Pearl Harbor Betrayed (43 page)

The stigmatization of Kimmel had begun.

*   *   *

Churchill had spent the evening of the seventh at his country home in Chequers entertaining, appropriately, U.S. ambassador to Britain John G. Winant and Roosevelt's special representative W. Averell Harriman. While in their company Churchill heard the news of Pearl Harbor from his butler, who had caught it on the radio. Within minutes Churchill placed his call to Roosevelt, who confirmed the report. That night, as he prepared for bed, the prime minister's mind filled with positive, even exultant, thoughts: “To have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy.” Britain's long, lonely nightmare was over. “So we had won after all!” Saturated with such emotion, “I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”
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Shortly after noon on Monday the eighth, Roosevelt appeared before a joint session of the Congress and delivered substantially the same talk that he had tested before the cabinet. In it he did not ask Congress to declare a war before the commencement of hostilities. Rather, he asked Congress to declare that “since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan,” a state of war “has existed” between the two nations. The speech lasted only six minutes and thirty seconds. It contained two sentences that have been securely graven into the monument of American oratory:

Yesterday, December seventh, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.…

 

With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounded determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.
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Thirty-three minutes later, Congress passed a joint resolution affirming the state of war. The vote in the Senate was 82 to 0, in the House 385 to 1 (Representative Jeannette Rankin [R. Wy.]). At 4:10
P.M
. the declaration was signed by the President.

A largely isolationist nation had become overnight a virtually united internationalist nation.

A fighting patriotism swept the land. Popular-music tastes changed, as though in an instant, from “Rockabye My Baby, There Ain't Gonna Be No War” to “Let's Remember Pearl Harbor!”

No doubt, on the other side of the world, it was borne home on Admiral Yamamoto Isoruoku, who had certainly anticipated it, that an awful avenging force had been unleashed.

EPILOGUE

I have always felt that Kimmel and Short were held responsible for Pearl Harbor in order that the American people might have no reason to lose confidence in their Government in Washington. This was probably justifiable under the circumstances at that time, but it does not justify forever damning these two fine officers.

Admiral Raymond A. Spruance
1961

 

At 1330 Admiral Nagumo ordered his Striking Force to shape course for home. The decision not to pursue further the defeated American fleet was taken at the urging of First Air Fleet chief of staff Kusaka, and against the strenuous objections of Genda and Fuchida. The two airmen argued that, since the air force was still virtually intact, and, although the aerial torpedoes had been expended, there were still plenty of bombs for the Kates and Vals, hence another air assault should be mounted. The pilots and crews on
Akagi,
as Fuchida could personally attest, were unanimously in favor of pressing the attack further, against the elusive carriers, if they could be located, or if not, against remaining targets on Oahu.

Fuchida thought that
Enterprise
and
Lexington,
with their accompanying heavy cruisers, were exercising in calmer waters to the south of Oahu. He recommended to Nagumo that, instead of retiring basically by the same route it had taken on the voyage out, the fleet should travel to the south of Oahu, thence in the direction of the Marshalls, all the while carrying out air searches for the American carriers. Two carriers could not stand up to Nagumo's six. But Nagumo and Kusaka raised what Fuchida later called “one insuperable obstacle.” That part of the tanker train that had detached at rendezvous Point C on the voyage out was standing by on the northwestern withdrawal route to refuel the fleet. If redirected southward it would not be able to catch up with the fast carriers. (Though no one on
Akagi
's bridge knew it, the American carriers were not south of Oahu but to the west and northwest.) Dashed, Fuchida recommended another pounding of Oahu, but he did not identify exactly which targets.
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But Nagumo firmly said no. Later, the once reluctant commander of
Kido Butai,
now its surprised victorious commander, committed his reasons to writing:

1. The first attack had inflicted practically all the damage that we had anticipated, and a further attack could not have been expected to augment this damage to any great extent.

