Pearl Harbor Betrayed (44 page)

The Japanese carriers would not return to Pearl. But, in the June following, they would attempt to ambush the U.S. carriers off Midway, and, for all their “brilliance” and “potential,” suffer there a crushing defeat. On that occasion it was the Japanese force that was surprised.

*   *   *

Before leaving the subject of surprise hostile attack, it bears mentioning that a carrier-borne air strike proved during the Pacific War to be the most difficult of all forms of naval attack to defend against, as the Japanese learned again and again, to their sorrow. First, because the attacking carriers made but a tiny mark on a very large ocean, thus were hard to detect. Second, because the weapons delivery systems that they launched reached their appointed targets with unprecedented speed. From 1 February 1942 to 13 August 1945 there were 72 major raids by U.S. carrier-based planes in which the element of surprise was a factor. Of those, 21 (29.2 percent) achieved complete surprise; 32 (44.4 percent) achieved partial surprise; 15 (20.8 percent) achieved no surprise; and 4 (5.5 percent) achieved an unknown element of surprise.
15
Overall, it was demonstrated that it was practically impossible to prevent or deflect an air attack once it was launched, remarkably even in those cases where the recipient of the attack was aware of the presence of enemy forces in the vicinity—the Halsey-Doolittle raid on Tokyo and other Japanese cities on 18 April 1942 was undeterred even though the carrier
Hornet
had been reported by picket boats—and even in some cases where the recipient was fully alerted.

Examples of the latter are the raids on Rabaul Harbor in New Britain conducted by Task Force 11 under Vice Admiral Wilson E. Brown in February 1942, and by Task Force TF 38 under Rear Admiral Frederick C. Sherman and Task Force 50.3 under Rear Admiral Alfred E. Montgomery in November 1943. One may cite, too, the attack in February 1944 by Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher's Task Force 58 on Truk, in the Carolines, where the carrier force was sighted twenty-four hours out by a Japanese scout plane.
16
In Admiral Kimmel's case at Pearl, where the advance warnings from Opana and
Ward
were not recognized for what they were because of a systems breakdown, Kimmel was under no illusion, either before or after the attack, that with the available forces and weapons he and Short could
repel
a determined air assault. The most he thought they could do was to make the aggressor pay a heavy price—which, as we know from Japanese staff planning, the
Kido Butai
expected to pay. The very nature of a surprise leaves defenders paralyzed in its opening minutes by the question, Are those enemy planes or
ours
? Short stated in the month following the attack that “I will say, this: that if we had been absolutely on the alert for this kind of an attack, I believe that those low flying planes that came in at two hundred feet would probably have gotten in regardless.” Unlike Kimmel's AA, his own Army AA batteries had been far from being on the alert, and their tardy performance had been spotty at best.
17

There were many instances in World War II, and there have been numerous since, where surprise occurred and no advance warning was immediately recognized. One thinks of the Ardennes in both 1940 and 1944, of the Yalu in 1950, Tet in 1968, Yom Kippur in 1973, the Beirut Marine barracks in 1983, Kuwait in 1990, Khobar Towers in 1996, the East African embassies in 1998, and the USS
Cole
(DDG-67) in 2000. Place Pearl Harbor at the head of that list. At Oahu Island the Japanese executed a cunning and audacious operational plan, under the strictest secrecy, and achieved complete tactical surprise, even though, as learned later, the possibilities of American foreknowledge were present. And it was not only at Oahu that Japan achieved surprise that day. At many of the other targets she struck on 7 December (Washington times) complete or partial surprise was effected: Singapore at 1500; Khota Baru at 1540; Davao Gulf, the Philippines, at 1810; Guam at 1810; Hong Kong at 1900; and Wake at 2000.
18
The only sites where there was full foreknowledge and warning that day were Clark and Iba U.S. Army Air bases, north of Manila, Luzon Island, in the Philippines. There a flight of level bombers and Zero fighters from Formosa (now Taiwan), 500 miles to the north, arrived overhead and unmolested at lunchtime on the eighth, local time (on the other side of the International Dateline). Depending on the source consulted, the advance warning time between receipt of the signal about Pearl Harbor at Army and Navy headquarters and the Japanese air strike on Clark and Iba was a startling
seven to ten hours
.
19
And yet General MacArthur's bomber and fighter squadrons on Luzon were caught flatfooted on the ground, where in a single stroke he lost almost half of his Far East Air Force, including half his fleet of B-17s, to bombs and strafing fire.

