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RESURRECTION

Naval Institute Press

Chapter One

It was raining when dawn broke over Pearl Harbor on Monday, 8 December 1941. The fires that had been burning along Battleship Row for nearly twenty-four hours had prevented complete darkness from enveloping the harbor the previous night. The flames flickered and crackled in the warm Hawaiian air from the port side of the battleship West Virginia and from the forecastle of the battleship Arizona as they lay on the bottom in the shallow water, only their upper works above the waves. The West Virginia had been torn open by torpedoes, and the Arizona had been pounded by bombs until her forward magazines exploded with volcanic fury. The twin columns of smoke that churned skyward from these ships were just a part of the destruction that was being illuminated by the climbing tropical sun. All around the anchorage lay sunken, beached, capsized, and damaged ships, the aftermath of a stunningly successful Japanese aerial assault the previous morning.

Japan and the United States had been on a collision course throughout the 1930s, a course that continued to converge into 1940 and 1941. Japan lacked the natural resources that would enable it to become the great power its leaders envisioned as their destiny, and nationalists demanded the establishment of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a euphemism for Japanese hegemony over the resource-rich lands of China and Southeast Asia. The coal, oil, and rubber of Dutch Borneo and Java, the tin of British Malaya, and the rice paddies of French Indochina were the keys to empire. Expansionism at the expense of the Chinese and the European colonies was unacceptable to the United States and its allies, which had close economic, social, and political ties to the region.

Japan's desire to become a world power had not been damped by a punitive U.S. embargo on scrap metal and oil, or by the transfer of the Pacific Fleet from California to Hawaii as a demonstration of American resolve to halt Japanese aggression. While ambassadors spoke of peace and continued to pursue fruitless negotiations with the Roosevelt administration, the government and military planned for war. The Imperial Navy would seize the sea lanes into Southeast Asia, brushing aside opposition from the weak American, British, and Dutch naval forces in the area, and land invasion forces with relative impunity in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Yet Japan's leaders knew that America would not stand idly by while Japanese forces ran rampant and that the Pacific Fleet would sortie from Pearl against the left flank of the advance. Success therefore depended on paralyzing the American navy at the outset. Adm. Isoruku Yamamoto, the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, developed a plan daring in concept, requiring precise execution: cripple the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor with a surprise attack at dawn on a Sunday morning, using carrier aircraft of the First Air Fleet to strike the blow.

Throughout late 1941 Yamamoto's forces trained for the attack while negotiations between Japan and the United States dragged on and relations worsened. There was no common ground for compromise. Japan was determined to fulfill its quest for empire at the expense of European powers hamstrung by war with Nazi Germany. America was equally determined that Japan would not. In late November a six-carrier task force set sail from the Kuriles in northern Japan and in silence transited the lonely, foggy northern Pacific, bound for Hawaii. The die was cast: Japan would make war on the United States, cripple its fleet, seize the land Japan needed for empire, then fortify and defend it.

Meanwhile, the United States Navy continued to train for the war few in the American military believed could be avoided but all hoped could be delayed while the fleet was strengthened. The Pacific Fleet commander, Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, divided his warships into three task forces and rotated them in and out of Pearl Harbor on an intensive training schedule. Task Force 1 was the main battle force and had six of the fleet's nine battleships assigned to it, along with the carrier Saratoga and a light cruiser division. Task Force 2 was a raiding force, with the carrier Enterprise, three battleships, and a heavy cruiser division. Task Force 3 was the landing force, the precursor of the great amphibious armadas to be formed a few years later. It had the fleet's third carrier, the Lexington, eight heavy cruisers, a minesweeping squadron, and attack transports to land the 2d Marine Division. These groups were complemented by the submarines of Task Force 7, the patrol planes of Task Force 9, and the vital oilers, tenders, and repair and supply ships of Task Force 4, the Base Force.

Task Forces 1, 2, and 3 operated out of Pearl Harbor according to the Employment Schedule, the fleet's quarterly training calendar. When not at sea, the ships returned to Hawaii for upkeep periods. This first weekend in December found most of the ships of Task Forces 1 and 2 in port, with Task Force 3 at sea for training. A provisional task force of cruisers, destroyers, and the Enterprise was returning from delivering fighters to Wake. Another force built around the Lexington was on the way to Midway and had been drawn from Task Force 3, the rest of which was now in the fleet training area to the south of Oahu.

