CHAPTER 1
(7–8 DECEMBER 1941)
PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII
SUNDAY, 7 DECEMBER 1941
0755 HOURS LOCAL
The first planes came in high, well above the ships and their sleeping crews in the anchorage. Some of the few sailors who were on deck actually waved, marveling at the sight of so many warplanes in the air that early on a Sunday. Then, across the water, came the sounds of explosions and firing from Ford Island and Hickam Field.
Just two minutes later, more aircraft, coming in low and fast, headed straight for the rows of battleships alongside Ford Island. The planes pulled up just in time to clear the masts of the assembled armada, but not before dropping aerial torpedoes from their bellies. The wakes of the torpedoes pointed like fingers toward the largest vessels of America’s Pacific Fleet. As the 550-pound warheads detonated against the hulls beneath the water, those on deck could see the bright insignia on the wings of the green and silver aircraft as they swept overhead: a red circle representing the rising sun of Japan. Many of those sleeping or working below decks never even knew who killed them.
Within minutes of the first bombs and torpedoes, radio operators at shore stations and aboard several of the ships under attack sent out the message “AIR RAID PEARL HARBOR THIS IS NO DRILL.” Weeks later, intelligence officers found a recording of another radio transmission. At 0753 hours that morning, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, leader of the airborne assault, had sent a coded signal to Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, commander in chief of the Japanese navy’s First Carrier Strike Force and the forty-nine Kate bombers, forty Kate torpedo bombers, fifty-one Val dive-bombers, and forty-three “Zeke” fighter attack planes accompanying him on the first wave of the raid. The message confirming that they had achieved complete surprise was one word, repeated three times: “TORA, TORA, TORA!”
Mitsuo Fuchida led the air attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war he was converted to Christianity by Jake DeShazer, one of the Doolittle Raiders and a former POW.
Fuchida’s message was accurate. The Japanese air attack caught the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marines in Hawaii incredibly unprepared. By 0945, a second wave of 167 attack aircraft had added to the devastation, then wheeled north to return to their six carriers: the Akagi, the Kaga, the Soryu, the Zuikaku, the Hiryu, and the Shokaku. Pearl Harbor, the largest naval anchorage in the Pacific, was littered with sunken and burning American warships; the best dry-dock and ship repair facilities west of California were in shambles; only 25 percent of the aircraft based in Hawaii were still in operation; and there were 3,581 American casualties.
It was a disaster of historic proportions. Yet it failed in its principal goal: keeping the U.S. Navy from launching a westward offensive against Japan until the emperor’s armed forces had seized sufficient territory to secure the Home Islands and their “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
Conceived by Fleet Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the brilliant, fifty-seven-year-old commander of Japan’s Imperial Combined Fleet, the surprise attack was code-named Operation Z—after Admiral Togo’s famous “Z” signal before the Japanese victory against the Russian navy at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905.
Yamamoto, Harvard-educated and highly regarded in the United States, where he had served as a naval attaché, had initially urged his colleagues to avoid war with the Americans. Overruled by the Imperial General Staff, he set to work on a plan to do even greater damage to the Americans.
Admiral Yamamoto was the strategist of the Pearl Harbor attack and CINC of the Imperial Combined Fleet until American pilots shot down his plane in 1943.
Yamamoto was a lifelong gambler, and he drafted a war plan that was bold and brilliant, but risky. He told the Japanese military planners, “If we are to have a war with America, we will have no hope of winning unless the U.S. fleet in Hawaiian waters can be destroyed.” It meant annihilating America’s Pacific Fleet before it could sortie toward Japan, and it required that the Imperial Army seize key bases in the Philippines and Guam, with near simultaneous strikes against the British in Hong Kong and against Dutch possessions in Indonesia.
He told the Imperial General Staff that “if successful,” the raid would enable them to hope for a short, limited war, after which Japan would quickly sue for peace on its own terms. The overall concept was approved by the General Staff by June 1941. Yamamoto then set his best naval planners to the most difficult part of the task: a surprise air assault of unprecedented size against Pearl Harbor, 4,000 miles from Japan. By August, working around the clock in absolute secrecy, Rear Admiral Takajiro Onishi and his fellow naval aviators Minoru Genda and Mitsuo Fuchida were able to deliver a final attack plan requiring six aircraft carriers and more than 350 aircraft.
In early September 1941, the Japanese Imperial General Staff approved Yamamoto’s daring war plan, and fleet units commenced a rigorous period of pre-attack training, though they were not told their target. By early November, the six carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, nine destroyers, thirty submarines, and eight tankers—constituting Nagumo’s First Carrier Strike Force—began to assemble at Tankan Bay in the Kurile Islands, Japan’s northernmost and remotest naval base. On the night of 26 November, this armada, the mightiest battle fleet ever assembled in the Pacific, was ordered to sortie into the frigid waters of the north Pacific and head east. Once out of port and sailing without lights under strict radio silence, the captains of the fifty-eight ships opened envelopes containing their secret orders and learned their target: Pearl Harbor.
