TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/120291/1202990.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 45.6 KB | 963 lines

                                                                                PEARL HARBOR, Page 30

PART 1

Day of Infamy


A half-century ago, Japan launched its surprise attack on Pearl
Harbor, and the world has never been the same since

By OTTO FRIEDRICH -- Research by Anne Hopkins


    Warden was just going back for seconds on both hotcakes
and eggs when this blast shuddered by under the floor and
rattled the cups It had become very quiet and everybody had
stopped eating and looked up at each other.

    "Must be doin some dynamitin down to Wheeler Field,"
somebody said tentatively.

    -- James Jones, From Here to Eternity



    The brass band on the stern of the U.S.S. Nevada kept on
playing The Star-Spangled Banner for the 8 a.m. flag raising
even after a Japanese bomber roared overhead and fired a torpedo
at the nearby Arizona. The torpedo missed, but the bomber
sprayed machine-gun fire at the Nevada's band and tore up its
ensign.

    "This is the best goddam drill the Army Air Force has ever
put on," remarked an Arizona sailor standing idly at the
battleship's rail.

    "Air raid, Pearl Harbor, this is no drill," said the radio
message that went out at 7:58 a.m. from the U.S. Navy's Ford
Island command center, relayed throughout Hawaii, to Manila, to
Washington. But there was an even sharper sense of imminent
disaster in the words someone shouted over the public address
system on another docked battleship, the Oklahoma: "Man your
battle stations! This is no shit!" Across the lapping waters of
the harbor, church bells tolled, summoning the faithful to
worship.

    Almost alongside the Oklahoma, another torpedo hurtled
through the air. After releasing it, recalled Lieut. Jinichi
Goto, commander of the Japanese torpedo bombers, "I saw that I
was even lower than the crow's nest of the great battleship. My
observer reported a huge waterspout springing up . . .
`Atarimashita! [It hit!]' he cried."

    "I felt a very heavy shock and heard a loud explosion,"
said the Oklahoma's executive officer, Commander Jesse
Kenworthy Jr., "and the ship immediately began to list to port.
As I attempted to get to the conning tower over decks slippery
with oil and water, I felt the shock of another very heavy
explosion." Kenworthy gave the order to abandon ship. He barely
made it over the rising starboard side as the giant battleship
began to keel over, trapping more than 400 crewmen below decks.

    Just as the Oklahoma capsized, a tremendous explosion tore
open the Arizona. "A spurt of flame came out of the guns in No.
2 turret, followed by an explosion of the forward magazine,"
said a mechanic on the nearby tanker Ramapo. "The foremast
leaned forward, and the whole forward part of the ship was
enveloped in flame and smoke and continued to burn fiercely."

    In Commander Mitsuo Fuchida's bomber circling overhead,
antiaircraft fire knocked a hole in the fuselage and damaged the
steering gear, but Fuchida couldn't take his eyes off the fiery
death throes of the Arizona. "A huge column of dark red smoke
rose to 1,000 ft., and a stiff shock wave rocked the plane," he
recalled years later, when he had become a Presbyterian
missionary. "It was a hateful, mean-looking red flame, the kind
that powder produces, and I knew at once that a big magazine had
exploded. Terrible indeed."

    As operational commander of the Japanese attackers,
Fuchida watched and controlled everything. It was Fuchida who
had given, exactly at 7:49 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, the order to
attack the strongest naval base in the world: "To! [the first
syllable of to tsugekiseyo, meaning: Charge!] To! To! To!" It
was Fuchida who sent back to Tokyo the triumphant signal that
the attack had caught the Americans by surprise: "Tora!
[Tiger!] Tora! Tora!"

    Now Fuchida led the attack on the Maryland, another of the
eight battleships berthed at the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet
headquarters. He saw four bombs hurtling toward their target.
"In perfect pattern [they] plummeted like devils of doom. They
became small as poppy seeds and finally disappeared just as tiny
white flashes of smoke appeared on or near the ship."

    Pearl Harbor is peaceful now, blue waves in the winter
sunshine, an occasional toot of harbor traffic. A concrete
canopy shrouds the rusted wreckage of the Arizona, the remains
of more than 1,000 American servicemen entombed inside. Her flag
is still raised and lowered every day on the mast emerging out
of the quiet water.

    The anniversary of the greatest U.S. military defeat, the
day President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "a date which will
live in infamy,"* remains a day of death and disgrace, an
inglorious event, and the spirit of reconciliation still bows
before gusts of rancor. When President Bush, a World War II
fighter pilot, indicated that he would attend the Pearl Harbor
anniversary ceremonies, White House spokesmen stiffly squelched
any talk of Japanese officials' joining in. So did the Pearl
Harbor Survivors Association. "We did not invite the Japanese
50 years ago, and we don't want them now,'' says the
association's president, Gerald Glaubitz.

    In American mythology, Pearl Harbor still represents, even
after a half-century, a classic moment of treachery and
betrayal. Certainly it was a moment of historic surprise, a
moment when the impossible happened, when warfare suddenly
spread, for the first and only time in history, to virtually the
whole world. This was the moment that changed Americans from a
nation of provincial innocents, not only ignorant of the great
world but proud of their ignorance, into a nation that would
often have to bear the burdens of rescuing that world. The same
cataclysm also changed the Japanese from a people trying to find
their place on the rim of the great world into a nation that
would eventually redefine that world and place itself at the
very center.

