Day of Infamy

(10 of 15)

That same Saturday night was the standard party night in Pearl Harbor, not orgiastic but convivial. Hundreds of soldiers and sailors from Schofield Barracks and Hickam and Kaneohe converged as usual on Waikiki Beach to see what was going on at Bill Leader's bar, the Two Jacks or the Mint. Tantalizing Tootsies was the name of the variety show at the Princess.

Kimmel attended a staid dinner party at the Halekulani Hotel and left early. He had a golf date the next morning with General Short, who went to a charity dance at the Schofield Barracks and also left early. As he rode along the coast highway, Short admired the lights of Pearl Harbor glowing below him. "Isn't that a beautiful sight?" he said. "And what a target it would make!"

Though the final Japanese note said nothing about war or Pearl Harbor, it was not quite complete -- it contained 13 parts and said another would soon follow. The 14th and last part reached Washington the morning of Dec. 7. It notified the U.S. that "it is impossible to reach an agreement through further negotiations." An accompanying message instructed Nomura to deliver the note "at 1 p.m. on the 7th, your time."

Nobody in Washington knew Hirohito had asked that the warning be delivered before the attack -- 1 p.m. in Washington was 7:30 a.m. in Hawaii -- but an Army intelligence officer, Colonel Rufus Bratton, guessed as much. Bratton telephoned Marshall at his quarters at Fort Myers, Va., but he was out riding. More than an hour later, about 10:30 a.m., Marshall called back and said he was coming to his office shortly. About the same time, Hull was meeting with War Secretary Henry L. Stimson and Navy Secretary Frank Knox. "Hull is very certain that the Japs are planning some deviltry," Stimson recorded in his diary, "and we are all wondering when the blow will strike."

Fuchida woke at 5 a.m. As he told American military historian Gordon Prange, he put on red underwear and a red shirt so that if he was wounded, his men would not be distracted by the sight of his blood. At breakfast, one of his lieutenants said, "Honolulu sleeps."

"How do you know?" asked Fuchida.

"The Honolulu radio plays soft music. Everything is fine."

At 5:50 a.m. Nagumo's fleet reached the takeoff point, about 220 miles north of Pearl Harbor. The six carriers turned east into a brisk wind and increased speed to 24 knots. Nagumo's flagship was flying the celebrated Z pennant that Admiral Togo had flown at Tsushima in 1905. The flight decks tilted more than 10 degrees, and the wind whipped spray over them.

"We could hear the waves splashing against the ship with a thunderous noise," Fuchida recalled later. "Under normal circumstances, no plane would be permitted to take off in such weather . . . There were loud cheers as each plane rose into the air." Once up, the pilots circled overhead until all 183 planes assigned to the first wave were airborne. At 6:15 Fuchida gave a signal, then led the way south.