Meanwhile, as Nagumo’s force steamed undetected toward its objective, the Americans at Pearl Harbor were woefully unprepared for the coming onslaught. Some, including Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, and Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, commanding general of the U.S. Army’s Hawaiian Department, believed that they would have sufficient advance knowledge of any Japanese attack.
Both Kimmel and Short knew that American cryptographers had broken the Japanese Purple code, giving senior U.S. officials access to Tokyo’s diplomatic messages. Using intercepts of cables sent from Tokyo to the Japanese ambassadors in Washington, the Department of the Navy issued a “war warning” to the Pacific Fleet headquarters on 27 November—the day after Nagumo’s battle group departed Japanese waters.
On 2 December, the U.S. code-breakers intercepted a message to all Japanese diplomatic and consular posts to destroy their code and cipher material and burn all classified documents. Based on this intercept and one directing the Japanese consulate in Honolulu to continue reporting on U.S. fleet activities at Pearl Harbor, another “war warning” message to all units in Hawaii was issued by the War and Navy Departments. Still, both commanders and their staffs believed that they had several weeks—if not a month or more—to prepare.
They had not ignored the situation. Ever since President Roosevelt had “indefinitely” stationed the entire Pacific Fleet in Hawaii in May 1940, naval officials had been complaining about the risk from Japan. In October 1940, the fleet commander, Admiral James O. Richardson, visited Washington to personally point out their deficiencies to Navy Secretary Frank Knox. Shortly after Richardson turned command over to Admiral Kimmel on 1 February 1941, almost one-quarter of the Pacific Fleet was transferred to the Atlantic to help contend with the German submarines wreaking havoc on Lend-Lease shipments to England. Though his organizational tables called for six twelve-plane squadrons of patrol aircraft, Kimmel had only forty-nine operational patrol planes available.
Admiral Husband E. Kimmel planned for traditional naval war and didn’t foresee the importance of aircraft. He became a scapegoat for the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Because the Army was responsible for defending Hawaii, General Short’s requests for men and matériel were equally severe. He had requested 180 B-17 bombers, but had only six that were flyable, and all his fighters were obsolete. Though the Army had only 102 out of the 233 anti-aircraft guns that were deemed necessary, thousands of them were being shipped to our struggling British and Soviet allies. And while five of the new, highly secret mobile radar units had been delivered to Hawaii in November, few operators had been trained. Worse still, because the Army and Navy in Hawaii operated independently, with no unified command structure, even if a radar operator detected an incoming attack, the Army had no other means of alerting the Navy besides a phone call to the Fleet headquarters.
Uppermost in the mind of Admiral Husband Kimmel was the security of his ships, oil storage tanks, and naval aircraft. His long-range reconnaissance aircraft could fly 750 miles on patrol and sink any submarines in sensitive areas, especially at the entrance to Pearl Harbor. Kimmel regarded enemy submarines as the most serious threat to his fleet. Across the mouth of the harbor, the Americans had installed an anti-sub, anti-mine, and anti-torpedo net that extended almost to the bottom of the harbor floor, only forty-five feet deep. Though the anti-submarine net was highly classified, and the area around it designated as a restricted zone that was off-limits to civilian or foreign vessels, the Japanese were fully aware of it. German agents and Japanese spies routinely gathered remarkably detailed intelligence on our installations, ships, and aircraft. More than half a dozen reports provided data on the net at the harbor entrance.
Unaware of the magnitude and accuracy of the Japanese espionage but concerned about the inadequacies they had reported back to Washington, both Admiral Kimmel and General Short believed that they had done all they could to prepare for war. Warned of possible sabotage to his aircraft, General Short ordered them to be grouped close together so that they could be more easily guarded at Hickam and Wheeler Fields.
All combatant ships in port were ordered to maintain Readiness Condition Three, allowing for a 25 percent watch set on the guns and an ability to get under way in twelve hours. In the early morning of 7 December, Admiral Kimmel, trying to save on spare parts and aircrews, dispatched only three of his scarce long-range PBYs out on patrol—but none of them were sent north of Oahu, where Nagumo launched his air strikes. Both Kimmel and Short went to bed on Saturday 6 December believing that they had plenty of time before Japan launched an attack. They were, of course, dead wrong.
It might appear from the results that all went exactly according to Yamamoto’s plan, but that wasn’t so. In Tokyo, at the last minute, Prince Hiroyasu Fushimi insisted that the attack include some special weapons that were hidden away at the top-secret Kure Naval Base. These weapons—so secret that only a handful of Japanese military officers knew about them—were midget submarines. The Japanese had been quietly working on these specialized subs for years. Fushimi was convinced that they could penetrate the highly secure Pearl Harbor. He wanted five of them to be included on the mission so that by attacking U.S. ships right at their docks, the submarine service would be part of the great victory over the American fleet.
The undersized subs, seventy-eight feet long and six feet high, were significantly smaller than conventional submarines. Displacing only forty-six tons, they had room for just two crewmen, specially trained for this mission.
Yamamoto was at first reluctant to include the unproven submarines in the attack, fearing that they could cost him the advantage of surprise if they were detected before his aircraft were over the target. Fushimi’s tiny subs would have to be moved into position hours ahead of the planned attack, risking the possibility of detection and thereby alerting the American military to the impending air strike.