    The surprise, when it first exploded over Pearl Harbor,
was shattering, and everyone who experienced it can still
remember what was going on when the news interrupted that quiet
Sunday: the Washington Redskins playing the Philadelphia Eagles,
Arthur Rubinstein as soloist in the New York Philharmonic
broadcast, or just a visit with friends. Trying to explain the
national sense of bewilderment, the TIME of that time reflected
the kind of racism that implicitly underlay the basic American
attitude. "Over the U.S. and its history," declared the weekly
newsmagazine, "there was a great unanswered question: What would
the people . . . say in the face of the mightiest event of their
time? What they said -- tens of thousands of them -- was: `Why,
the yellow bastards!' "

    As often happens in surprise attacks, however, the
surprise of Pearl Harbor was largely a matter of national
illusions. The leaders on both sides fully expected a war,
indeed considered it inevitable, even to some extent desirable,
but neither side really wanted to fight unless it had to. Up to
the last minute, each antagonist thought the other was bluffing.

    Japan's navy had already begun planning and training for
the attack on Pearl Harbor when Emperor Hirohito startled his
assembled advisers on Sept. 6 by asking an imperial question.
In the midst of a fervent debate over when and how to go to war,
the Emperor, who traditionally never spoke during such
gatherings, suddenly pulled out and read in his high-pitched
voice a poem by his revered grandfather Emperor Meiji:



    All the seas, in every quarter,

    are as brothers to one another.

    Why, then, do the winds and waves of strife

    rage so turbulently throughout the world?



    Roosevelt, re-elected to a third term in 1940 after
pledging that "your boys are not going to be sent to any foreign
wars," knew that Hirohito was just a figurehead ruler over a
militarist government dominated by the flinty General Hideki
Tojo. Still, Roosevelt staked his hopes for peace on a
last-minute message to the Emperor. "Both of us," Roosevelt
said, "have a sacred duty to restore traditional amity and
prevent further death and destruction in the world."

    Japanese military censors delayed that message for 10
hours, so it was almost midnight on Dec. 7 in Tokyo when U.S.
Ambassador Joseph Grew sped with it to the Foreign Ministry. It
was past 3 a.m. -- and Fuchida's bombers were within sight of
Pearl Harbor -- when Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, in full
diplomatic regalia, reached the Imperial Palace. He found the
Emperor listening to his shortwave radio. Togo read him the
message and then the response that the government had already
written for him. It said that peace was the Emperor's "cherished
desire." This would "do well," Hirohito told Togo. The Foreign
Minister bowed low.

    If war between the U.S. and Japan was inevitable, it had
probably been inevitable for a long time, perhaps as long ago
as July 8, 1853. That was the day when Commodore Matthew Perry
sailed his black-hulled steam frigate Susquehanna into Edo Bay
(now Tokyo Bay) and "opened" Japan at gunpoint, after more than
two centuries of self-imposed isolation, to American merchants
and missionaries. Humiliated, the Japanese decided to modernize
their feudal regime by imitating the barbarian invaders. They
hired French officers to retrain their soldiers and British
shipbuilders to create their navy. From the Germans they
learned the secrets of modern science and from the Americans the
secrets of modern commerce.

    But as Japanese commerce and Japanese emigration
increased, so did Western talk of a "yellow peril." In 1922 the
Supreme Court ruled that Japanese immigrants were ineligible to
become U.S. citizens. The following year it ruled that they
could be barred from owning American land -- Japanese farmers
were then growing 10% of California's agricultural produce on
1% of its land. In 1924, when Congress imposed national
immigration quotas, the figure for Japanese was zero.

    The deepest conflict between the U.S. and Japan, though,
was over the future of China, which had been in turmoil ever
since the collapse of the Manchu Empire in 1911. Though
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek claimed that his Canton-based
Kuomintang represented the entire republic, local warlords ruled
much of the country, notably the huge northern territory of
Manchuria. The Japanese, who had blocked a number of Russian
incursions into Manchuria, were moving in to gain control of the
region's plentiful coal and iron, which Japan sorely lacked.

    The explosive force in the midst of this ferment was
Japan's fractious Kwantung Army, originally sent to the Kwantung
Peninsula just east of Beijing to protect Japanese rail and
shipping interests in Manchuria. After ultranationalist Kwantung
officers murdered the Chinese overlord of Manchuria, Tokyo
installed a puppet regime in 1932 and proclaimed the
independence of what it called Manchukuo. Despite calls for
sanctions against Japan, outgoing President Herbert Hoover had
no enthusiasm for a crisis, and the incoming President Roosevelt
was preoccupied with the onrushing Great Depression.

    That left Chiang and his Chinese Nationalists to fight on
against the Japanese, the growing communist guerrilla forces of
Mao Zedong and a clutch of surviving warlords. On the night of
July 7, 1937, came the murky events that constituted the
long-expected "incident." A Japanese soldier apparently wandered
off to relieve himself near the Marco Polo Bridge, outside
Beijing. His comrades, who later claimed they feared he had been
kidnapped, got into a gunfight with a nearby Chinese Nationalist
unit, and the fighting soon spread.