*   *   *

Admiral Yamamoto knew, even before he demonstrated it in a single morning, that the primacy of the battleship in ocean warfare had ended. Hence, it was ironic that he expended so much energy, and took such great risks, to prove the point. The U.S. Navy was not essentially diminished by the sinking, capsizing, disabling, or damaging of eight battleships. Those slow, obsolescent vessels would have had no roles to play in the major carrier battles that developed soon afterward at Coral Sea (7–8 May) and Midway (4–6 June). Nor would they have been capable of cruising to the western Pacific to interdict or harass Japan's Southern Operation anytime in the next six months, for lack of a supply train. And when, finally, they were needed to soften up invasion beaches and to engage Japan's own big-gun ships in blue-water exchanges of fire, six of those battleships would be ready. And that was owing to the fact that the navy yard was able quickly to repair the damaged vessels—
Maryland
by February 1942,
Nevada
by December 1942,
Pennsylvania
by January 1943,
Tennessee
by May 1943—and to refloat, repair, and modernize
California
by May 1944 and
West Virginia
by July 1944. (Only
Arizona
and
Oklahoma
were total losses.)
California
and
West Virginia
could be raised readily because the harbor water was shallow and their hulls had settled on even keels in the muck.

If any of the stricken battleships had been caught at sea, off soundings, in the vicinity of Oahu where Nagumo's aircraft flew, instead of where they were, it is not likely that any would have survived. And the number of deaths would have been greater by many thousands. That accounts for the paradox uttered by Admiral Nimitz in 1965: “It was God's mercy that our [battleship] fleet was in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.”
20
Two of the sunken and two of the damaged battleships—
California, West Virginia, Tennessee,
and
Maryland
—would participate in the largest naval battle in history, Leyte Gulf, in 23–25 October 1944, when the once-wounded veterans of Battleship Row “capped the T” on the battleships
Yamashiro
and
Fuso
in Surigao Strait.

What, then,
should
the Japanese have targeted at Pearl? The navy yard. First, the two above-ground tank farms east and west, with their several million barrels of oil. That reserve had been barely sufficient to fuel the fleet on a training basis; oil was depleted faster than the supply line could haul it from the West Coast. Even the reduced fleet after 7 December expended 750,000 barrels of fuel oil in the first nine days after the attack, when the most that all the available Navy and commercial tankers could transport to Pearl at a time was 760,000 barrels.
21
Incineration of the tank farms would have totally immobilized the fleet. Second, the maintenance and repair shops, together with the drydocks, that kept the fleet ready for sea and, after 7 December, returned to the fleet two sunken and four damaged battleships, three damaged cruisers, three damaged destroyers, and the damaged
Curtiss, Oglala,
and
Vestal
.

Destruction of the tank farms and the shops, combined with demolition of the power plant and five submarines (
Gudgeon, Tautog, Cachalot, Narwhal,
and
Dolphin
) moored at the yard piers would have taken the Fleet out of the Pacific War for a conservatively estimated three months. On assuming command at Pearl, and expecting a second air strike, Admiral Nimitz observed, “There remain untouched the very important and tempting objectives of fuel supply, navy yard industrial establishment and drydocks, commercial docks and the city of Honolulu.”
22
But by the date of those remarks, 7 January 1942, Nagumo's carriers were moored back in home waters, having shot their bolts in the wrong direction. Though they may not have realized it yet, their great tactical victory had become a strategic defeat. Attacking Pearl Harbor, as shown earlier, was not even necessary to protect their warlords' seizure of rubber, tin, tungsten, and oil. And for their pains they had riled up an American public as no other act in our history had. Said historian Morison in an oft-quoted judgment, “One can search military history in vain for an operation more fatal to the aggressor.”
23