2. Even in the first attack, the enemy's antiaircraft fire had been so prompt as virtually to nullify the advantage of surprise. In a further attack, it had to be expected that our losses would increase out of all proportion to the results achievable.

3. Radio intercepts indicated that the enemy still had at least fifty large-type aircraft in operational condition, and at the same time the whereabouts and activities of its carriers, heavy cruisers, and submarines were unknown.

4. To remain within attack range of enemy land-based planes was distinctly to our disadvantage, especially in view of the limited range of our own air searches and the undependability of our submarine patrol then operating in the Hawaiian area.
2

There may have been other reasons besides, which Nagumo would be reluctant to acknowledge. For one thing, as Combined Fleet Chief of Staff Ugaki entered in his diary on the day following the attack, “We haven't yet had a plan like that.”
3
His Navy had not thought sufficiently ahead or broadly to consider the possibility that
Kido Butai
might carry off a surprisingly easy victory, which it did. An overly cautious operations staff had prepared no contingency plan for that eventuality. And Nagumo probably was not willing to improvise. Capt. Tomioka Sadatoshi, chief of the Operations Section of the Naval General Staff, told the historian Gordon Prange after the war that Nagumo acted in character with a pervasive defect in the officers list: inflexible compliance with orders combined with the inability to adapt to new situations and to go beyond instructions.
4
A second possible reason was that Nagumo, who had initially opposed the Hawaii Operation, and now was sensible of the fact that he had met the bare requirements of his mission, was not willing to exploit the unanticipated opportunity before him. Protecting his fleet assumed more importance than inflicting additional damage on the enemy. In Prange's deft expression, “The admiral felt like a gambler who has staked his life's savings on the turn of a card and won. His only idea was to cash in and go home as quickly as possible.”
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When Nagumo broke radio silence to inform Admiral Yamamoto both of the unexpectedly successful results of the raid and that he was retiring, staff officers on board the flagship
Nagato
objected that Nagumo should return to wipe up. Yamamoto is reported to have told them, “It would be fine, of course, if it were successful. But even a burglar hesitates to go back for more. I'd rather leave it to the commander of the task force.… He isn't going to do it just because he's prodded from a distance. I imagine Nagumo doesn't want to.”
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But late in 1942, at Truk, Yamamoto said to Vice Admiral Ozawa Jisaboro, commander, Third Battleship Division: “Events have shown that it was a great mistake not to have launched a second attack against Pearl Harbor.”
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The reason: the first attack had hit the
wrong targets
.