    The worldwide depression, which partly inspired Japan's
move into China, left most Americans unable to deal with
anything beyond their own breadlines and Hoovervilles and,
Brother, can you spare a dime? To the extent that they worried
about foreign problems at all, they worried mainly about Adolf
Hitler, who had seized Austria and the Czech Sudetenland in
1938, then demanded western Poland in 1939.

    Americans did hear horror stories -- of civilians
massacred in Japanese air raids on undefended Shanghai and of
the Rape of Nanking, a month of slaughter that cut down more
than 200,000 civilians. Roosevelt talked of "quarantining"
Japan, but American ships went on supplying Tokyo with American
oil and steel. Times were hard, and business was business.

    What came to dominate Japan's overall strategy was the
impact of Hitler's stunning victories over the Western Allies
in the spring of 1940. The Dutch army was crushed within a week,
and Queen Wilhelmina fled to London, leaving the immense wealth
of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in the charge of a few
colonial bureaucrats. France collapsed in a month, and Marshal
Petain's feeble puppet regime, based in the French resort of
Vichy, had other worries than French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos
and Cambodia). Britain, threatened by a Nazi invasion, could
devote little more than some Churchillian rhetoric to the
defense of Singapore, Malaya, Hong Kong and Burma.

    Japan's Prince Fumimaro Konoye, a serpentine conservative
who had twice been Premier since 1937, realized the way was now
clear "to include the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese
islands of the Orient" in a Japanese commercial empire that
Tokyo called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. On
Sept. 27, 1940, Konoye joined the Axis powers, Nazi Germany and
Fascist Italy, in a formal alliance known as the Tripartite
Pact. He demanded that Britain shut down the Burma Road, supply
route for aid to Chiang, and that Vichy accept Japanese bases in
Indochina for a southern attack on Chiang.

    The U.S., the only Western power strong enough to
retaliate, banned all iron and steel shipments to Japan. "It
seems inevitable," said Asahi Shimbun, then Japan's largest
daily, "that a collision should occur between Japan, determined
to establish a sphere of interest in East Asia . . . and the
United States, which is determined to meddle in affairs on the
other side of a vast ocean." Added Yomiuri, another giant
newspaper: "Asia is the territory of the Asiatics."

    Impersonally though the tides of history may seem to flow,
they now waited on one man, a remarkably squat and
broad-shouldered man, no more than 5 ft. 3 in. tall. He had been
born Isoroku Takano, the first name meaning 56, because that was
the age at which his proud father had been presented with his
sixth and last son. Later adopted, according to an old custom,
into a richer family, he acquired a new name: Yamamoto.

    Trained as a naval cadet, Yamamoto proudly bore the scars
he got at 21, when he lost the second and third fingers on his
left hand during Admiral Togo's great victory over the Russian
navy at the Strait of Tsushima in 1905. Yamamoto had come to
know the U.S. as a graduate student at Harvard and as naval
attache in Washington. And as executive officer of Japan's
naval flight school, he had learned the new religion of air
power. He loved poker, bridge and shogi, the Japanese version
of chess. Said one of his top aides: "He had a gambler's heart."

    Now 57, with a gray crew cut, Admiral Yamamoto commanded
Japan's Combined Fleet, but he disliked the imperial navy's
cautious strategy. In case of war, its plan was to fall back and
try to lure the U.S. Pacific Fleet into the Inland Sea between
the Japanese home islands of Honshu and Kyushu. But as early as
spring 1940, Yamamoto remarked to one of his officers: "I
wonder if an aerial attack can't be made on Pearl Harbor."

    Others had suggested such a strategy but it had always
been rejected as too dangerous. Pearl Harbor was too far away,
too inaccessible, too well defended. Besides, the overall
strategy of striking south toward Malaya and the Dutch East
Indies now required all the navy's resources. Yamamoto
nonetheless began in early 1941 to assemble some trusted
lieutenants to make plans for Operation Hawaii, which he also
named Operation Z, after Admiral Togo's historic banner at the
battle of Tsushima.

    One of Yamamoto's key planners was Commander Minoru Genda,
still only 36, still a hot pilot at heart, first in his class
at the Etajima naval academy, combat ace over China, leader of
a daredevil stunt team called Genda's Flying Circus. Genda
contributed several key ideas: that every available Japanese
carrier should be assigned to the attack, that it should combine
dive-bombing, high-level bombing and torpedoes, that the
attackers should strike at dawn.

    Not the least important of his ideas was to recruit a
cadet classmate named Mitsuo Fuchida, who could train all of
Yamamoto's pilots and lead them into battle. Fuchida, grandson
of a famous samurai, was born in 1902, a Year of the Tiger
("Tora! Tora!"), so he was 39 when summoned to his mission. An
ardent admirer of Hitler, he had grown a toothbrush mustache.

    The techniques of dive-bombing and torpedo bombing were
still relatively new, and aerial torpedoes were almost
impossible to use in water as shallow as Pearl Harbor. Filching
an idea from a recent British torpedo raid against the Italian
naval base of Taranto, Genda had technicians create auxiliary
wooden tail fins that would keep torpedoes closer to the
surface; others converted armor-piercing shells into bombs. But
drilling was Fuchida's main task, and all summer his planes
staged trial runs over Kagoshima Bay in Kyushu, chosen for its
physical resemblance to Pearl. Only in September did Genda tell
him, "In case of war, Yamamoto plans to attack Pearl Harbor."