The midget subs, officially called Special Purpose Submarines (SPS), had been under development since the late 1930s and had been subjected to intensive testing by the Imperial Navy at the secret base in Kure. But they were a new weapon, dependent on unproven tactics. Yamamoto, not only skilled in the art of war but also wise to political realities, understood that Prince Fushimi had powerful allies in the emperor’s household, so he reluctantly modified his plan of attack to include the midget subs.
Five I-Class submarines, Japan’s largest, were fitted with special cradles enabling each “mother sub” to carry an SPS behind the conning tower. Yamamoto designated the group as the Special Attack Unit.
The 600-horsepower, battery-powered mini-subs were capable of twenty-three knots surfaced and nineteen knots submerged, but only for two hours. At two knots they could run for nearly ten hours submerged, if the two-man crew didn’t run out of air first. Because of these limitations, Yamamoto ordered the Special Attack Unit I-boats to approach within ten miles of Pearl Harbor early on the morning of 7 December, fan out around the entrance, and launch their midget submarines. The mother subs would then retreat to a rendezvous point off Oahu and await the return of the SPSs after the attack.
Each SPS was outfitted with two Type 97, eighteen-inch-diameter torpedoes. There was nothing “midget” about these weapons—each had a 772-pound warhead. When fired from the vertical tubes at the bow of the subs, they could run up to three miles at fifty miles per hour. The midget subs were also packed with high-explosive charges that could be detonated by the crew, effectively making the subs suicide bombs.
Once released by their mother subs, each SPS was to make its way through the anti-submarine nets and into the harbor to launch its torpedoes at the U.S. ships moored around Ford Island.
Ten men had been chosen and trained for the two-man crew of each midget sub. They had to be able to tolerate confinement in a tiny space for long periods of time; be able to withstand extreme cold and heat; and be able to endure the foul air and the buildup of sulfuric acid gases given off by the sub’s lead-acid batteries. Those serving on Japanese midget subs had to have not only no fear of death, they had to expect to die.
Early on the morning of 7 December, while Nagumo’s six carriers were preparing to launch aircraft 230 miles north of Oahu, the five mother subs of the Special Attack Unit arrived on station off the mouth of Pearl Harbor. Navy Lieutenant Kichiji Dewa was aboard the mother ship for SPS I-16 TOU, one of the midget subs. (The midget subs didn’t have individual names like all of the large ships. Instead, they were referred to by the designation of their mother ships, followed by the suffix TOU.) He spoke by telephone to the officer inside the SPS as the tiny vessel prepared to disconnect from its mother ship, wishing that he were one of the ten brave men in the five midget subs headed for Pearl Harbor.
SIGNALMAN KICHIJI DEWA
Aboard Submarine Chiyoda
6 December 1941
2210 Hours Local
We were the chosen ones among the chosen. We had realized the importance of our mission, so despite the kind of work we were doing, there was not much dreading. We were gradually making progress in training for the port and harbor assault.
When I went on the Chiyoda, I did a lot of training and learned many spiritual lessons [as] the “chosen ones among the chosen.” It was maybe two months after I went on the Chiyoda that I really started to become aware of my status as a crew member of the SPS. I felt that we were working on something really important.
During training they created what is called “port and harbor assault.” The strategy was that when SPSs encountered enemy warships, the first thing they tried to do was lessen the numbers of warships, battleships, and troops—to decrease the enemy military units. The SPS was to be used for this “reduction of enemy forces” plan.
While we were submerged, we devoted ourselves to sleep. When we surfaced at night, we maintained the ship. Our major duties were charging the batteries and ventilation. Since we carry large batteries, if we leave the hatch closed all day long, a lot of gas gets generated. And if the motor is turned on with that generated gas, it can spark and blow up. Someone actually died from an explosion, so we were constantly careful about that. Otherwise, it was cleaning the ship. Bilge, filthy water, would accumulate. We can’t just leave it, especially in places like the motor room.
After we loaded the SPS on the mother submarine and sailed, it was officially announced by the captain that our target was Pearl Harbor.
I heard that the upper staff officers weren’t going to grant permission [for the mission] unless there were arrangements for the crew members to return alive, but I don’t think the commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Masaji Yokoyama, expected to return alive. He used to say, “There is a saying, ‘Kill the small insect to get the big insect.’”
Basically, even if they were to succeed with the assault and return, the U.S. was no doubt going to track us down, and once they did, the existence of the mother ship would be discovered, and if it were attacked, we would lose everything. So it would be for the best if just the two in the SPS died. That was our way of thinking. I don’t think anyone expected to come back.
When they were leaving, they were dressed in the uniforms that airplane pilots wore. They took their Japanese sword and food we prepared for them.
On the night of 6 December, I was in charge of the phone connecting the [mother] ship and the SPS. I was talking about maintenance and ordinary things. On the other end, Lieutenant Commander Masaji Yokoyama, the commanding officer of the SPS, spoke, thanked us for the job well done, and things like that. Both of us were matter-of-fact. It was just an ordinary conversation. We weren’t really thinking about death. We were only thinking about carrying out our duties properly.