*   *   *

Admiral Kimmel was given, and then denied, one last opportunity to fight the Japanese enemy, at Wake Island. Actually a volcanic atoll with three small islands above the ocean's surface, Wake was first attacked on 8 December (local time) by thirty-six twin-engined bombers from Japanese bases at Kwajalein Atoll, 620 nautical miles to southward in the Mandates. Defending Wake were a detachment of Marines, of the 1st Defense Battalion, Fleet Marine Force, and Marine fighter squadron VMF-211, consisting of twelve F4F-38 Grumman Wildcats that had been flown off
Enterprise
on the fourth. After just ten minutes of bombing, nearly all the ground facilities on Wake were destroyed, nine Wildcats were destroyed or damaged, and twenty-three Marine officers and men and ten civilian workers were left dead or dying. Second and third bombing attacks hit the wounded garrison on the ninth and tenth, after which a small invasion force, with 450 naval landing troops, appeared off the beaches on the eleventh. The besieged garrison made surprisingly good use of its coastal artillery and surviving Wildcats, sinking two destroyers, damaging two light cruisers and setting fire to a transport, killing an estimated five hundred Japanese, and preventing an amphibious landing—all for the loss of a single American life.

At Pearl, Kimmel and his war plans staff were drawing up plans for sending a reinforcement expedition to the exposed base, when, on the same day that Wake held, CINCPAC headquarters was distracted by the arrival in Hawaii of Secretary of the Navy Knox, who had come to make a personal inspection of fleet losses. (A parallel mission from the War Department was frustrated when the aircraft carrying Col. Charles W. Bundy, of the War Plans staff, crashed into the High Sierras while on course to California.) After Knox's four-engine PB2Y Coronado flying boat set down in Kaneohe Bay, amid the burned wreckage of PBYs and hangars, he was driven to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel at Waikiki Beach. Kimmel greeted him there and, shortly afterward, escorted him and his aide Captain Beatty to CINCPAC headquarters, from which the secretary could plainly see the broken remains of Battleship Row, the
Arizona
still smoking. There, too, he heard a detailed briefing on what had happened from Kimmel and his staff, during which one unidentified staff officer made a “fervent plea” for the dispatch of a reinforcement expedition to Wake. Knox would state later that those in responsible position showed a willingness “to assume their share of the blame.”
24

Following the briefing, the secretary allowed that no one in the Department of the Navy, including Kelly Turner, had expected an attack on Pearl. (But Knox would be among those who would make sure that the two men, Kimmel and Short, who had the
least
information to go on would be the ones held responsible for knowing what was going to happen.) If that was true, it put another of his remarks in a very curious light: “Did you get Saturday night the dispatch the navy department sent out?”
25
Kimmel answered that no warning had been received after 27 November, except for the Army's grossly delayed alert of 7 December. “Well, we sent you one,” Knox insisted.
26
Poco Smith particularly recalled that Knox used the phrase “on the Saturday preceding Pearl Harbor.”
27
Beatty later asked each staffer, in turn, “Did you receive our message of the sixth?” (Later investigation turned up no such warning or warning draft directed to Pearl Harbor in Navy Department files.) Knox studied closely every photograph of the attack and its effects that intelligence officer Layton had collected; met twice with General Short; visited the burn ward at Hospital Point—“The sight of those men made me as angry as I have ever been in my life”
28
—and, after thirty-two hours of investigation, reboarded his aircraft for the flight home. Shortly after takeoff he commented to Beatty, “Frank, you will be glad to hear that a decision was finally reached and relief forces for Wake will soon be on its way.”
29

*   *   *

Kimmel had long regarded Wake as both a defensible position and a bait: “If Wake be defended,” he had written to OpNav the previous 18 April, “then for the Japanese to reduce it would require extended operations of their naval force in an area where we might be able to get at them, thus offering us an opportunity to get at naval forces with naval forces.”
30
Now he and his staff settled on an improvised task force built around the carrier
Saratoga,
then racing back to Pearl from repair at San Diego. “Sara” was the choice over “Big E” and “Lady Lex” because she embarked eighteen new Marine Corps Wildcats with full personnel and equipment. The other two carriers would provide diversion and support. In company with three cruisers and a destroyer squadron,
Saratoga
sortied from Pearl to Wake at 1115 on 16 December, under the overall command of Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher.