Pearl Harbor — What Really Happened

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Delano got two machine guns operating on the West Virginia, then hastily taught enlisted men how to operate them. They started firing at bombers "up too high to be bothered by any .50-caliber machine guns. But the gunners didn't know that. They were feeling pretty deadly about this thing. Then the guns jammed."

In the frenzy, some bullets were bound to find their mark. "We had primitive antiaircraft guns on the Sumner, old-fashioned and ineffective," says Warren K. Taylor, who was an Ensign. "But one of the guns on the fantail shot down one of the torpedo planes."

Pearl Harbor was engulfed in shock, terror and, perhaps above all, confusion. The UP reporter Frank Tremaine was awoken by antiaircraft fire, looked out the window, went to the phone, got the press officer at Fort Shafter, Harry Albright, on the horn and asked, "Who is it, Harry? You don't think it's the Germans?"

Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, knew who it was, and realized even as the attack was in progress that Pearl Harbor had been grievously ill-prepared. At one point, as he stood near a window at Naval Command, a spent bullet shattered the glass, nicked him and fell to the floor. Kimmel picked up the slug and said, "It would have been merciful had it killed me." He would be relieved of his command before Christmas, as would General Short.

The first wave of the attack ended at 8:35. "The Japanese came back after about half an hour," says Raymond Emory. "They stuck around a bit longer than the first wave."

But they didn't finish the job.

As devoted as Yamamoto had been to the idea of a sneak attack, he was consistently reluctant to embrace any suggestion of a follow-up strike on Pearl. The Japanese had a golden opportunity to improve on their formal plans when Commander Fuchida, flush with success, landed back on the Agaki and implored Admiral Nagumo Chuichi to okay a second series of aerial attacks. Nagumo, knowing how Yamamoto felt and happy with the spoils won, said no. His carriers turned for Japan.

Vulnerable at Pearl Harbor were several damaged but not destroyed battleships, intact repair facilities and a massive cluster of oil tanks filled with fuel. Returning to Pearl from a mission to Wake Island was the USS Enterprise, which would have presented a prime target. That all of these assets were spared proved vital when, in early May 1942, the Japanese suffered setbacks during the Battle of the Coral Sea. Precisely a month later, the U.S. Pacific Fleet scored perhaps the greatest naval victory ever at the Battle of Midway, where it halted Japan’s eastward push and let the Axis know that the fight was now well and truly engaged. The Battle of Midway was the first major defeat suffered by the Japanese navy in 350 years. The results had a massive effect on the psychological profile of the war. What would end with atomic bombings began, of course, at Pearl Harbor. But it began again at Midway.

But that was all tomorrow. This was today at Pearl Harbor, mid-morning, and even with the sky finally free of Kates and Zeroes, the fires, explosions and killing continued. At 9:50 the destroyer Blue picked up the signal of a submarine. She maneuvered to attack and dropped six depth charges. An oil slick and air bubbles rose to the surface. The ship then detected another signal from a submarine that appeared to be bearing down on the St. Louis. That sub, too, was sunk by a depth charge.

The bay was burning. By then, Victor Delano was in it, trying to swim from the West Virginia to the Maryland: "Just as I started, fire broke out on the water ahead of me. So I tried to get to the Tennessee. There were oil slicks, some of which would ignite. I was just trying to keep away from whatever oil I could keep away from. There was an old chief petty officer, and I heard his voice behind saying, 'Help, save me, I can't swim!' I was physically really in no condition to help anybody, so I thought I'd say something nice to him. So as I turned to encourage him, he went sailing past me on the water, still saying, 'Help, save me, I can't swim!' I finally gave up and swam ashore to Ford Island."

Ships were sinking. Charles Merdinger, an ensign, was the ranking officer in a below-decks communications room on the Nevada, and remembers, "Water began to drip from overhead. Then the gaskets on the door by which we entered started to give way, and the water started coming in." He moved his men out and up, through rooms littered with bodies, and into the open air. On deck, "people were running around and it was a shambles. Everybody was concerned that there would be more attacks." No one at Pearl, not even Kimmel and Short, could accurately fathom what had happened, or knew what would happen next. Reports buzzed around Oahu of Japanese troop landings on the southern beaches, and parachute drops in the hills. No matter how effective the movie Pearl Harbor is at capturing the paranoia of the afternoon and evening of 12/7/41, it won't approach the reality. "I was too scared to go back to my quarters," says Anna Busby, 89, who was then an Army nurse at Tripler Hospital on Honolulu. "I was afraid I wouldn't be able to speak if the sentry said, 'Halt. Who goes there?' I didn't know if I could answer. I ended up staying at the hospital."

"After it got dark, we still manned our guns," says Merdinger, now 83 and living in Nevada. ""Planes were coming into port. We knew they were friendly, and the gunnery officer yelled to everybody, 'Hold your fire. Don't do anything.' But some bird let go with a machine gun, and the next thing you know the whole harbor erupted into this cone of fire. The tracers made an umbrella of fire — 360 degrees. I guess we shot down a couple of them. They were our own people, and here we were just firing madly. It was one of those horrible things." The flames of the burning ships grew in intensity all night, and the harbor resembled hell.

The following afternoon in Washington Roosevelt declaimed December 7 a date that would forevermore live in infamy, and asked Congress for a declaration of war. There were no isolationists left in America, and within days the United States was not only fully an avowed enemy of Japan, but of Germany as well. Many things were quickly in motion: enlistment campaigns and draft call-ups, round-ups of Japanese-American citizens as enemy aliens, rescue and salvage operations at Pearl, inquiries and second guessing. Were Kimmel and Short culpable? Certainly they would be scapegoated, but were they culpable? Could it be possible that Roosevelt, through U.S. intelligence, knew in advance, and allowed the attack to happen so that America could be drawn into the war. How much was really lost? How many had died?

Two thousand four hundred and three Americans had been killed, another 1,178 wounded. Eighteen ships had been sunk or seriously damaged, while 347 planes had been destroyed or damaged.

Twenty-nine Japanese planes had been shot from the sky — a marginal loss in an attack of such size.

But in the aftermath, once assessments had been made, even Yamamoto — the architect of it all — was forced to observe, "I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."

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