CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
At 6:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, the first wave of 183 planes—forty-three fighters, fifty-one dive bombers, forty-nine horizontal bombers, and forty torpedo bombers—took off from the Japanese First Air Fleet’s launch position, 240 miles north of Oahu, Hawaii.
Forty minutes later, the US destroyer Ward spotted the conning tower of a midget submarine headed for the entrance to Pearl Harbor. The destroyer sunk the sub with depth charges.
At 7:00 A.M., the second wave took off from the First Air Fleet. Two minutes later, the radar unit at Opana Point in Hawaii picked up a signal indicating a large formation of planes approaching from the north. They were mistaken for B-17s returning from the mainland.
By 7:48, the lead Japanese plane crossed the northern shoreline of Oahu, and the first bombs fell at the Kaneohe U.S. Naval Station.
It had been a sleepy Sunday morning, but the sailors quickly woke up. At 7:55, the full brunt of the Japanese air attack struck. Dive-bombers destroyed all thirty-three planes on the ground. The only survivor was the plane in the air on patrol at the time.
There would be no dogfights. By 8:05, the battleship Oklahoma had capsized. A direct hit on the Arizona caused what was at the time a record-sized explosion, instantly killing more than a thousand sailors.
Also put out of commission by the dive-bombers were the Nevada, California, West Virginia, Cassin, and Downes. All but the Oklahoma and the Arizona were repaired and eventually saw action in the war.
In all, 2,700 US sailors died. Americans heard the news on the radio, with regular programming interrupted by CBS announcer John Daly, later the host of the TV game show What’s My Line? Somewhere, Father Coughlin’s radio show was interrupted by the shocking news from Hawaii.
In New York, the boys were listening to football, the New York Giants of the NFL playing the Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds when the bulletin interrupted the second-half broadcast. Same thing in Chicago, where the Bears were playing the Chicago Cardinals, and in Washington, DC, where the Redskins were playing the Eagles.
And FDR had no choice but to immediately ask Congress to declare war on Japan. In solidarity, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.
Across America, boys lined up to enlist.
Once the US entered World War II, everything changed on the domestic front. In Minnesota, William Dudley Pelley disbanded his Silver Legion but continued to publish anti–U.S. government propaganda in his magazine called Roll Call.
Celebrities like Charles Lindbergh, a Nazi sympathizer who considered a run against FDR in the 1940 presidential election, now kept their opinions private. The great majority of American Nazis went so far underground that they disappeared entirely. Some of them, of course, were drafted, but an effort was made for obvious reasons to send young German American men to fight in the Pacific, where their allegiance would not be questioned. Luckily for those who remained stateside, their whiteness allowed them to blend back into the crowd, unlike the tens of thousand of Japanese Americans who were plucked from their peaceful lives and interned during the war, many of them at the former Camp Siegfried.
Many German Americans changed their names and—when asked—claimed to be of Swedish descent. The Germania Club, the scene of gangsters versus Nazis fighting in Chicago, changed its name to the Lincoln Club.
But going subterranean did not signal the end of the war against US anti-Semites by Jewish gangsters. Jews still took a poke at smug Aryans whenever they had a chance. Take Mickey Cohen. During the spring of 1942, four months after Pearl Harbor, now twenty-eight years old, he was busted for making book and spent some time in a downtown L.A. holding cell awaiting a court appearance. At the same time, the Nazi leader Robert Noble and an “outspoken isolationist” named Ellis O. Jones were brought in by police for questioning. The pair together ran an organization called the Friends of Progress and had made the papers by holding “mock trials” of FDR for war crimes.
Cohen’s court hearing that day was to discuss the ownership of a filed-off gun that had been found in his Santa Monica Boulevard bookie joint at the time of his arrest. Cohen claimed that he wasn’t initially in the same cell with “those assholes,” but after Cohen had a talk with the guards, Noble and Jones were moved into Cohen’s cell.
Cohen knew who Noble was; a “real rabble-rousing anti-Jew Nazi bastard,” Cohen called him. He’d heard about some of the crap Noble had said in the newspapers. The usual hate speech. He had no clue who Jones was, but he didn’t like him much, either. He was just another “weasel bastard.”
Now he could hear the two men talking.
“That fucking Douglas MacArthur should be in here instead of me,” Noble exclaimed.
Cohen took exception. “That’s a hell of a way to talk about the hero of our country,” he said.
Noble looked at Cohen and smirked. “Oh, you must be one of those Jews, huh?” Noble said.
“What about it?” Cohen asked.
“You should know MacArthur ran out on his troops at Bataan,” Noble said with a sneer.
That did it.
Cohen took a quick look around to make sure no one was watching and charged the Nazis. In a flash, Cohen grabbed both by the head and knocked their skulls together, a move later popularized by George Reeves on The Adventures of Superman TV show. Superman only had to knock the bad guys’ heads once and they fell unconscious. But Cohen, who was tough but not Superman, had to knock their heads together a couple of times and only managed to make them groggy.
Noble turned his back to Cohen, his hands on his head. Cohen kicked him in the seat of his pants so hard that his face hit the wall, breaking his glasses.
Then Cohen went to work with his fists. He expected some fight-back, but his foes were too stunned to do anything, so he pummeled their faces and ribs. When working their bodies, Cohen imagined he was Jack Dempsey busting up the ribs of Jess Willard on the Fourth of July.
After a time, Noble and his pal tried to escape, which was impossible as they were in a locked room with bars on the door. So instead they bellowed bloody murder. Guards came running.
“Why’d you put us in here with him,” they screamed. “The guy’s an animal.”
By the time the guards arrived, Cohen had returned to his seat and was calmly scanning a newspaper. He told the guards that the two men had gotten into a fight with each other.
“I stayed out of it. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t want to mix with them,” Cohen said, the picture of innocence.
“You’re a lying bastard,” they screamed, but no one paid attention.
General Douglas MacArthur was also the subject of Noble and Ellis’s legal troubles. They had been charged with libel over a pamphlet that claimed MacArthur fled Bataan in a cowardly manner. An L.A. county grand jury voted to indict the pair. This would be just the start of their problems, which would escalate into an FBI investigation and an eventual indictment for wartime sedition.
With America now embroiled in WWII, the Office of Naval Intelligence was worried about enemy agents infiltrating the U.S. through its ports. Efforts by the government to gather information from dockworkers and fishermen went nowhere, so—just as Judge Perlman had done—the intelligence officers contacted Meyer Lansky, who in turn had a talk with his best friend Lucky Luciano. Word went out, and the dockworkers and fishermen were on board, helping keep sinister figures from entering the U.S. on their watch.
The gangsters versus Nazis war moved overseas as well. After chasing Rommel across North Africa, the Allies planned to invade Sicily and then Italy in what was called Operation Husky. Luciano supplied information regarding the coastlines that was invaluable as the U.S. embarked on history’s largest sea-to-land invasion before D-Day.