Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Preface: Dreadnoughts and Holystones

  PART I

  * * *

  THE ROADS TO WAR

  Chapter One: Conceiving the Inconceivable

  Chapter Two: A Sinister Wind

  Chapter Three: Autumn 1941

  Chapter Four: November

  Chapter Five: December 6

  PART II

  * * *

  STRIKE!

  Chapter Six: From the Air

  Chapter Seven: Pearl Harbor

  Chapter Eight: Describing the Indescribable

  Chapter Nine: Infamy

  Chapter Ten: Resurrection

  PART III

  * * *

  VICTORY

  Chapter Eleven: Vengeance

  Chapter Twelve: Triumph

  Chapter Thirteen: Legacy

  Appendix 1: Judgment and Controversy

  Appendix 2: The Medal of Honor

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Sources

  Index

  for Bill

  On April 4, 1968, Robert Kennedy was giving a speech in Indiana when he was told that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. After sharing the news with his shocked and tearful audience, he quoted Aeschylus:

  Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget

  falls drop by drop upon the heart,

  until, in our own despair,

  against our will,

  comes wisdom

  through the awful grace of God.

  PREFACE

  * * *

  DREADNOUGHTS AND HOLYSTONES

  On February 13, 1940, thirteen days before he turned eighteen, San Antonio high school football player James Lawson volunteered to join the United States Navy. Like everyone else at that moment at the bottom of the barrel in the Department of War, he was paid a princely $21 a month, but getting three hots and a cot was an economic toehold in an America just financially rousing itself from the Great Depression. The services had so slimmed down from their Great War peaks that it was a leap to get in, though civilians commonly looked down on sailors as unsavory ne’er-do-wells whom they called squids. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had made a quip—“The cleanest bodies and the dirtiest minds in the world”—while Norfolk, Virginia, had signs in its city parks: SAILORS AND DOGS KEEP OFF THE GRASS.

  After San Diego boot camp, Seaman 2nd Class Lawson rode a supply ship across the Pacific, arriving in Oahu at Ford Island’s quay Fox 8 in May of 1940. He never forgot crossing the plank for his very first day aboard the USS Arizona, a moment when, so awed by the thirty-thousand-ton dreadnought’s grandeur and majesty, he forgot to salute: “I was just overwhelmed by the size of it. New sailors are like that. You go up that gangway for the first time, and you been trained to ask permission to come aboard and salute the flag at the stern, but the new seamen second come aboard and right away they forget.”

  Lawson’s first assignments were brute labor—chipping paint; polishing brass; swabbing—and the most dreaded of all, holystoning. The decks of the ship were planked in teak, and the muscular technique the USN devised to polish them to a sheen was to take a sandstone brick with a hole drilled in it—the bricks originally came from churchly ruins, thus holystones—and use a broomstick in the hole to soothe the deck. Lawson’s bed his first year aboard was a hammock hung six feet in the air so “people could walk underneath it,” as fellow sailor Galen Ballard remembered. “It rocked nice and put you to sleep, but it was very easy to fall out of. . . . That’s a long way to fall.”

  Promoted to messcook—better to peel potatoes than holystone decks—Lawson was promoted again after a few months, to gunner’s mate 3rd class, Deck Division 4. He lived in the stern, working the port quarterdeck’s Turret 4 as well as the No. 2 catapult, which threw scouts into the sky: “The [float] plane sat on top of the catapult on a cradle, with a long cable that ran along the tracks of the catapult. Usually the plane went off the port side. As the ship turned and faced into the wind, we get the word to fire. We’d hit the firing key, it was just like firing a gun. The firing mechanism would fire off that five-inch cartridge, basically a can full of powder, and when that charge expanded the gas, it fired the plane, it would run on the cradle all the way to the end of the catapult. By the time it hit the catapult it was at takeoff speed. We had trained to rotate the catapult so that when planes left the ship, they’d be headed into the wind, which was takeoff position for aircraft. When they would come back in, the ship would have to swing around to make a slick. The big ship turning this way or that would flatten out the waves enough for the aircraft to sit down in the water. The plane would taxi up close to where the boatswain’s mates could swing the crane out to hook on to the plane to hoist it back aboard and over onto the catapult.”

  In that dawn-of-radar era, a battlewagon’s scout planes sent target coordinates back to her control room, and Lawson, as a pointer, controlled the elevation of his great Turret 4 guns, while the trainers ruled their horizontal. Their 179,614-pound cannon could blast 1,400-pound, armor-busting projectiles at an angle of fifteen degrees for a range of twenty miles . . . so far that they could pierce the horizon to strike enemies unseen: “It was a thrill: pulling the trigger and knowing it was going after somebody across the horizon with another twenty-five hundred to three thousand pounds of high explosives. . . . Every time I’d press the firing key in that turret and hear those big bullets going shreeeeeeeeeooooooooooo twenty miles across the water, I was thinking, ‘Here’s another one for Tojo’—that was what the head honchos called the Japanese in those days. We figured that, with our superior forces, our superior ships, our superior gunnery, we’d take ’em.”