    Ironically, Yamamoto didn't want to carry out his own
plan. But if Japan was going to be forced to fight, he believed
it should strike first and strike hard, in the hope that a
demoralized U.S. would then accept a negotiated peace. If he was
deluded in that hope, he was not deluded about U.S. power. "If
I am told to fight regardless of the consequences, I shall run
wild for the first six months or a year," he presciently told
Prince Konoye in the fall of 1940, "but I have utterly no
confidence for the second or third year."

    By 1940 Japan had installed a pro-Japanese regime in
Nanking, but U.S. aid enabled Chiang to fight on. Konoye began
wondering about mediators to end the exasperating war that Tokyo
insisted on calling the Chinese Incident. Where angels fear to
tread, in rushed the missionary fathers of the Maryknoll
Society, who guilelessly assured each side that the other seemed
ready to talk. And so talks began in Washington in the spring
of 1941.

    Talks is hardly the word. Tokyo's goal was to negotiate a
victory in China, Washington's goal to negotiate a Japanese
withdrawal. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, nearly 70, a
longtime power on Capitol Hill, was a log-cabin-born Tennessee
mountaineer who knew little of the Japanese and disliked what
he knew. He once referred to Tokyo's envoys as "pissants."
Japan's ambassador, Kichisaburo Nomura, 64, a one-eyed retired
admiral and former Foreign Minister, was considered a moderate
and so was mistrusted in Tokyo. It did not help that Hull had
a speech difficulty, while Nomura was partially deaf.

    Hardly had the talks begun when the Japanese, having
already seized a number of bases in northern Vietnam, suddenly
occupied the south in July 1941. That threatened not only the
back route to China but British control of Malaya and Burma (now
Myanmar). Roosevelt retaliated by freezing all Japanese assets
and placing an embargo on all trade in oil, steel, chemicals,
machinery and other strategic goods. (The British and Dutch soon
announced similar embargoes.) At the same time, he announced
that General Douglas MacArthur, the retired Chief of Staff now
luxuriating in the Philippines, was being recalled to active
military duty and financed in mobilizing 120,000 Filipino
soldiers. (Roosevelt had made another significant move that
spring, when he shifted the Pacific Fleet's headquarters from
San Diego to Pearl Harbor.)

    Roosevelt's embargo was a devastating blow, for Japan
bought more than half its imports from the U.S. The Japanese
military leaders were determined to fight. When they met with
the Cabinet on Sept. 3, they insisted on an October deadline for
Konoye's diplomatic efforts. The Prince asked for a meeting with
Roosevelt, but Hull was opposed, and Roosevelt, preoccupied with
the increasing likelihood of war with Hitler, never answered.
Konoye resigned on Oct. 16. Tojo, a Kwantung Army veteran who
was then War Minister, became Premier.

    Though Japan's military leaders had decided on war, they
had not yet agreed to a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Yamamoto was adamant: "Japan must deal the U.S. Navy a fatal
blow at the outset of the war. It is the only way she can fight
with any reasonable prospect of success." But war games
suggested that an attacking fleet would be spotted and badly
mauled. As late as October, Yamamoto learned that the staff
admirals, determined to concentrate on the drive into Southeast
Asia, wanted to take away two or three of his six carriers. The
First Air Fleet's own commander, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo,
supported that decision. "The success of our surprise attack on
Pearl Harbor," Nagumo predicted dolefully, "will prove to be the
Waterloo of the war to follow." Yamamoto sent an aide to inform
the navy's high command that if his Pearl Harbor plan was
rejected, "he will have no alternative but to resign, and with
him his entire staff." Yamamoto got his way.

    The military set a new target date of Dec. 8 (Dec. 7 in
Hawaii), and the Emperor and his military chiefs formally
approved Yamamoto's attack plan on Nov. 3. But the Foreign
Ministry instructed Ambassador Nomura and Special Envoy Saburo
Kurusu to make "a final effort" in Washington.

    On Nov. 17, Yamamoto visited his training base in Saeki
Bay to bid his men farewell. "Japan has faced many worthy
opponents in her glorious history -- Mongols, Chinese,
Russians," Yamamoto said, "but in this operation we will meet
the strongest opponent of all. I expect this operation to be a
success." Genda, Fuchida and other officers joined him in eating
surume (dried cuttlefish) for happiness and kachiguri (walnuts)
for victory. Near portable Shinto shrines, they toasted the
Emperor with sake and shouted, "Banzai!"

    It took Nagumo's fleet five days to reach the rendezvous
point at Hitokappu Bay in the Kuriles just north of Japan's main
islands. Fog swirled over the desolate outpost, and snow fell
intermittently as the fleet steamed eastward at dawn on Nov. 26.

    The armada boasted six carriers, led by Nagumo's flagship,
the Akagi, 400 warplanes, two battleships, two cruisers, nine
destroyers and a dozen other surface ships. At an average 13
knots, refueling daily, the attack fleet pursued a course 3,500
miles through the empty expanse of the North Pacific. Its orders
provided that "in the event an agreement is reached in the
negotiations with the United States, the task force will
immediately return to Japan," but nobody expected that to
happen.