PACIFIC OCEAN
ONE MILE SOUTH OF OAHU
SUNDAY, 7 DECEMBER 1941
0245 HOURS LOCAL
Once released from their “mother subs,” the skippers of the midget subs tried to find a way into the harbor so they’d be in place around Ford Island when the aerial attack started.
The crews of the midget subs could see the lights of Honolulu through their periscopes and hear big-band jazz music coming from the local radio stations—the same ones whose signals had guided the mother subs to the release point ten miles from the harbor mouth. Getting this far had been relatively easy. Slipping undetected through the anti-submarine net into the anchorage behind or beneath one of the American ships as it entered the harbor presented a much more formidable challenge.
The commander of the five-sub Special Attack Unit, twenty-nine-year-old Lieutenant Commander Naoji Iwasa, had been a Japanese test pilot. He had trained the other nine men and emphasized the importance and seriousness of their task. He hadn’t exactly said that theirs was a suicide mission, but none doubted that it was. “No one intends for us to come back,” Iwasa had told his men. Iwasa, the skipper of the mother ship I-22, was also skipper of the SPS I-22TOU. Iwasa was the oldest of all the crew members, and his crewman was Naokichi Sasaki, an expert kendo swordsman.
Lieutenant Commander Masaji Yokoyama, the skipper of SPS I-16TOU, was assisted by Petty Officer Sadamu Uyeda, a quiet mountain boy.
Skipper Shigemi Furuno of SPS I-18TOU had told his parents that he couldn’t get married because he had to be ready to die at any moment. His crewman was Petty Officer Shigenori Yokoyama.
Ensign Akira Hiro-o, the skipper of SPS I-20TOU, at twenty-two years old, was the youngest of the midget submariners. Petty Officer Yoshio Katayama, a farm boy, was his crewman and engineer.
Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki was the skipper of SPS I-24TOU, along with crewman Chief Warrant Officer Kiyoshi Inagaki.
At 0342 hours, the minesweeper USS Condor, on patrol just outside the harbor entrance, sighted what appeared to be a submarine periscope following in the wake of the USS Antares as she steamed slowly toward the harbor, waiting for the submarine net to drop at dawn so she could enter. The crew of the Condor immediately broadcast a warning over the radio: “SIGHTED SUBMARINE ON WESTERLY COURSE SPEED FIVE KNOTS.” Alerted by the Condor, the crew of the Antares also spotted the sub and repeated the message. The calls were heard by a PBY reconnaissance aircraft overhead and by the USS Ward, an ancient four-stack destroyer manned by Navy Reservists from the upper Midwest under a brand new captain, Commander William Outerbridge.
Aboard the Ward, Fireman First Class Ken Swedberg, a fresh-faced Navy Reservist from St. Paul, Minnesota, was at his “general quarters” battle station within seconds of the alert. As he peered into the darkness, his first thought was that it had to be one of Hitler’s submarines.
FIREMAN FIRST CLASS KEN SWEDBERG, USN
Aboard USS Ward, Pearl Harbor
7 December 1941
0630 Hours Local
I was a Fireman First Class, which meant I was normally in the boiler rooms. This is what I was trained for. But my job for “general quarters” was topside, up on deck, assigned to a World War I balloon gun designed to shoot down dirigibles.
About one o’clock Saturday afternoon, 6 December, the captain called a “general quarters” drill to test his reserve crew. This was his first drill, and I think he was very wise to do that, as it later proved. We went to battle stations and I manned my three-inch gun up on the bow, right below our main battery, the number-one four-inch gun. We went through our drills and the captain was pleased, so we went back to our regular watches.
There was a wire mesh net that was drawn across the harbor entrance at dusk. It normally wouldn’t open again until dawn. At night we’d make lazy figure eights outside the harbor entrance, sounding with our relatively new sonar. At 3:45 AM on the morning of 7 December, one of the minesweepers, the USS Condor, sighted what they thought was a periscope. We went to “general quarters,” raced over there, and searched for about an hour, but found nothing. And so then we went back on our patrol.
At daybreak, about six-thirty, just as the harbor was coming alive, the USS Antares was standing off, waiting for the net to open so they could enter Pearl Harbor. And in the wake of the Antares we spotted this sub conning tower, about four feet out of the water, following the Antares, obviously intending to follow the supply ship into the harbor. We went to “general quarters” immediately, and as we raced over to it, a PBY overhead dropped a smoke bomb to mark the position for us. As I manned my gun on the bow, I could see we were coming up pretty fast.
I’ve got a front-row seat. As we approached it, it looked as though we were on a collision course. Everybody was starting to brace themselves. But at the last minute, the captain veered to port. When he did, the starboard, or right side, raised up a little. Our naval guns could not depress down that far, so when we fired, the first shell, from number-one four-inch gun, went over the conning tower.
By now we were almost parallel to the sub, and number-three gun on top of the galley deck, on the starboard side, trained on it and fired. We were so close that the fuse didn’t travel far enough to arm, but the projectile put a hole right through the conning tower. It was a relatively small hole, but the sub took on water and started to sink. Obviously it filled up with water pretty quick.