  The ship was so huge that it could be depersonalizing—Lawson called everyone “Guns” since he knew so few of the other men by name—but the navy knew how to build camaraderie, as North Carolina’s John Rampley explained: “A man’s name was presented by the senior petty officer to the whole gun crew. If any of them didn’t like him or [thought] that he would be incompatible, he didn’t get in. So if you did make it, you felt you were part of a select group.” Clint Westbrook, originally from the Bronx, was one of the powder men working with Lawson at Turret 4, using hoists to transfer sixty-pound powder bags and shells up from the magazine deep below, across the scuttle of the fireproof hatch, and then up to the turret. Westbrook assumed that war was near . . . but that it would strike, not in their Pacific, but in the Atlantic. “I signed up for a six-year peacetime stint,” he said.

  Lawson eventually qualified as a helmsman, taking wheel watch on alternate days, meeting the boss, Captain Franklin Van Valkenburgh, and working the ship’s three methods of steering—electric; steam; auxiliary—to make sure she was ready for anything. Auxiliary meant brute muscle force, a tag team of crew using their full body weight against enormous cranks: “You’d run down a long hallway and grab one of those big spokes and ride that sucker down. Somebody’d go right behind you and ride the next one down. It was a constant run, one man at a time.” But besides that method of power and the dreaded holystoning, Lawson loved his life at sea, especially serving on a battleship: “We were kingpins of the navy in those days. We looked down on the destroyer sailors. It was like living in a big city.”
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  The Arizona’s keel was laid at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City on March 16, 1914, when she was then known only as No. 39. The keel is the spine of a ship’s hull, which, like a human spine, serves as the structural foundation; the vessel’s backbone. “Laying the keel” places that spine in the cradle where the ship will be constructed around it and is the official moment of birth. Since No. 39 with her sister ship, Pennsylvania, would be the “biggest fighting ship, built or building, for any navy,” according to the New York Times, “the ceremony of laying the keel was . . . postponed until 11 o’clock yesterday morning in order to make possible the presence of Assistant Secretary Roosevelt [in a greatcoat, bowler hat, and gold pince-nez]. . . . The firing of a salute of seventeen guns from the superdreadnought North Dakota announced his coming [then] the giant traveling crane above the cradle of the battleship-to-be began to move. It carried a massive steel plate and dropped it at the spot designated by the constructors. Then Mr. Roosevelt stepped forward. Capt. Gleaves handed him a silver-plated bolt. Mr. Roosevelt quickly hammered it into place while the band played the National Anthem and the crowd stood with bared heads.”

  Through his mother, Sara, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt was descended from a family that had made its fortune in seafaring, his grandfather Warren Delano having prospered in the trade of Chinese tea and opium. Franklin as a teenager learned to sail the Hudson River aboard the family’s sixty-foot schooner, Half Moon, and at the age of five, he accompanied his influential father, who had made a great fortune in rail and coal, to the White House, where President Grover Cleveland told the boy, “My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be president of the United States.”

  As a New York state senator, Franklin publicly campaigned for Woodrow Wilson against his fifth cousin Teddy. When Wilson won, he appointed FDR assistant secretary of the navy in 1913, and Roosevelt would have this job when, on April 6, 1917, America joined the Great War. He nagged Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels to grant him a commission, but was turned down because Daniels judged Roosevelt’s administrative duties—overseeing procurement and shipping—as too important.

  FDR would forever after love the United States Navy with an unimaginable passion. During his presidency, he personally selected the service’s flag officers, raised its budget every year, and called the navy “us” and the army “them” until General George Marshall insisted he stop. At his White House breakfast meetings, the nation’s chief executive often sat in bed, his shoulders draped in a blue navy cape, surrounded by his collections of postage stamps and naval memorabilia. Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations after Pearl Harbor, remembered a visit to the cruiser Houston on the afternoon of February 28, 1939; Roosevelt “was in high spirits, for he loved the Navy and always visibly expanded when at sea. As the admirals greeted him, he would have some pleasant, half-teasing personal message for each.”

  During FDR’s tenure with the navy in World War I, Winston Churchill was Great Britain’s first lord of the admiralty, and Roosevelt saw their careers as taking similar paths. Eventually he wrote to Churchill in 1939 that you “should keep me in touch personally about anything you want me to know about.” When Joseph Kennedy, ambassador to England, asked about their relationship, FDR said, “I have always disliked him since the time I went to England in 1918. He acted like a stinker at a dinner, lording it all over us. . . . I’m giving him attention now because there is a strong possibility that he will become the prime minister and I want to get my hand in now.” Cabinet member Frances Perkins called Roosevelt “the most complicated human being I ever knew.”

