Attack on Pearl Harbor (26 page)

The very idea that sinking a ship in the channel would bottle up the Pacific Fleet was a shocking miscalculation. This myth will be more fully explored in
Chapter 10
.

But, how can the decision to attack
Nevada
be considered poor when the damage inflicted by the dive bombers directly contributed to sinking the ship?

Sinking
Nevada

The Japanese benefited from an extraordinary chain of circumstances in their attack on the
Nevada
.

Two GP bomb hits contributed flooding, something that ordinarily would not be expected. One passed through the forecastle and out the hull to explode directly alongside, punching in side plates and leaving two wide cracks, one 25 feet long and the other 18 feet long. While this seems dramatic, flooding from this hit was limited to the outermost torpedo defense void. A second bomb passed through the forecastle and out through the bottom to explode under the hull, creating a hole six feet in diameter.
³⁸
This caused more flooding, but it was flooding outside the ship’s armored, watertight citadel, and as such should not have been lethal. This was the extent of the flooding directly caused by the 14 GP bombs. It was not enough to sink the ship. Many, many more hits like this would have been required to give the immediate, large scale flooding needed to sink a battleship in the channel.

The ship would have remained afloat had not three other factors come into play.
Nevada
succumbed not to Japanese bombs but to poor material condition, critical design flaws, and a massively significant damage control mistake.

Starting from the initial attack,
Nevada
was hit by a single torpedo forward port side between the two forward main battery turrets. The innermost torpedo bulkhead held, but leakage at the seams and butts caused flooding below the first platform. At this point the poor material condition factor came into play. Manhole covers to the torpedo defense voids and some fuel tanks were either loose or were sprung by the torpedo hit, allowing oil and water to flood the third deck. As the ship settled oil began shooting up out of the fuel tank sounding tubes, past caps that ought to have been sealed with effective gaskets. An initial five degree list was corrected by counterflooding. But the flooding was being contained, and this hit would not have sunk the ship.

After getting underway the ship was hit by five 250kg GP bombs. Two of the hits caused additional flooding forward, as mentioned above. The other bombs started a large fire in the forward superstructure. One bomb passed the forward gasoline storage tank to explode just under the bottom of the hull, opening a six foot hole in her plates. Gasoline leakage and vapors almost immediately ignited in the forward part of the ship near the magazines. The forward superstructure was engulfed in flames, and by the end of the battle the foremast structure containing the bridge was destroyed.

Because of this fire, the forward magazine was ordered to be flooded. Then the next factor came into play. Somehow the word was passed to flood the after magazine as well. These two flooded magazines put a huge tonnage of water inside the armored citadel, and the ship settled deep in the water.

Then the last factor came into play, two design flaws. The first was that the second deck was not watertight. As portions of the non-watertight second deck were submerged the flooding became progressive and compartments were flooded from above. The efforts of the damage control team were then stymied by the ship’s poor material condition. According to the ship’s war damage report, the crew was in a “losing fight against water spreading through boundaries and fittings which should have been watertight but actually were not.”
³⁹

For example, the Main Battery Plotting Room was one of the most protected spaces in the ship, five decks below the main deck at the bottom of the armored conning tower tube and inside the citadel. It escaped damage during the attack. Five hours after the last bomb had been dropped water started to enter through a watertight door and began streaming down from the overhead, and the compartment flooded.

Many similar deficiencies caused inexorable progressive flooding. For instance, sounding tubes in some crew spaces led down into fuel tanks. These tubes were capped with a threaded plug seated against a gasket. Many of the gaskets were either cracked or missing, or the cap missing altogether. When the fuel tanks were flooded by torpedo hits and pressurized as the ship settled in the water, the result was a fountain of fuel oil gushing out of the sounding tubes.

Throughout the ship watertight doors were not watertight and stuffing tubes for cable and piping runs leaked.

Then, the second significant design flaw frustrated all attempts to keep the ship afloat. The ship had a centralized ventilation system called the “Bull Ring” where the main ventilation air intakes were located. Air from the Bull Ring was distributed throughout the ship, with ventilation ducting piercing many watertight compartments. There were inadequate closures in the ventilation systems, so when the Bull Ring flooded, it distributed water throughout the ship, outside and inside the armored citadel.

Flooding progressively compartment by compartment, the ship eventually settled onto the mud.
⁴⁰

The Japanese objective of disabling
Nevada
for at least six months was thus achieved.
Nevada
was drydocked on 14 February 1942, and afterwards sailed under her own power to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard on 22 April 1942. She was revamped and modernized, her old superstructure stripped off and an entirely new superstructure built, along with a greatly augmented AA battery and changes to correct the ship’s poor internal watertight integrity.

Nevada
could have been repaired and returned to service in only a few months, albeit without many of the modernizations. The modernization took longer because her return to service was given a low priority, as the shipyard was directed to concentrate on new construction, battle damage repair, and modernizations for cruisers and destroyers. Plus, the battleships were not expected to be needed for some time. American prewar planning had always expected the decisive battleline engagements to occur near the Philippines or the island chains close to Japan. This was not anticipated to happen in 1942. Forward deployment of battleships would also require a robust logistics chain, again something that would not be established in 1942. So, repairs to
Nevada
could wait.

Nevada
was back to sea in December 1942, one year after the attack.

Was the decision to attack
Nevada
with dive-bombers a good decision? A superficial analysis, based on the result–one sunken battleship–would intimate that it was.
Nevada
would not have sunk if she had not been hit by those five GP bombs, which caused the fire, which caused the magazines to be flooded, which caused the ship to settle and flood the second deck and the Bull Ring, which caused the progressive flooding which sank the ship.