We thought it was a German U-boat and released four depth charges set for a hundred feet. With the added weight of the water she had taken on, the sub lost her buoyancy and she settled like a rock—in twelve hundred feet of water.
We stayed at “general quarters,” and the captain gave the order to break out the Springfield rifles. About an hour or so later, two planes came at us from inside the harbor and we could see the “meatballs,” the red suns, painted on their wings. Our new anti-aircraft guns fired at the planes, and that’s really what saved us, because they broke off their attack. We got a splash on one side, a splash on the other side. And that was as close as we came to getting any hits.
By 8:15, we could see the smoke and explosions ashore. About that time the captain told us that he had received a radio message that “this is no drill.”
ABOARD USS WARD
PEARL HARBOR
7 DECEMBER 1941
0645 HOURS LOCAL
After relaying what he had seen up on the bridge, Ken Swedberg busied himself at his gun station. At 0653, Commander Outerbridge transmitted a message to the commandant, 14th Naval District: “WE HAVE ATTACKED, FIRED UPON AND DROPPED DEPTH CHARGES UPON SUBMARINE OPERATING IN DEFENSIVE SEA AREA. STAND BY FOR FURTHER MESSAGES.”
The crew of the Ward, though all Reservists assigned to an aging destroyer, had been trained well and responded quickly.
As Ken Swedberg correctly surmised, the four-inch shell fired by the Ward’s number-three turret had not traveled far enough to arm. But even without exploding, the shell had done its damage. The round that hit the conning tower killed the Japanese skipper and the sub took on water. After sinking the Japanese midget sub, the Ward’s crew continued to salvo depth charges into the harbor, assuming correctly that there were probably other submarines in the waters.
The PBY patrol plane that Ken Swedberg had seen from the deck of the USS Ward was being flown by Lieutenant (jg) Bill Tanner, a twenty-four-year-old pilot from San Pedro, California. He was a graduate of USC and had joined the Navy in 1938, had trained in Pensacola, Florida, and had been stationed in San Diego until his squadron had ferried their twelve PBYs to Kaneohe Bay, on the northeast coast of Oahu, earlier that year. Tanner had responded to the radio calls from the Antares and the Condor and was flying over the area where the sub was last sighted. In the gray dawn of the morning, Captain Tanner thought he saw something and banked his plane for another look. His stomach fluttered a little when he spotted the subs—at least two, maybe three of them, in waters below—scarily close to the ships anchored just beyond the anti-submarine net, inside Pearl Harbor. He dropped smoke signal flares into the water where he had spotted the midget subs and then radioed a message to the air base telling of his discovery.
Tanner turned his PBY around and headed back to the spot where he had dropped the smoke containers. He readied his plane for dropping depth charges on the target to try to sink the enemy subs that he’d discovered in the Hawaiian waters.
A PBY plane like the one that detected the midget subs.
CAPTAIN WILLIAM (BILL) TANNER, JR., USN
Navy Air Recon PBY
Pearl Harbor Patrol Area
7 December 1941
0630 Hours Local
The PBY was a very slow, cumbersome airplane, but it had great range. It had a crew of eight and two engines, and was a seaplane used for long-range reconnaissance. They flew on patrol about 700 or 800 miles and returned. They were not fighter airplanes; it was strictly reconnaissance, but we had guns if we were attacked.
On the morning of 7 December, it was our turn to fly patrol, and as a matter of fact, it was the first real patrol that I had flown as a command pilot. I had just been made a patrol commander the week previous. I took off before dawn, along with two other airplanes, one flown by Fred Meyers and another by Tommy Hillis. We flew out of Kaneohe Bay on the north side of the island of Oahu, around Barber’s Point, turned east, and flew south of Pearl Harbor, with the island about two miles offshore. Then we veered slightly to the southeast and followed the line of the islands of Maui and Lanai toward the big island—about a hundred miles—and then we’d turn, and return on a parallel course twenty miles further to sea. That’s what I was supposed to do. The other two airplanes had slightly different patrols, to the north and east of where I was.
I saw it, and the copilot saw it too—what looked to be a buoy in the water, but a moving buoy. We had never seen anything quite like it. There was no question in our minds that it was an enemy submarine. It looked like it was on a course directly heading toward Pearl Harbor. We looked off to the left and saw the Ward steaming toward the object. We were too close to do anything about arming bombs, so we dropped two smoke signal flares on the object to help the Ward close in on it.
We turned left to circle and come back and see what was happening, and as I turned the airplane, the Ward was firing at the submarine. From what we could tell, it looked like the first shot went high, and the second shot I thought was high because I saw it splash in the water behind the submarine.
There was no question that it was an enemy submarine because our subs were not allowed to be submerged in that area, and we were ordered to attack any submerged submarine we sighted in the restricted zone. We completed our circle, came around, and dropped our two depth charges. The Ward followed its gun attack by dropping depth charges as it went over the spot where the submarine was.
