Dec. 7 marks the 76th anniversary of the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor that killed more than 2,400 American servicemen and civilians,
wounded more than 1,200 and propelled the United States into World War II that
eventually took the lives of 405,000 Americans and some 60 million worldwide
before it finally ended in 1945 when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
Much
has been made about the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. But in
reality it wasn’t that much of a surprise. The Japanese had been on the move
throughout the Pacific and the Orient since 1904 when they defeated the
Russians in Port Arthur, Manchuria. Then they took control of Korea and most of
the German colonies in the Pacific, including the Carolines, Gilberts and
Marianas, plus the German colony on the Chinese coast at Tsingtao.
American
writers Homer Lea and Jack London had written about the Japanese efforts to
expand its empire prior to World War I. Gen. Billy Mitchell wrote about it in
the mid-1920s. And in 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria and followed in July 1937
with the “infamous Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which instigated the Second
Sino-Japanese War,” and then followed with attacks on Shanghai and Nanking.
Finally, there was the Japanese air attack on the American gunboat, USS Panay, in
December of ’37 that happened to be filmed by cameramen on the Panay and on the
riverbank. Both films clearly showed Japanese aircraft attacking the Panay with
the American flag flying.
This
was all public information.
And
when George Patton was the intelligence officer of the Hawaiian Division, he
issued a detailed report dated June 3, 1937, in which he concluded, “Japan was
willing and possibly able to attack Hawaii.” In the last sentence of the report,
he wrote, “It is the duty of military forces to prepare against the worst
possible eventualities.”
Gen.
Patton always said, “To be a successful soldier, you must know history.”
Either
the leaders of this country didn’t know history or didn’t pay attention to it.
As
late as November 1941, admirals in Washington wrote a vague message warning the
commanders in Hawaii of the possible danger of an attack, but never checked to
see if any precautions were being taken. Pulitzer Prize-winner Steve Twomey
writes about this in his book, “Countdown to Pearl Harbor,” which I read last
year prior to attending the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor.
The
commander of the Pacific Fleet’s intelligence unit had lost track of Japan’s
biggest aircraft carriers. Twomey writes of false assumptions and racists ones,
misunderstandings, infighting and ego clashes between intelligence officers and
the Navy and Army commanders—all of which led to our being totally unprepared
for the attack.
So
much warning was evident long before the “Day of Infamy.”
At
7:02 a.m. on the morning of Dec. 7, two young Army privates, George Elliott Jr.
and Joseph Lockard, at a mobile radar unit at Opana on the opposite side of
Oahu, picked up “a blob of unknown, inbound airplanes that erupted on their
oscilloscope,” and they reported it to authorities. Only the switchboard
operator and one other man were at Fort Shafter’s information center as Elliott
informed the operator that a “large” flight of planes, which turned out to be
360 Japanese war planes, were inbound.
A
few minutes later Lt. Kermit Tyler, a fighter pilot who had been given the
morning shift for the second time in his life to be a “pursuit officer,” called
the mobile radar unit at Opana. With no fighter planes standing by, he knew
nothing about how things worked or what to do. When Lockard told him about the
incoming aircraft, he said he thought about it for a moment and said, “Well, don’t
worry about it.”
“I
had a friend who was a bomber pilot,” he said later, “and he told me any time
that they play this Hawaiian music all night long, it is a very good indication
that our B-17s were coming over from the mainland because they use it for
homing.”
He
had heard such music on his radio as he drove to the center in the early
morning hours. And a flight of B-17s had, in fact, been flying all the way from
California and arrived in the midst of World War II.
At
7:55 a.m., Dick Lewis, a Marine sergeant from my hometown, was relieving the
guard on Ford Island. He was
standing at the end of the runway with three other Marines, all of whom had
just returned from a few months in the Central Pacific building airstrips with
the forward echelon of the Marine Air Wing.
“I
looked over my shoulder and saw these planes flying right at us,” Lewis told me
in an interview that was later published in Leatherneck magazine. “I thought
they were Army planes at first and wondered why they were flying maneuvers on
Sunday morning. Then I noticed them meatballs on the wings and wondered why
they covered up the stars on the bottom of the wings. That’s how dumb I was at
first.
“Then
I saw something coming out of the planes and didn’t know what it was that was
hitting the airstrip and making fire jump off the runway. They were still quite
a ways away from us, and pretty soon something went ‘Yiinnnggg,’ and I went end
over end. I got a ricocheted bullet in my right shoulder. And I knew it was for
real then.”
For
a short time, Lewis thought he’d lost his whole shoulder. Bleeding badly, he
yanked off his dungaree jacket to get down to his undershirt and tore it off,
then took his fingers and pushed the shirt into the hole to stop the bleeding.
But his arm was hanging straight down and wouldn’t move.
“We’re
under attack, boys!” Lewis shouted as the planes flew over. “This is the real
thing.”
He
said they were on the other side of Ford Island about three miles from
Battleship Row; smoke was billowing up over the hangers, and planes were
burning right in from of them. Smoke was also beginning to billow up over the
harbor.
“Dadgoneit,”
Lewis told me in the interview, “we knew the war was coming just as well as you
and I are sitting here and know that it did happen. They sent us on out to Guam
to build an airstrip, and then we went on to another island—I may be getting
these islands mixed up—but we went on to Midway and helped build an airstrip on
Eastern Island and got on ship and came back to Barber’s Point on the fourth or
fifth of December. We came into Pearl Harbor and unloaded all our planes and
things.”
And
so, the war did come. It raged on for 43 more months in the Pacific and in
Europe. The world endured tremendous loss and destruction amid that horror—and
witnessed a lot of courage and sacrifice, as well. What Pearl Harbor signals
today is that the security of our world can be a precarious thing, and
sometimes we must fight to preserve our freedom. But it also has a great cost.
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