However, the Japanese had no way of knowing that such a progression was possible. There was no way they could incorporate those factors in their decision process. The dive bombers’ attack, under any reasonable military criteria, ought to have been inadequate to sink the ship, by criteria used by both the Japanese and the Americans. The fact that the bomb hits triggered a chain of event that inflicted damage far out of proportion to any reasonable expectation was a result of factors that the Japanese could not reasonably predict.

Consider a man who wanted to start a farm, and so he decided to buy a piece of desert land. He should have known that he could not grow crops on parched land. Was it a good decision? Then, while plowing the ground to plant his first crop he strikes gold. The unexpected event does not make the original decision to start a farm in the desert a good decision.

The dive bomber’s success against
Nevada
, however unexpected, was the second wave dive bombers’ shining moment. It achieved success by a remarkable string of unlikely occurrences. Lefty Gomez once said, “I’d rather be lucky than good,” a sentiment in this case seconded by the Japanese dive bomber pilots.

Similarly, the other dive bomber attacks against other battleships were also bad decisions. Absent the factors that made the attack on the
Nevada
successful, those other attacks achieved what would be expected, that is, they achieved almost nothing, little more than nuisance damage to the heavily-armored ships. Superstructure damage such as was inflicted upon
Nevada
made for spectacular photographs, but essentially could be repaired with new sheet-metal and replacement electrical wiring. It was damage that could not be expected to put a ship out of the war for any significant period, and did little to contribute to the objective of the attack.

In
Nevada
’s case, there was effectively no chance that the ship could have been sunk in the channel and zero chance that the ship could have been sunk by five or even fourteen 250kg GP bombs. It was the design flaws, poor material condition and damage control errors that sank
Nevada
, not the Japanese dive bombers. The proper decision would have been to put those five hits on two cruisers which, with only a smidgeon of good fortune, would have put two cruisers on the bottom of the harbor.

Cruiser Targets

Cruisers were vulnerable to GP bombs. During World War II, nine Allied cruisers were sunk by GP bombs. A single bomb hit on a cruiser would, on average, require six to seven weeks of shipyard repair; one 500kg (1,102-pound) bomb hit on the British cruiser
Suffolk
forced the ship to be beached, and she was out of action for eight months.

There was a very lucrative grouping of cruiser targets available. In the Navy Yard,
New Orleans, San Francisco, St. Louis
, and
Honolulu
, all modern, powerful 10,000-ton cruisers, were crammed into a very restricted space. Bombs dropped into the Navy Yard piers area could hardly miss hitting something of value—a ship, a pier, quays, tugs or yard craft, floating cranes, or the industrial facilities. In the face of this crowding, the number of 250kg bombs that splashed in the water causing no damage was remarkable.

Hits on ships in the yard could be particularly devastating. When undergoing what is known as “shipyard availability,” material condition Zed cannot be set. Electrical power cables, welding leads, and high and low pressure air hoses are strung through watertight hatches from their sources on the pier down into the depths of the ship, making it impossible to close hatches to contain either flooding or fire. One cruiser had a large access port cut into her side to remove machinery. Portions of a ship’s firemain system might be isolated and drained for valve maintenance. Lots of flammable materials—oils, grease, oil-based paints, wooden staging—would be scattered throughout the ship, a damage control nightmare.

A bomb hit on a ship in this condition could cause fires and flooding that could not be isolated, and could potentially spread progressively throughout the ship. A bomb hit could be expected to cause much more damage than under normal combat conditions. This should have been recognized by the Japanese before the attack. These were lucrative targets in a very vulnerable condition.

The
Chronology
estimated that 30 dive-bombers attacked the Navy Yard area (including those that attacked
Pennsylvania
). These attacks were inaccurate. Only two hits were achieved, one each on
Honolulu
and
Pennsylvania
. Most made thundering splashes that almost swamped yard craft. One bomb did shatter a ship’s boat, wounding three men with bomb fragments.

The dive-bomber pilots were instructed to dive into the wind, in order to better maintain their dive angle and so the wind would not push their bomb off line. To make this approach, they had to pass close to the cloud of smoke billowing out of Battleship Row up to an altitude of 8,000 feet, a column of turbulence that without doubt disturbed their attempts to get lined up on their targets during the critical initial part of their dive. Some of the pilots ignored this instruction, as American observers noted dive-bombers coming in from both the west and the east.

The story could have had a happier outcome for the Japanese had they followed their target prioritization scheme and hit the cruisers in the Navy Yard with more bombers more accurately. In the first year of the war, with many of the battleships knocked out and with insufficient tankers to keep the remainder in fuel in forward areas, cruisers became the “heavy units” of the surface war in the Pacific, and were constantly in demand and short in supply. By employing dive-bombers against battleships, more of these critical cruisers survived. The bombers diverted by Egusa to the more spectacular, but less logical and less appropriate battleship target, could have had a greater impact on the war than they did.

Striking
Nevada
was an emotional, Japanese-logic decision that backfired. It provided the most memorable inspirational event that cheered the defenders on, rather than another nail in their intended coffin of despair.

Blocking the Channel by Other Means

Had the planners really wanted to sink a ship in the channel, there was
Neosho
, one of the largest tankers in the world.
Neosho
pulled out of her mooring at the Ford Island Fuel Pier just after
Nevada
passed by. She was 50% to 75% full of volatile aviation fuel. She would have been easier to put on the bottom than
Nevada
, but even then it would have been no easy thing, with her large tanks holding a cargo that was lighter than water. At the Battle of the Coral Sea,
Neosho
was hit by seven bombs and one suicide aircraft and at one point was abandoned due to fires, yet remained afloat for four days.

Photographs show
Neosho
in the channel and lining up to enter the Southeast Loch past the Navy Yard as the dive-bomber attacks began. If the Japanese wanted to sink a ship in the channel,
Neosho
was the better choice. But, even against her, more than 14 bombers would be needed.