We reported, “SANK ENEMY SUBMARINE ONE MILE SOUTH OF PEARL HARBOR.” We sent it in code, not by voice, back to our headquarters. We had no indication we were at war but we sent it in Morse code, just as we were supposed to. We got an answer from our base that said, “VERIFY YOUR MESSAGE.” And so we did, and our base told us to remain in the area until further notice.
We circled there for some time. When we didn’t see anything other than what we had already reported, Fleet Air Wing One sent us a message to resume patrol.
ABOARD JAPANESE SPS I-24TOU
PEARL HARBOR OUTER PERIMETER
7 DECEMBER 1941
0650 HOURS LOCAL
Twenty-three-year-old ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, stripped to just a loincloth, sat at the periscope of his midget submarine. Because he had no radio contact with the other SPS boats, he was unaware that one of them had just been sunk. He panned the periscope around to see if the USS Antares, the supply ship waiting outside the harbor, had been given clearance yet to move inside the bay and on to the docks. If the Antares was moving in that direction, then that would mean the underwater anti-sub net was open and Ensign Sakamaki could maneuver his midget sub, submerged below and behind the Antares, to get inside the harbor next to all the U.S. Navy ships at anchor around Ford Island. Sakamaki’s orders called for him to get inside the harbor and launch his two torpedoes and “sink as many ships as he could,” any way that he could. His orders made aircraft carriers the first priority, then battleships, followed by heavy cruisers. If the American carriers were not there, the Japanese submariners decided that their primary target should be the battleship USS Pennsylvania, the flagship of Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
It had been more than seven hours since the midget sub had been released from the mother sub some ten miles away, and by now the sulfuric acid gases were building up inside the cramped sub.
But Ensign Sakamaki had more problems inside his tiny sub than the buildup of toxic gases. Ever since they had detached from I-24, the minisub’s gyroscopic compass—his primary means of navigation—had been malfunctioning. He and his crewmate, Petty Officer Kiyoshi Inagaki, had been working for the past several hours to try to repair the gyrocompass but had been unsuccessful. Eager to participate in the attack, they were both growing increasingly anxious that they would not make it inside the harbor before the air attack began, in little more than an hour.
Sakamaki’s duty was to steer the midget sub, and Inagaki’s job was to operate the ballast and trim valves. Working together, they tried to navigate toward the mouth of the anchorage by recalling the detailed charts of Pearl Harbor that they had memorized while en route across the Pacific from Japan. They, along with the other four midget sub crews, had been required to memorize all the pertinent details and layouts of not just Pearl but four other harbors as well: Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, and perhaps most frightening to the Americans, had they known about it, San Francisco.
USS MONAGHAN, DD-354
PEARL HARBOR
7 DECEMBER 1941
0755 HOURS LOCAL
A little more than an hour after the USS Ward sank a sub outside the anchorage, the USS Curtiss, a seaplane tender, and an auxiliary ship, the USS Medusa, also sighted one of the midget subs—this time inside Pearl Harbor. They immediately sent messages to the USS Monaghan, a destroyer that had just gotten under way. But as the Monaghan got up steam to race toward the new contact, the sky was suddenly filled with planes and all hell broke loose around them.
As Japanese aircraft dropped bombs and torpedoes, strafing the American airfields, barracks, and fleet, only one SPS midget sub penetrated the harbor. It launched a torpedo at the Curtiss, which by now had also been severely damaged after a Japanese plane had crashed into it. Despite fighting fires inside her hull and defending against other aircraft, the crew of the tender replied to the torpedo attack with a salvo of gunfire that scored a direct hit on the sub’s conning tower.
The underwater missile intended for the tender missed and struck a dock at Pearl City. But the torpedo’s wake alerted lookouts on the USS Monaghan . With anti-aircraft guns blazing at swarming Zeros, the destroyer, belching black smoke to hide it from the aerial attack, charged at the minisub, which then fired its second torpedo at the bow of the oncoming American vessel. The shot went wide, and seconds later, the Monaghan rammed the sub at high speed, crumpling its stern like a discarded cigarette. For good measure, before clearing the blazing harbor, the Monaghan dropped depth charges on the damaged sub. She sank quickly into the mud at the bottom of the anchorage.
By the time Commander Fuchida’s second wave of aircraft reached Pearl Harbor, the Monaghan had joined the Ward and several other U.S. combatants—including the cruisers Phoenix, St. Louis, and Detroit, and destroyers Tucker, Bagley, Dale, Henley, and Phelps—outside the anchorage. There they joined in the attack on two other SPS midget submersibles—one of which was detected and believed sunk by depth charges after it fired its torpedoes at the USS St. Louis. Though never confirmed, a fourth midget sub was initially presumed to have been sunk about a mile outside the harbor during one of several depth charge attacks by American destroyers that ensued during the afternoon of 7 December and the morning of the following day.
Yamamoto’s misgivings about the SPS attack were proving to be well founded. But for one of the midget sub skippers, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, the attack would prove to be the most ignominious event of his life.
