an style='font-style: italic'>The following narrative is excerpted from material contained in the new LIFE book "Our Call to Arms: The Attack on Pearl Harbor." The hardcover book, which contains interviews with survivors of the attack as well as 187 color and black-and-white photographs, can be ordered by calling 1-800-327-6388. Please allow four to six weeks for delivery.
"The night of December 6 , we went to a black-tie dinner dance at the Fort DeRussey Officer's Club on Waikiki Beach," recalls Kay Tremaine, whose husband Frank was a reporter with United Press in Honolulu. "Before going home, four of us walked outside. It was a balmy night. There were heat flashes. It looked like shelling was going on. Commander [George] Gelley made the prophetic remark, 'Just like the calm before the storm.' "
Two hundred thirty miles north of Hawaii, aboard the Japanese flagship Akagi, bomber pilot Abe Zenji prepared for battle: "I changed my old underwear to my new ones. I put on my best flying uniform, the khaki-colored one. Every aircraft carrier had a shrine. I went underneath and prayed at the shrine. I bowed just once. 'I am going now," I said." In the pre-dawn of 6 a.m., the first wave of the Japanese attack took off from six carriers in the Pacific. "It was like the sky was filled with fireflies," Abe says. "It was a beautiful scene — 183 aircraft in the dark sky. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen."
Photo Essay:
The Attack on Pearl Harbor
Review:
Mission Inconsequential
Timeline: A tick-tock of events the morning of Dec. 7, 1941 in Pearl Harbor
Learn More: Information on Pearl Harbor and WWII from across the Web
Past Covers: Look back in TIME at past coverage of Pearl Harbor
Click here for more on Pearl Harbor
|
|
 |
Only 15 minutes later on the island of Oahu, two trainees noticed blips on their radar screen — planes approaching. "There was no way of telling what they were," says Kermit Tyler, who was a lieutenant with one day's experience at the Fort Shafter Information Center. "A little after 7:00, one of the plotters showed me a plot at 132 miles and three degrees east of north. It made me think that it was probably B-17s because as I was coming into town, I had flipped on the radio and heard Hawaiian music. A pilot had told me, 'When our B-17s are coming in, they play Hawaiian music without interruption so they can home in.' It turned out that the Japanese used the music to home in, too.
"At about 7:15 I got a call from Pvt. Joseph Lockard that he had the same plot. He said it was the biggest plot he had ever seen. Well, 12 B-17s could make a pretty big splash on the screen. I told him, 'Don't worry about it. It's O.K.'
"A few minutes after 8:00 I stepped outside to take a breath of fresh air. I looked off to the west and saw puffs of smoke and a few planes."
It may have been that in the days, hours and minutes leading up to 7:55 a.m.
local time, December 7, 1941, there was, on the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor,
a fierce love triangle revolving around a handsome sailor, a Ben Affleck type.
That may have been so, but we'll never know — no matter how convincing you find the
titanic Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay film "Pearl Harbor."
But after nearly 60 years of confusion, speculation, investigation, revisionist theorizing and revisionist-theory backlash, we can form a pretty clear picture of what led to the attack, why it was such a surprise to the U.S. military and what critical mistake by the Japanese allowed the U.S. Pacific Fleet to mount a swift comeback that would prove crucial to the shape of World War II. Japan's bold strike against Pearl can now be seen as a fine example of how a nation might win a battle and, in the act itself, lose a war.
War was on, of course, well before the infamous date — even if the United States wasn't formally engaged. In Europe, Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 had pulled France and Britain into the fray, and by the following spring the Nazis had swept through Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium and were poised at the Maginot Line, the supposedly impregnable fortifications on France’s northeastern border. On June 22 France fell, and on July 10 the Battle of Britain began.
The U.S., watching Europe keenly and intent on helping Britain survive, was meantime working through negotiations to keep a dicey situation in the East from degenerating further. Japan's own expansionist intentions had been made plain as early as 1931 when the empire launched an undeclared war on China’s heartland by extending its reach in Manchuria, which it renamed Manchukuo. Chinese soldiers, debilitated by the war between Mao Zedong’s communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, were unable to resist as, throughout the decade, Japan pushed south through Beijing and on toward Shanghai. Four qualities invariably marked the Japanese attack: efficiency, discipline, brutality and, especially, surprise.
Japan was successfully on the march, but it became evident that additional resources were needed to fuel the empire's campaign. New targets were chosen, including mineral-rich Indochina and oil-rich Indonesia, colonies of France and Holland. With the 1940 German victories over the European mother countries, these Pacific outposts seemed ripe for picking.
In the summer of '40, the Japanese government, which was dominated by militarists — most prominently, War Minister Tojo Hideki, a man described as "the fiercest hawk in the Orient" — decided that the future should include an alliance with Germany, an effort to resume trade with the U.S. (which had been halted by Washington to protest Japan’s incursions) and an offensive in Southeast Asia. As dealmakers flew to Europe and negotiators to America, fighter planes and bombers were readied for sorties in the Pacific. By the end of the year, Japan, knowing that it was embarking on risky business, had secured for itself a place in the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. Under the terms of the deal, if any of the partners was attacked by a nation not yet in the war, the others would hurry to its aid. The Axis was formed.
Tensions between the U.S. and Japan over China continued to worsen. Early in the new year, on January 7, 1941, Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku, Commander in Chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet, offered his "Views on Preparations for War." The plans included a strategy that stunned most of his colleagues and confirmed the appraisal of one of them, that Yamamoto had "a gambler’s heart." The big wager in Yamamoto’s "Views" was that a surprise attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor could result in a quick victory, which would prompt the U.S. to petition for peace in the Pacific. Yamamoto never anticipated a surrender — he wasn’t seeking one, nor did he feel that Japan would necessarily prevail in a drawn-out war with America — but rather a settlement that would allow Japan to pursue its prospecting in Sumatra, Borneo, Java and French Indochina.
Within three weeks of Yamamoto’s presentation, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Joseph C. Grew heard a disquieting rumor. He cabled Washington: "My Peruvian colleague told a member of my staff that he had heard from many sources including a Japanese source that the Japanese military forces planned, in the event of trouble with the United States, to attempt a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor using all their military facilities." Warnings about Pearl Harbor’s vulnerability were nothing new. As long before as 1924, Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell, then assistant chief of the Army Air Service, had returned from an inspection tour to report that Pacific defenses were inadequate, and even to predict that, if the Japanese were to attack Oahu, they would do well to begin with Ford Island at 7:30 in the morning. A January 1938 U.S. War Department survey of Pearl Harbor’s defenses had said that if the Japanese attacked, they would do so without notice, and "there can be little doubt that the Hawaiian Islands will be the initial scene of action." On January 24, 1941, three days before Grew reported his rumor, Navy Secretary Frank Knox mailed a letter to the command at Pearl Harbor that said a reexamination of the base’s readiness had been undertaken, "prompted by the increased gravity of the situation with respect to Japan, and by reports from abroad of successful bombing and torpedo plane attacks on ships while in bases."
RSS