    The envoys made their "final effort" on Nov. 20,
presenting to Hull an unyielding proposal on which Foreign
Minister Togo said "no further concessions" could be made.
Nomura noted that this was an inauspicious day -- "They call it
Thanksgiving" -- but he dutifully delivered the message. It said
the U.S. must restore trade to pre-embargo levels, provide oil
from the Dutch East Indies and not interfere with Japan's
"efforts for peace" in China.

    Hull's answer, just as forceful, said the U.S. oil embargo
would continue, and demanded that Japan "withdraw all military,
naval, air and police forces from China and from Indochina." He
handed it to the envoys on Nov. 26, the day Nagumo's fleet left
Hitokappu Bay for Pearl Harbor. Hull did not know that, since
the fleet was under total radio silence, but he did know from
intercepted messages that another Japanese war fleet had passed
Formosa on its way toward Indochina or Malaya. "We must all
prepare for real trouble, possibly soon," Roosevelt cabled
Churchill.

    The War Department then sent Hawaii and other outposts an
important but significantly ambiguous "war warning."
"Negotiations with Japan appear to be terminated to all
practical purposes," said this Nov. 27 message over the
signature of Chief of Staff George Marshall. "Japanese future
action unpredictable but hostile action possible at any moment
. . . You are directed to undertake such reconnaissance and
other measures as you deem necessary, but these measures should
be carried out so as not repeat not to alarm civil population
or disclose intent. Report measures taken." Hawaii's commander,
Lieut. General Walter Short, not a man of broad vision, reported
back that he was taking measures to avert sabotage -- parking
his aircraft close together and keeping all ammunition safely
locked up. Since Washington did not specify a threat to Pearl
Harbor, Short felt he had done his duty, just as Marshall felt
he had done his.

    The Navy Department sent an even stronger message to its
top commanders, specifically including the Pacific Fleet chief
in Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Kimmel: "This dispatch is to
be considered a war warning. Negotiations with Japan . . . have
ceased, and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the
next few days." Kimmel, 60, a hard-driving disciplinarian who
had held his command less than a year, took the warning as "no
more than saying that Japan was going to attack someplace."

    Kimmel and Short were only too aware that Washington was
concentrating on Hitler's victories in Russia and his
submarines' ravages of Atlantic shipping. Though Chief of Naval
Operations Harold Stark acknowledged to Kimmel that his Pacific
Fleet was weaker than the Japanese forces arrayed against it,
he not only turned aside Kimmel's request for two new
battleships but took away three he had, plus one of his four
carriers, to help fight the Battle of the Atlantic.

    Roosevelt's assertive strategy against Japan was largely
a bluff, backed by inadequate armed forces and inadequate funds.
Washington theoreticians saw the Philippines as a check to any
Japanese move southward. MacArthur overconfidently promised that
he would soon have 200,000 Filipinos ready for combat, and the
War Department began in the summer of 1941 to ship him the first
of a promised 128 new B-17 Flying Fortresses. By April 1942,
said Marshall, that would represent "the greatest concentration
of heavy-bomber strength anywhere in the world," able to
interdict any Japanese assault on Southeast Asia and mount
"incendiary attacks to burn up the wood and paper structures of
the densely populated Japanese cities."

    Perhaps the greatest single cause of American complacency
in the Pacific was the fact that the U.S. military's Operation
Magic had deciphered Japan's sophisticated Purple diplomatic
code in 1940. But that triumph had its drawbacks. U.S.
intelligence officials had to sift through so much trivia that
they failed to react to some important messages, such as a Tokyo
request to its Hawaiian consulate for the exact location of all
ships in Pearl Harbor. Also, the code breaking was kept secret
even from some key officials. While the British were plugged
into Magic, and MacArthur too, Kimmel and Short were not.

    Ironically, the Nazis warned the Japanese that their codes
might have been broken, but Tokyo refused to believe the
Americans were smart enough for such a feat. Just as ironically,
while U.S. code breakers knew of the Japanese warships heading
for Southeast Asia, Nagumo's radio silence meant that his
carriers heading for Pearl Harbor simply disappeared. On Dec.
2, Kimmel's intelligence officer confessed that nothing had been
heard from the Japanese carriers for about two weeks.

    "What!" said Kimmel. "You don't know where [they] are?"

    "No, sir, I do not. I think they are in home waters, but
I do not know where they are."

    "Do you mean to say that they could be rounding Diamond
Head, and you wouldn't know it?"

    "I hope they would be sighted before now."

    And the Americans could intercept but not understand a
message Yamamoto sent his fleet on Dec. 2: "Climb Mount
Niitaka." That meant "Proceed with the attack."

    One thing that the code breaking did tell Washington was
Tokyo's answer to Hull's last proposal. Before the original even
reached the Japanese envoys, a messenger brought an intercepted
version to Roosevelt in his White House study after dinner on
Dec. 6. The President read it carefully for about 10 minutes,
then said to his closest aide, Harry Hopkins, "This means war."