*   *   *

To Admiral Kimmel the immediate problem was locating the Japanese carriers. At 0817 he had ordered the PBYs to “locate enemy carriers.” With that, Ensign Tanner's dawn patrol flight of three PBY-5s was diverted from the operating area to southward to the sea approaches to Oahu between 310 and 360 degrees, northwest to north. Logan Ramsey, who had made that canny decision, was one of the few persons in command that morning who got it right: the carriers were either to the northwest or north. Tanner's flight did not find the carriers but one of his PBYs on a due north heading tangled with Zero fighters. Kimmel seems not to have known at the time of his order that PatWing 2's flight line lay in fiery ruin—only one PBY got into the air from Ford Island that day; it flew a pie sector search to the northwest without seeing anything but
Enterprise
with her three cruisers and nine destroyers.
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And little help could be expected from PatWing 1 at Kaneohe where damage to the PBYs was proportionately even more severe. But four other PBY-5s were in the air that morning over the operating area conducting intertype exercises for communication and recognition with USN submarines. Ramsay redirected these four to the sector 245 degrees to 285 degrees west of Oahu. But these, of course, would not be in positions to sight the Japanese carriers.
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Kimmel had briefly entertained what he called “a hunch” that the attack had come from the northward, so that the planes could fly downwind with their bomb loads. But he failed to follow up on it. During the second wave bombing, cryptanalyst “Ham” Wright called Layton from Station Hypo to say that a direction-finding bearing had been acquired on a Japanese radio transmission. Unfortunately, it was a “bilateral” bearing: either 003 degrees or its reciprocal, 183 degrees. There was no way to correct it by reference to the Navy's large-array direction finder on a peak north of Pearl, since, for some reason, the Army had unplugged the telephone lines to that installation. When Kimmel asked Layton what information he had on the carriers' position, Kimmel became “uncharacteristically testy” when all Layton could report was: either north or south. “Goddammit!” he quoted Kimmel as saying, “We're under attack here … and you don't even know whether they're north or south. For Christ's sake!”
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Later, at 1046, bearings on another radio transmission indicated the “probability” of an enemy carrier to the southward at 178 degrees from Barbers Point on the southwest corner of Oahu. Kimmel had that position transmitted to Halsey on
Enterprise,
whose Task Force 8 was then about two hundred miles south by west of Pearl, standing to eastward. Halsey launched fifteen Douglas “Dauntless” dive-bombers with 1,000-pound bombs and altered course to a more southerly heading. At the time, Task Force 12 (Vice Admiral Newton), composed of the carrier
Lexington,
three cruisers, and five destroyers, was positioned at 23°45′ N, 171°15′ W, or 425 miles southeast of Midway and 300 miles west of French Frigate Shoals on a westerly course to land eighteen Marine F4F fighters on Midway. Newton cancelled the fly-off when he learned of the attack on Pearl, and, subsequently, Kimmel ordered him to proceed at fastest speed to join up with Halsey south of Oahu. The search by both carriers would be fruitless, of course, but, in one of that Sunday's kinder blunders, the erroneous heading saved both U.S. carriers from extinction. If, by contrast, the
Enterprise
and
Lexington
had steamed to the northward and had encountered the retiring
Kido Butai,
the odds against them would have been three to one, and, absent a “five-minute miracle” such as would happen at Midway, the carriers probably would have gone down with all hands.
11

At Pearl, Kimmel scratched together thirty-four surviving aircraft of varying types and sent them on search missions 200 to 300 miles out. Short, too, got five B-17 and three B-18 bombers into the air, along with one A-20A medium bomber. At the same time, warships that had cleared the harbor, as well as those that now could, were organized as Task Force 1 and directed by Kimmel to join up with Halsey's Task Force 8 “to assist in locating and destroying the enemy.”
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All such efforts proved futile, and only after the recovery of flight charts from downed Japanese aircraft did the Hawaiian commanders learn that the attack made against them had been flown from the north. Admiral Newton said later that he had wondered from the start why anyone thought that the Japanese would be to the south, since that was the fleet's training area and all commercial shipping had been routed to southward, hence the Japanese carriers would likely have been observed before they launched their aircraft.
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In any event, both surface and air searches of the approaches to Oahu continued with what assets were available during the days and weeks that followed, since both Kimmel and Admiral Nimitz, who relieved him on the seventeenth and formally took command on the thirty-first, believed that the Japanese, after reflecting on the ease with which they had broken through Oahu's door, would return. The Navy Department helped by sending the newly refitted carrier
Saratoga
(CV-3) from the West Coast, and, from the Atlantic, the carrier
Yorktown
and three battleships that had been detached in the preceding April and May. Every available PBY was also rushed to Oahu. Nimitz would write on 7 January to the Navy's new CINCUS (that office now having been severed from CINCPAC) Admiral Ernest J. King:

The attack of 7 December will be followed by others. The enemy has exploited the element of surprise. He can, however, use it again, although to a lesser extent because of local alertness measures, if adequate search is not maintained. In any case, his strength in carriers and heavy ships is such that he need not depend on surprise.…

Japanese aircraft carrier aviation, with all due allowance for the advantage of surprise, proved itself to be in a very high state of development. This applies with full force not only to material and to the training, skill and determination of personnel, but also to the unquestionably brilliant manner in which the entire expedition was conceived, planned and handled. This arm of the Japanese fleet has been greatly underestimated. Its potential must be recognized from now on.
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