While at Pearl the fleet was under the protection of the United States Army and Lt. Gen. Walter Short's Hawaiian Detachment. It was a logical arrangement, since the Navy could hardly be expected to protect itself while in port for rest and refit. The Army's role on Oahu was to protect the fleet and its base from attack, though Short focused more on sabotage threats than attack by air. He was not alone in underestimating the threat to Oahu from the Japanese. The best naval intelligence estimates placed the likely initial attacks in the Far East.

So it came to be that on the first Sunday in December, while battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and auxiliaries lay in Pearl Harbor for upkeep, Japanese planes roared over Oahu. The raid was an overwhelming success. The Japanese had been prepared to be discovered, prepared to fight their way in to the target if necessary. But despite the fact that the incoming planes had been detected on radar, despite the fact that a midget submarine had been sunk by a destroyer off the harbor entrance a few hours before the attack, despite the heightened tensions in the Pacific and a vague war-warning message sent to the islands from Washington a week before, the Japanese had achieved complete surprise. Torpedo planes, dive and high-level bombers, and fighters converged on Kaneohe Naval Air Station, on the Army's Wheeler and Hickam Fields, on the Marine base at Ewa, and on Battleship Row, and had laid waste to them all.

The carriers of the First Air Fleet were now retiring to the west, though there were those who would say they had left the job half done. Repeated attacks could have been made against the repair shops and dry docks of the Navy Yard, against the fuel tank farm, against the ships already crippled in the harbor, to pummel them into wrecks beyond repair. What the raiders left behind, however, was, in the minds of those who had endured it, a catastrophe of the first order.

Oil was everywhere, thick, black, and foul-smelling. It floated on the water, flowing down the channel to the sea, coating the shoreline along the way. It had come mainly from the ruptured fuel tanks of the battleships, by the tens of thousands of gallons. Some of it had caught fire and burned on the surface; most had simply gushed out of the torn sides of the big ships, bubbled to the surface, and floated away with the wind and the tide. The smell of it, mixed with smoke and gunpowder and burned flesh, was everywhere.

Small boats darted across the harbor all day on Monday, carrying ammunition and pumps and diving equipment. They dodged oil slicks and pieces of wood, life vests and mattresses, canvas awnings and clothing. Occasionally a boat could be seen stopped off Battleship Row, its crew struggling to retrieve a large, inert form from the water. Sometimes they merely attached a line to the object that bobbed in the oil and towed it slowly toward shore. More motionless shapes washed ashore on Ford Island or drifted uncollected down the channel with the tide. They were the bodies of American sailors and Marines who had been blown clear of their ships and floated until someone had a moment to retrieve them from the warm water.

Many of the bodies had come from the West Virginia. The minesweeper Tern, small and unimposing, lay alongside the port side of the great battleship. The day before, the weather decks of the West Virginia would have towered over the little vessel. Now, on Monday, the situation had been reversed. The "Weevee" sat on the hard coral bottom, her hull filling with seawater. The Tern played streams of water onto her fires while the engines kept the minesweeper's stem pointed into the wind that blew down the channel. The Tern had joined a garbage lighter that had driven its bow into the smoke and fire on the water to get close enough to the stricken battleship to hose down the flames. The fires that had begun on, in, and around the West Virginia nearly twenty-four hours before would continue to bum until early Monday afternoon. The dark smoke that rose over her bow covered the conning tower and foremast with soot. The superstructure deck on her port side tilted steeply down, the supporting beams and bulkheads below mangled and unable to support the weight of the decks above (no one had yet pieced together the sequence of events, though it was believed that she had been hit by four torpedoes and a bomb). (1) The sailors who walked her decks-fighting fires, removing dead friends and parts of unidentified shipmates-occasionally looked around them, around the harbor, at a scene that in some way defied immediate understanding. Their ship was "uninhabitable," a "total loss, [so] wrecked and gutted by fire and flooded that repair appears impractical."