    Roosevelt tried to call Admiral Stark, but he was at a
revival of Sigmund Romberg's Student Prince; the President
didn't want him paged at the theater lest that cause "undue
alarm." When Roosevelt did finally reach him shortly before
midnight, the Navy chief said, according to his later
recollection, that the message was not "something that required
action." After all, Stark testified, warnings had already gone
out that Japan was "likely to attack at any time in any
direction."

    That same Saturday night was the standard party night in
Pearl Harbor, not orgiastic but convivial. Hundreds of soldiers
and sailors from Schofield Barracks and Hickam and Kaneohe
converged as usual on Waikiki Beach to see what was going on at
Bill Leader's bar, the Two Jacks or the Mint. Tantalizing
Tootsies was the name of the variety show at the Princess.

    Kimmel attended a staid dinner party at the Halekulani
Hotel and left early. He had a golf date the next morning with
General Short, who went to a charity dance at the Schofield
Barracks and also left early. As he rode along the coast
highway, Short admired the lights of Pearl Harbor glowing below
him. "Isn't that a beautiful sight?" he said. "And what a target
it would make!"

    Though the final Japanese note said nothing about war or
Pearl Harbor, it was not quite complete -- it contained 13 parts
and said another would soon follow. The 14th and last part
reached Washington the morning of Dec. 7. It notified the U.S.
that "it is impossible to reach an agreement through further
negotiations." An accompanying message instructed Nomura to
deliver the note "at 1 p.m. on the 7th, your time."

    Nobody in Washington knew Hirohito had asked that the
warning be delivered before the attack -- 1 p.m. in Washington
was 7:30 a.m. in Hawaii -- but an Army intelligence officer,
Colonel Rufus Bratton, guessed as much. Bratton telephoned
Marshall at his quarters at Fort Myers, Va., but he was out
riding. More than an hour later, about 10:30 a.m., Marshall
called back and said he was coming to his office shortly. About
the same time, Hull was meeting with War Secretary Henry L.
Stimson and Navy Secretary Frank Knox. "Hull is very certain
that the Japs are planning some deviltry," Stimson recorded in
his diary, "and we are all wondering when the blow will strike."

    Fuchida woke at 5 a.m. As he told American military
historian Gordon Prange, he put on red underwear and a red shirt
so that if he was wounded, his men would not be distracted by
the sight of his blood. At breakfast, one of his lieutenants
said, "Honolulu sleeps."

    "How do you know?" asked Fuchida.

    "The Honolulu radio plays soft music. Everything is fine."

    At 5:50 a.m. Nagumo's fleet reached the takeoff point,
about 220 miles north of Pearl Harbor. The six carriers turned
east into a brisk wind and increased speed to 24 knots.
Nagumo's flagship was flying the celebrated Z pennant that
Admiral Togo had flown at Tsushima in 1905. The flight decks
tilted more than 10 degrees, and the wind whipped spray over
them.

    "We could hear the waves splashing against the ship with
a thunderous noise," Fuchida recalled later. "Under normal
circumstances, no plane would be permitted to take off in such
weather . . . There were loud cheers as each plane rose into the
air." Once up, the pilots circled overhead until all 183 planes
assigned to the first wave were airborne. At 6:15 Fuchida gave
a signal, then led the way south.

    At almost that very hour -- around 11:30 a.m. in
Washington -- Marshall arrived at his office and read the
ominous words Bratton had brought him. He asked the officers
assembled there what they thought it meant. All expected an
imminent Japanese attack -- somewhere. Marshall recalled that
every major U.S. base had been warned of that more than a week
earlier. Bratton and others urged a new warning. Marshall
scrawled a message reporting the 1 p.m. meeting and added, "Just
what significance the hour set may have we do not know, but be
on alert accordingly."

    Bratton rushed the message to the War Department signal
center, where Marshall's scrawl had to be retyped for
legibility. The message went to several points within a few
minutes, but because of atmospheric difficulties, the copy for
Hawaii went by commercial wireless. It reached Honolulu at 7:33
a.m. and ended in a pigeon hole, awaiting a motorcycle messenger
to deliver it.

    Fuchida's bombers had to fly blind over dense banks of
clouds, so they homed on the Honolulu commercial radio station
KGMB. Over his receiver, Fuchida heard soothing music, then a
weather report: "Partly cloudy . . . over the mountains. Cloud
base at 3,500 ft. Visibility good." Fuchida flew on.

    To save money and fuel and manpower, the Pearl Harbor
authorities had recently canceled weekend reconnaissance
flights. But they had acquired some new radar equipment, though
the National Park Service strongly objected to towers being
installed on scenic mountaintops.

    Two trainees operating a mobile radar unit at Opana, on
Oahu's northern coast, were about to shut down when their watch
ended at 7 a.m. Suddenly, Private Joseph Lockard noticed a large
blip -- "probably more than 50" planes -- approaching southward
from about 130 miles away. On the phone to Fort Shafter,
Lockard reported to Lieut. Kermit Tyler "the largest [flight]
I have ever seen on the equipment." The inexperienced Tyler
figured that the planes must be a flight of the new B-17s
expected from California. He told Lockard, "Don't worry about
it."