  On August 10, 1921, Roosevelt was on vacation with his family at Campobello, his father’s island estate off the New Brunswick coast. FDR and his sons were out sailing when they spotted a fire in the woods and docked to help put it out. At dinner that night, Roosevelt didn’t feel well and went to bed early; in the morning, he found he could barely walk. By that night, his back and legs were wracked with pain, his temperature had soared to 102 degrees, and eventually he was diagnosed with poliomyelitis and was paralyzed from the waist down. He now had to be carried by attendants up and down stairs; had a Ford convertible modified so it could be driven entirely by hand; and on being elected governor of New York in 1928 and president of the United States in 1932, developed a gentleman’s agreement with the press (especially the photographers) for him not to be seen as helpless. He had trained himself to appear to walk in public through a remarkable feat: holding on to a cane with one hand and the arm of an aide or a son with the other, he would tilt his useless legs (held rigid by steel braces) from side to side, inching forward like an acrobat on the parallel bars, powered entirely by his arms and shoulders. It was such an incredible performance that few Americans ever knew their longest-serving president was completely paralyzed from the waist down. The disease also awoke in him a sympathy for the ignored, the underprivileged, and the dismissed in American society—he told America’s first female cabinet secretary, Frances Perkins, “We are going to make a country in which no one is left out”—and he founded the March of Dimes, which ultimately led to polio vaccines, which may soon eradicate polio entirely.

  His paralysis meant FDR needed to keep nearby anything he needed throughout the day, leading to a life of monumental clutter. He ran the nation not from the Oval Office, but from the Oval Study, a small room next to the presidential bedroom on the White House’s second floor, filled with model ships and furniture from the yacht the Mayflower. One corner of the room was taken up by a pipe organ, while shelves were devoted to the 150-volume Roosevelt stamp collection, and the walls were festooned with portraits of his mother, his wife, and historic sailing ships. Using these three adjoining rooms of bed, bath, and study, FDR required no help. The suite was so significant that, in case of a power failure, backup generators would keep the electricity going there, but not in the Oval Office itself.

  • • •

  The USS Arizona’s array of four turrets, each hosting three fourteen-inch guns, made up her signature artillery (fourteen-inch/45-caliber meaning the inner diameter of the bore), but she was additionally provisioned with twenty-two five-inch/51-caliber guns, four three-inch/50-caliber antiaircraft guns, thirty-nine .45-caliber machine guns, and two twenty-one-inch torpedo tubes. Like her great historic predecessor, HMS Dreadnought, Arizona reached a maximum speed of twenty-one knots driven by four shafts, each powered by a Parson turbine fed by three Babcock and Wilcox boilers, but unlike her British ancestor, she supped oil, not coal.

  Arizona’s crew nicknamed her At ’em Maru—combining up and at ’em with the Japanese word for “ship”—and Herbert Hoover rode her on a presidential tour of the Caribbean. Then after nine years based in San Diego, she sailed, along with the rest of the American fleet, to Pearl Harbor, in June 1940.

  The two stars of the fleet in Hawaii, Arizona and Pennsylvania, were as good as you could get in battlewagons in their day, the result of a revolution in warfare that navies around the world believed would be, forever after, the ways of their world. For three prior centuries, ending with the Age of Sail, nations had built ships of the line that pounded at each other broadside with batteries of gun and cannon mounted in rows in deck upon deck . . . but from no more than a few hundred yards, with their firepower and maneuverings defined by the speed and direction of the wind. France introduced steam propulsion to her of-the-line vessels in 1850 with Napoléon; armoring with iron in 1859 with Gloire; and pioneering steel construction in 1876 with Redoubtable. These innovations triggered an arms race with Britain and Germany, culminating in 1906 with the English ship that would render all others obsolete: HMS Dreadnought. Powered by steam turbines to an astonishing twenty-one knots, protected by an eleven-inch armor belt, and bristling with ten twelve-inch cannons mounted on five turrets, Dreadnought was so revolutionary and so powerful that she indeed feared nothing, as her title proclaimed; her global descendants would be called dreadnoughts and thei
r progeny, superdreadnoughts.

  While US battleships averaged crews of around sixteen hundred, it took twenty-one hundred to man the fleet’s other giants, aircraft carriers. Carrier warplanes included the fighter (used for both offense and defense), the dive-bomber (which zeroed in on its target at close range for greater accuracy), the high-level bomber (which dropped heavier ordnance than a diver from a defensive altitude and used gravity to increase its devastation), and the torpedo bomber (which skimmed low over the waters). Vulnerable carriers set sail surrounded by a task force that included the more lightly armored and thus faster cruisers, which screened the formation and scouted foes, and destroyers, which were originally designed to attack torpedo boats and were known as torpedo boat destroyers. One bell-bottom joked that their real name should have been “destroyeds,” since their mission was more often than not to be first to reveal the enemy by taking a hit.

  One of the maneuvers all sailors needed to learn at this time was zigzagging to evade torpedo strikes. During one practice zigzag, Oklahoma smashed into Arizona’s bow, leaving a gash thirty feet high and twenty feet wide, which was quickly repaired in dry dock. One sailor would later say, “You can’t hurt a battleship much.”

  If the navy’s capital ships were state-of-the-art for their era—in December of 1940, one midshipman wrote home, “Well, Mother, a battleship is about as safe a vessel as you can find in a fleet, so you don’t have to worry about my well-being!”—the same could not be said for America’s army forces based just down the road, charged with both defending the American territory of Hawaii and the US Fleet when she was at anchor. These soldiers were still armed with bolt-action Springfields, their heads protected by “dishpan” helmets with cotton liners that took a good half hour to thread into place.