told Major Harrison, “I think I’ll go and see Old Knox.” The two men walked across the bridge to the Navy Building and found panic. In Knox’s outer office one admiral was pacing one direction while a second was pacing another as if they were on the deck of a sinking ship. Knox’s naval aide told Harrison, “My God, what will the American people think of the Navy!”
At 12:29 P.M. President Roosevelt entered the House chamber in the Capitol on the arm of his son James. There was a resounding ovation as he grasped the rostrum. “Yesterday, December 7, 1941,” he began in the voice that no one who heard it would ever forget, “—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked.…”
1A review of the muster rolls of Marine units in Washington for December 1941 reveals that no such assignment had been routinely made. It must have been an emergency special detail. Why?
2It took I-26 three or four hours to sink the lumber ship. There were no survivors. In an interview with Yokota in 1979, he maintained he had launched his attack at 8 a.m. Honolulu time. Both Commodore Berndtson and Chief Radio Operator Rudy Asplund stated it was 7 A.M., fifty-five minutes before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Grogan thought it was a little after eight but three other crew members agreed with Berndtson.
3At almost the same moment a similar message was being sent from NSM, the standby station at Pearl Harbor.
4This message was never intercepted by station MS-5 at Fort Shafter. Neither was another from Tokyo which might have been a similar execute. It had arrived at 3:20 A.M. and read: RELATIONS STRAINED BETWEEN JAPAN AND THE UNITED STATES AND BRITAIN.
5It was a fortunate mistake. The Japanese had only lost twenty-nine planes and probably would have dealt such grievous damage to the two American carriers and their planes that Spruance could not have challenged the Japanese six months later at Midway.
6Since Western Union had no direct link with Hawaii, the message had been transmitted to San Francisco where RCA radioed it to Honolulu.