    As Fuchida's bombers neared Oahu, the defenders of Pearl
Harbor got the last of their many warnings. Just outside the
harbor, the U.S. destroyer Ward spotted an intruding submarine
at 6:30 a.m. and opened fire from 50 yds. away. As the sub began
diving, the Ward finished it off with depth charges. Lieut.
William Outerbridge's report of his action was still ricocheting
around headquarters when Fuchida arrived overhead.

    "What a majestic sight," he said to himself as he counted
the vessels lined up in Battleship Row in the dawn's early
light. He pulled the trigger on his flare gun. That was supposed
to signal the slow-moving torpedo bombers to take advantage of
the surprise and strike first. But Fuchida's fighter pilots
missed his signal to provide cover, so he fired again for the
dive bombers to begin, and then the Japanese all attacked at
once. Even when they made mistakes, it seemed that nothing
could go wrong.

    Within minutes, Pearl Harbor was pandemonium: explosions,
screams, tearing steel, the rattle of machine guns, smoke, fire,
bugles sounding, the whine of diving airplanes, more explosions,
more screams. With Battleship Row afire, Fuchida's bombers
circled over the maze of Pearl Harbor's docks and piers,
striking again and again at the cruisers and destroyers and
supply ships harbored there.

    Other Japanese bombers swarmed over Hawaii's military
airfields, Hickam and Wheeler, Kaneohe and Ewa. Dive-bombing and
strafing the American planes neatly parked on the runways, they
quickly won control of the sky. They wrecked hangars,
warehouses, barracks -- as well as the Hickam Field chapel and
the enlisted men's new beer hall, the Snake Ranch. And in the
midst of all this, a rainbow appeared over Ford Island.

    To many of the Americans, the whole morning had a
dreamlike unreality. Disbelief had been the overwhelming first
reaction -- this couldn't be happening, it was a trick, a drill,
a silly rumor, a prank -- disbelief and then pain and then
anger, and still disbelief.

    Admiral Kimmel was preparing for his golf game with
General Short when an officer phoned him with the news that
Japanese planes were attacking his fleet. The admiral was still
buttoning his white uniform as he ran out of his house and onto
the neighboring lawn of his chief of staff, Captain. John Earle,
which had a fine view of Battleship Row. Mrs. Earle said later
that the admiral's face was "as white as the uniform he wore."

    "The sky was full of the enemy," Kimmel recalled. He saw
the Arizona "lift out of the water, then sink back down -- way
down." Mrs. Earle saw a battleship capsize.

    "Looks like they've got the Oklahoma," she said.

    "Yes, I can see they have," the admiral numbly responded.

    General Short, who couldn't see the explosions, bumped
into an intelligence officer and asked, "What's going on out
there?"

    "I'm not sure, general," said Lieut. Colonel George
Bicknell, "but I just saw two battleships sunk."

    "That's ridiculous!" said Short.

    Down on Battleship Row, Fuchida's bombers kept pounding
the helpless battlewagons. The West Virginia took six
torpedoes, then two bombs. One large piece of shrapnel smashed
into the starboard side of the bridge and tore open the stomach
of the skipper, Captain Mervyn Bennion. A medic patched up the
dying man's wound, and a husky black mess steward, Doris Miller,
who had once boxed as the ship's heavyweight champion, helped
move the stricken captain to a sheltered spot.

    Fire and smoke swirled around the bridge. Bennion told his
men to leave him; they ignored him. He asked them how the
battle was going; they told him all was well. After Bennion
died, an officer told Miller to feed ammunition into a nearby
machine gun. Like other blacks in the Navy of 1941, Miller had
not been trained for anything but domestic chores, but he soon
took charge of the machine gun and started firing away. A young
ensign recalled later that it was the first time he had seen
Miller smile since he last fought in the ring.

    Caught by surprise, and then often finding all ammunition
neatly locked away, the defenders hacked away the locks and
fought back with any weapons at hand -- machine guns, rifles,
pistols. This usually achieved nothing, but there were some
surprises. At Kaneohe Naval Air Station on the east coast of
Oahu, a flight of Mitsubishi Zeroes was strafing the hangars
when a sailor named Sands darted out of an armory and fired a
burst with a Browning automatic rifle.

    "Hand me another BAR!" shouted Sands. "I swear I hit that
yellow bastard!"

    Japanese Lieut. Fusata Iida turned to strafe Sands, but
the sailor fired another BAR clip, then ducked the bullets that
pocked the armory's wall. As Iida's Zero climbed again,
gasoline began streaming from his fuel tank. Before takeoff,
Iida had said that any pilot whose engine failed should crash
his plane into the enemy, so now he turned for a last attack.
For one incredible minute, the two enemies faced and fired at
each other, Iida from his crippled Zero, Sands with his BAR.
Then the Zero nosed into a highway and smashed into pieces.

    As Admiral Kimmel stood near a window, a spent machine-gun
bullet smashed the glass and hit him lightly in the chest.
Kimmel -- who would soon, like General Short, be dismissed from
his command -- picked up the bullet. To an aide, he observed,
"It would have been merciful had it killed me."

    In Washington the disbelief was just as overwhelming. "My
God, this can't be true, this must mean the Philippines," said
Secretary Knox on hearing the news. "No, sir," said Admiral
Stark, "this is Pearl."