ENSIGN KAZUO SAKAMAKI
Aboard SPS I-24TOU
Oahu, Hawaii
8 December 1941
We were under severe orders to keep our mission secret, so we couldn’t surface or make any noise. Two destroyers were working the area, patrolling. When I approached, they dropped many depth charges. I tried again to pass the patrol and get into the harbor. We were instructed to try to get past the anti-submarine net, and even cut the net if necessary to get into the harbor.
We rushed the net and cut the wire mesh, trying to enter so we could get to our rendezvous point inside, but it was so hard, impossible to make a good course because my gyrocompass did not work. Then we got caught on the reef. We tried for four hours to try and get moving, but could not.
The next day, 8 December , just before dawn, we emptied the ballast tanks. I ordered my crewman to abandon ship. At that time, both of us were overwhelmed by the bad air inside the submarine.
Before I knew it I was floating in the sea, hurt. I cannot be sure, but maybe when we jumped into the water we got injured on the coral. I don’t know. Waves—big waves—pushed me to the island, in front of the American airfield.
I was unconscious . . . and remembered nothing. I was captured.
By the night of 7 December, the sole surviving midget sub, piloted by Ensign Sakamaki, was in dire straits. Its gyrocompass inoperable and batteries nearly depleted, the sub drifted east until it ran aground on a coral reef off Bellows Field late that night. Sakamaki and his junior officer, Inagaki, were forced to abandon ship. Before doing so, they set a detonator on an explosive device to keep their sub from falling into American hands. Then they swam for the shore, fewer than a hundred yards from where the sub ran aground. Unfortunately for the hapless Sakamaki, the explosive charge failed to work as advertised and the sub did not self-destruct and sink. Worse still, Inagaki either drowned or committed suicide, and the exhausted Sakamaki, injured from the coral and sick from the poisonous fumes that had filled the submarine, barely made it ashore, where he finally collapsed, unconscious.
The next thing he recalls is a Colt .45 automatic pistol being held against his head by an American soldier, yelling at him in English to get up. The soldier holding the pistol was Corporal Akui of the Hawaii National Guard. He had just made Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, Imperial Navy, the first Japanese prisoner of war.
SECOND LIEUTENANT STEVE WEINER, US ARMY
Bellows Field Communications Shack
Pearl Harbor
7–8 December 1941
Early Sunday morning, just as the attack began, there was a four-engine plane that buzzed our field. Now, Bellows Field is just a short strip, used for gunnery practice for P-40 fighter planes. And when this plane passed over, we thought it was the Navy, but they didn’t have four-engine planes. Moments later, there was a crash. A B-17 trying to land on our strip had overrun our runway and crashed into the ditch at the far end. Those of us that were in the BOQ [Bachelor Officers’ Quarters] got dressed quickly, ran down to the plane, and found that the crew was semi-hysterical. They had been shot up—some of them were bleeding, and you could see where the plane had been shot at.
We asked them, “What do you mean, you were attacked? Who attacked you?”
And while we were trying to make sense of the situation, a flight of Japanese fighter planes came in and started strafing us, and we all ran for cover. I ran to the operations shack, where there was a space between the floor and the ground. I stayed there until the attackers left.
After the attack, the armory was opened. None of us had carried arms before, but now we could take whatever we wanted. We each took .45s and M1 rifles, but there was no loose ammunition for the rifles. All they had were bandoliers for the .30-caliber machine guns, but the shells fit the rifles. So we wrapped bandoliers around us.
We were advised to pair off, dig a foxhole, and be prepared for hand-to-hand combat. By late afternoon I paired off with a young pilot from Texas. He was greener than me, and neither of us had ever fired a gun. So it starts to rain, and it was a miserable time, and we’re sitting commiserating with each other—how it might be our last day on earth. He was sitting on my right, and because it was raining he took out his handkerchief to wipe his rifle, and he fired it across my lap. And I almost became a Pearl Harbor Purple Heart recipient on the first day of the war!
Later, after dark, we were sitting in the foxhole, and we saw two figures walking toward us from the ocean, about a hundred yards from where we were. When they got close enough, we saw that one was Corporal Akui, who had been stationed at the end of the runway. He was a member of the Hawaiian National Guard, leading a prisoner who was nude, with the exception of a loincloth. The corporal turned him over to us.
I asked, “Where did you get him?”
Corporal Akui said, “He walked right out of the water.”
I think he was happy to turn him over to us. We, in turn, were looking to turn him over to a higher authority, so we took him to the operations shack. We sat him down and could see that he had been in the water for a number of hours. His skin was all wrinkled and he looked distressed, so we put a blanket around his shoulders and gave him some water and crackers. We tried to get some intelligence but he was defiant. He just looked from one face to the other, and we realized that we weren’t getting anywhere with him. We decided that two young second lieutenants with no experience in interrogation weren’t likely to get this guy to talk.
After an hour of attempted interrogation we realized we weren’t getting anywhere. We didn’t know who he was or where he came from and kept hoping that a senior officer would show up and take him off our hands.
Then, all of a sudden, after about two hours of just sitting there, the prisoner finally spoke. In crude English he asked for a paper and pencil. He wrote, “I Japanese Naval Officer. My ship catch on coral. I jump in water, swim to this airplane landing. I no tell about ships. Kill me in an honorable way.” And he signed his name, Kazuo Sakamaki.