After getting under way from Ten Ten Dock, the Tern had been alongside since 1050 Sunday, dousing the fires that burned on deck and in the water with five separate streams of water. By 1520 on the seventh, the weather decks of the battleship had cooled enough that the Tern's crew could put hoses aboard to fight the fires in the casemates and below deck. When the fires aboard the West Virginia had finally been extinguished, at about 1400 on the eighth, the Tern moved aft to the Arizona to fight a blaze that would continue to burn for another twenty-four hours.

There was no doubt that the Arizona was wrecked, and little doubt that her captain and Adm. Isaac Kidd, the commander of Battleship Division 1, had died aboard her. Details of the exact nature of her damage were vague: possibly three bomb hits, a torpedo hit reported by the Vestal, a bomb seen to go down the stack. The forward part of the ship was completely obscured by smoke, as if it were no longer there. The Navy Yard's Planning Section was notified that she was "broken in half and burning. Completely submerged except for two after turrets and tripod mast. No job orders issued." By "no job orders issued" the Navy Yard meant that there were no requests for work on the ship. There was nothing that could be done for her. By the afternoon of the seventh she had already been declared a total loss, and by Monday the main concern was not the damage but the smoke still pouring from her. Not only was it "exceedingly unpleasant and unhealthy for the Tennessee with a certain degree of menace in it, but it constitutes a highly undesirable marker both day and night which would assist attacking planes."

A few hundred yards down Battleship Row the crew of the Maryland were trying to stop the flooding caused by a bomb hit below the waterline at the bow. It had exploded within the ship and caused enough flooding to put her 5 feet down by the head. Another bomb had slammed into her forecastle deck but had done little damage. Her captain, D. C. Godwin, reported only four casualties, two dead and two wounded. She was the most lightly damaged of the battleships and was ready for a fight-if, that is, she could be maneuvered out from behind the hull of the capsized battleship Oklahoma next to her.

Tied to mooring quays on the opposite side of Ford Island from the battleships was the light cruiser Raleigh, her crew struggling to keep her from capsizing. She had been hit between the firerooms by a torpedo, flooding both compartments and the adjacent forward engine room, and a bomb had gone through her port side to explode on the harbor bottom. Despite the closure of all watertight doors and hatches with the setting of Condition Zed, many of them had apparently failed. The Raleigh had listed immediately to port, and to keep her from capsizing, any and all removable weight, including her scout planes, had been lowered over the side or simply tossed overboard, the positions of the equipment being noted for later recovery. The stanchions, boat skids, life rafts, anchors, chains, gangways, and booms were cast off. Torpedoes, without warheads, were taken by boat to Ford Island. In all, about 60 tons of material were sent overboard. Oil-soaked bedding and clothing were taken off to reduce the fire hazard. Pontoons and a lighter that were alongside the old retired cruiser Baltimore were brought to the Raleigh and were tied to the port quarter by riggers from the shipyard, to act as a stabilizing outrigger. Four 2-inch steel hawsers were run completely around the barge and ship, then wire straps were run about the top and bottom wires between the ship and barge and cinched up tight. She was low in the water, with barely any freeboard, and extremely unstable because of the amount of free surface water on her main deck. The tug Sunnadin was alongside and had passed pumping hoses to the stricken cruiser in an effort to rid her of some of that water. A significant shift in this weight from one side of the ship to the other, and she would roll over, just as the target and gunnery training ship Utah had done, astern of her.

The Utah, a former battleship launched two days before Christmas in 1909, belonged to the Base Force, the collection of repair ships, tankers, auxiliary vessels, tenders, and supply ships that kept the warships ready to fight. She had come into port late Friday afternoon, about a half-hour behind the Sunnadin. She was maneuvered to the quays on the north side of Ford Island, where she moored at berth Fox 11 (F-11). The Utah had been serving most recently as a target ship. The weapons she carried for training, the 5-inch dual-purpose and 1.1

Continues...

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Excerpted from RESURRECTION by Daniel Madsen Copyright © 2003 by Daniel Madsen. Excerpted by permission.
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