    Knox called Roosevelt, and Roosevelt called Hull, who was
supposed to meet Nomura and Kurusu at 1 p.m. But the envoys had
trouble getting the message from Tokyo decoded and retyped and
asked for a delay, so it was 2:05 before they seated themselves,
all unknowing, in Hull's antechamber. Hull, who had already
read their message and knew about the raid on Pearl Harbor as
well, made a pretense of reading the document, then lashed out
at the luckless envoys. "In all my 50 years of public service,"
he declared, "I have never seen a document that was more
crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions." When Nomura
tried to answer, Hull raised a hand to cut him off, then showed
him to the door.

    Fuchida's surprise attack lasted only about half an hour.
Then, after a short lull, a second wave of 171 more planes
roared in. By now the Americans were on the alert and firing at
anything in sight. Twenty planes flying in from maneuvers with
the Enterprise came under heavy American fire; two were shot
down.

    The battered Nevada (its band having finished The
Star-Spangled Banner) managed to get up enough steam to proceed
majestically out into the channel to the sea. Despite a gaping
hole in its bow, its guns were firing, and its torn flag flew
high. As it edged past the burning Arizona, three of that doomed
ship's crewmen swam over, clambered aboard and manned a
starboard gun.

    "Ah, good!" the watching Fuchida said to himself as he saw
the slow-moving Nevada. At his signal, all available bombers
attacked in an effort to sink it and block the channel to the
sea. Bombs ignited huge fires in the ship's bow. It escaped
total destruction only by deliberately running aground.

    More fortunate -- indeed kissed by fortune -- were Army
pilots George Welch and Kenneth Taylor, who had gone from a
dance at the Wheeler Officers' Club to an all-night poker game.
They were still in formal dress at 8 a.m. when they saw the
first Japanese planes open fire overhead. Under strafing fire,
Taylor's car careened back to the P-40 fighters at Haleiwa
Field. Taking off, the two went looking for Japanese planes and
soon found them over Wheeler.

    "I got in a string of six or eight planes," Taylor
recalled. "I was on one's tail as we went over Waialua . . . and
there was one following firing at me . . . Lieut. Welch, I
think, shot the other man down." Welch's version: "We took off
directly into them and shot some down. I shot down one right on
Lieut. Taylor's tail."

    Landing only for more fuel and ammunition, the two
sleepless lieutenants set off for the Marine base at Barber's
Point. "We went down and got in the traffic pattern and shot
down several planes there," said Taylor, who suffered a severe
arm wound. "I know for certain I shot down two planes or perhaps
more; I don't know." Official records credited the two of them
with downing seven planes, almost one-quarter of all Japanese
losses.

    The great attack was really fairly short. The first
bombers returned to their carriers just after 10 a.m., scarcely
two hours after they descended on Battleship Row. Fuchida
lingered to observe and photograph the damage and was the last
to return to Nagumo's fleet. It was still only noon.

    Fuchida and Genda argued fiercely for renewing the attack.
The oil-storage tanks had not been hit, and the raiders had not
found any of Kimmel's three carriers (the Lexington and
Enterprise were at sea, the Saratoga undergoing repairs). But
Admiral Nagumo, who had mistrusted the plan from the start, felt
he had accomplished his mission and saw no reason to risk his
fleet any further. Back in Japan, Yamamoto strongly disapproved
of Nagumo's decision to withdraw but accepted the tradition that
such decisions are left to the combat commander on the scene.

    Long after the Japanese had left, Pearl Harbor
reverberated with reports of enemy invasions, parachute landings
and other nightmares. Jittery defenders fired wildly at anything
that moved. A fishing boat returning with the day's catch was
shot to pieces.

    On the capsized hull of the Oklahoma, Commander Kenworthy
strode up and down for hours listening for raps and banging from
the men trapped inside. Some survivors were finally pulled to
safety through holes cut in the hull, but others drowned in the
water rushing through the openings. Kenworthy wouldn't leave
until the last of 32 survivors had been saved. By then it was
Monday afternoon. Six sailors caught inside the West Virginia
died just before Christmas -- after two weeks of incarceration.

    In terms of casualties and destruction, this was one of
the most one-sided battles in history. The U.S. lost 2,433
killed (about half of them on the Arizona) and 1,178 wounded.
The Japanese, who had expected to sacrifice as much as one-third
of their force, lost 55 airmen, nine crewmen aboard five
minisubs and approximately 65 on one sunken submarine. The U.S.
lost 18 surface warships, sunk or seriously damaged; the
Japanese none. The U.S. lost 188 planes destroyed and 159
damaged; the Japanese lost 29. Yet three of the five wrecked
U.S. battleships (the California, Nevada and West Virginia) were
eventually restored to service, and all the lost warplanes were
eventually replaced -- more than replaced -- by the bombers that
struck Tokyo and Hiroshima.

    If Pearl Harbor seemed an American disaster, it proved a
Japanese disaster as well. Churchill knew that when he gloated
at the news: "So we had won after all!" So did Stimson, who felt
"relief . . . that a crisis had come in a way which would unite
all our people." So did Admiral Yamamoto, when he predicted
that he would run wild for only a year. Pearl Harbor united
Americans in rage and hatred, and thus united, powerful and
determined, they would prove invincible.