Well, early Monday morning, we see a conning tower sticking up, about a hundred, or a hundred and fifty yards offshore. We couldn’t get very close—we were on shore—this was still in the water, and it wasn’t accessible. I don’t know who arranged it, but somebody from the base swam out to the sub with a towline, and with a jeep we pulled it in. We also found the body of an enlisted Japanese sailor. It washed ashore later that morning. Never in our wildest dreams did we think that we’d be attacked by midget submarines.
Ironically, these little-known facts of history are often overshadowed by the other events that originated in the skies over Pearl Harbor. This footnote to that “Day of Infamy” has been brought to light by a handful of warriors and historians from both sides of the hostilities.
For more than sixty years, members of the destroyer Ward, the Monaghan , and others had maintained that they had sunk three of the Japanese midget subs shortly before and during the infamous air attack. Yet, except for the captured sub commanded by Ensign Sakamaki—his sub is on display at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas—no evidence could ever be found to prove the claim that at least three other subs were sunk. Photographs taken during the aerial attack bear out evidence of a sub’s presence in the harbor, but couldn’t prove that any of them were sunk.
Then in 1960, off Keehi Lagoon, Navy divers found a midget sub during practice exercises. On 28 August 2002, just a few miles outside the mouth of Pearl Harbor, another was discovered. A research submarine from Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory made a discovery that confirms that the Ward fired the first shot and scored the first victory over the Japanese attackers.
John Wiltshire, director of the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory, told me the Ward did indeed sink the midget sub. He showed me a four-inch hole in the starboard side of the conning tower—a shot that even John Wayne would have had trouble making. Wiltshire said, “This is the midget sub sunk by the USS Ward on the morning of December 7, 1941. It was found over 1,200 feet down on the ocean floor, just a few miles outside Pearl Harbor. It vindicates the crew of the USS Ward. It shows that, in fact, the crew of the Ward accomplished that dramatic first kill with an incredible shot from an ancient deck gun.”
During that first battle of World War II, the U.S. defenders nailed four of the five midget subs, having sunk three and captured the fourth, Ensign Sakamaki’s, after it ran aground. The fifth sub was variously believed to have been sunk outside the harbor on 7 or 8 December, or to have escaped altogether. Twelve hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. code-breakers intercepted a Japanese fleet message thought to have originated on the fifth midget sub: “SUCCESSFUL SURPRISE ATTACK.”
But after the war, it was concluded that the fifth sub had been lost trying to rendezvous with the mother sub—and it’s still out there somewhere in the Hawaiian waters. All five mother ships waited two days for the midget subs to return. None did.
In the aftermath of the attack, Admirals Nagumo and Yamamoto would be decorated by Emperor Hirohito for their victory. Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short were relieved of command just ten days after the attack. Though both men asked for courts-martial to clear their names, neither request was granted.
And as for American forces at Pearl Harbor? Other than the irreplaceable lives lost, the attack was not as devastating as it might have been. Half the Pacific Fleet, including its three carriers—the Enterprise, the Lexington, and the Saratoga—were out of port on various assignments. Because the Japanese neglected to attack the shipyards, salvage and repair work on damaged vessels began almost immediately. Of the battleships that the Japanese thought they had sunk forever, only the Arizona and the Oklahoma (and the target ship Utah) were total losses. The West Virginia, the California, the Nevada, the Pennsylvania, the Maryland, and the Tennessee were all repaired and saw action later in the war. And the same was true for the cruisers Helena, Honolulu, and Raleigh. Other than the destroyers Cassin and Downes and the repair ship Sotoyomo, which were damaged beyond repair, every other vessel hit during the attack was fixed and returned to duty.
Japanese Midget Sub
Fuchida’s pilots also ignored two other targets that would prove critical to the United States in the days ahead: Untouched by a single Japanese bomb or bullet was the enormous fleet fuel farm, where millions of gallons of fuel oil and aviation gas were stored. And in perhaps the greatest error of all, not one of the U.S. submarines in port at the time of the attack was touched. Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet would soon feel the consequences of these mistakes.
A total of 350 Japanese aircraft carried out assaults on the Utah, the Raleigh, the Helena, the Arizona, the Nevada, the California, the West Virginia , the Oklahoma, and the Maryland. The U.S. Pacific Fleet was nearly decimated. At the same time, attacks on nearby air bases severely crippled America’s air assets. Kaneohe Naval Air Station lost thirty-three out of thirty-six of its Catalina PBY flying boats. Hickam Field and the base at Ford Island suffered extensive damage to the runways, to aircraft parked on the fields, and to barracks and BOQ buildings housing the military personnel.
Some ninety-eight ships, about half of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, were in port the day of the attack. Miraculously, the other half of the American fleet was elsewhere in the Pacific on that fateful day. All of her carriers, most of her heavy cruisers, and about half of her destroyers were at sea when the attack occurred. That lucky break would help the United States greatly when America fought back, determined to rebound.
Luck, or Providence, played a key role that day for America.