Pearl Harbor (9 page)

At the same time, another group of bombers and fighters was crippling the U.S. Air Force with a swift and powerful assault on Navy air bases at Ford Island and Kaneohe Bay, Marine fields at Ewa, and Army Corps fields at Bellows and Wheeler. The Japanese assault also devastated Hickam Field, where most of the Air Force bombers—twenty B-17s, twelve A-20 light bombers, and thirty-two B-18s—sat clustered. Since the army had feared sabotage more than Japanese bombers, it had ordered the planes kept close together so they could easily be patrolled and protected. The move backfired: Lined up wingtip to wingtip, the planes were easy targets for the Japanese pilots.

Admiral Kimmel, at home when the attack started, received a panicked phone call from an aide. “There's a message from the signal tower saying the Japanese are attacking Pearl Harbor and this is no drill,” he told the admiral. Kimmel, who had an unobstructed view of Battleship Row from his front lawn, slammed down the receiver and rushed outside, where he was joined by his neighbor Mrs. John Earle. She recalled watching the planes flying over “circling in figure 8's, then bombing the ships,
turning and dropping more bombs.” She could see the Rising Sun on their wings, “and could have seen the pilots' faces had they leaned out.” Kimmel, she noted, stood next to her “in utter disbelief and completely stunned.” His face, she observed, was “as white as the uniform he wore.”
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The first Japanese attack wave broke off the assault around 8:45 a.m. and headed back to their carriers. After a lull of about thirty minutes, the second wave of 167 planes appeared in the sky. While Japan achieved total surprise on the first wave, the second wave encountered heavy antiaircraft fire and inflicted only minor damage. Nearly 90 percent of the damage was done in the first wave.
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At the end of the second attack, Fuchida circled above Pearl Harbor to assess the damage his forces had inflicted. He was satisfied with the results. It had taken roughly fifteen deadly minutes for the Japanese attackers to destroy the American Pacific Fleet. But Fuchida realized his forces had missed a number of key targets. They had left the shipyard untouched and the vital oil-storage facilities. There were also a number of American ships still afloat. Another run would be necessary.

When Fuchida returned to the aircraft carrier, a third wave of planes was preparing to launch. Admiral Nagumo, however, decided that the mission had been accomplished and it was time to go home. They were low on fuel, and he knew that the American carriers would be looking for him. At 1:00 p.m. the task force turned toward home.
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In 1946, the Joint Congressional Committee investigating the events of December 7 described Pearl Harbor as “the greatest military and naval disaster in our Nation's history.” It was an accurate assessment. In a matter of a few minutes, Japanese bombers sank or severely damaged eight battleships, three light cruisers, four destroyers, and 350 airplanes. The Americans suffered 3,566 casualties. Of the 2,388 killed, nearly half—1,177 men—died on the USS
Arizona
, where they remain entombed today. By comparison, Japan lost only 28 planes, five midget submarines, and fewer than 100 men.
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5

“Have you heard the news?”

A
S JAPANESE planes circled above Pearl Harbor, navy officials in Hawaii informed Washington of the attack. Pearl Harbor was not the first crisis of the Roosevelt presidency, but it was the most unexpected and the most challenging. In the critical minutes that followed, FDR reached out to the people he needed and trusted most to develop an appropriate strategy to confront the crisis.

 

 

T
he Naval Station in San Francisco picked up the announcement of the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor. The message was relayed to Washington and handed to Frank Knox, who was meeting with Admiral Stark. “My God, this can't be true, this must mean the Philippines,” Knox said after reading the bulletin. Stark looked at the message and recognized the origin code—CINCPAC—which made clear that it was accurate and authentic. “No, sir,” said Admiral Stark, “this is Pearl.” Knox realized that he needed to reach the president as quickly as possible.
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At 1:47 p.m., roughly twenty-seven minutes after the first Japanese planes began their bombing raids in Oahu, the White House operator informed Roosevelt, still in his study, that Knox was on the phone with an urgent message. “Mr. President,” Knox said, “they had picked up a radio from Honolulu from the Commander-in-Chief of our forces
there advising all our stations that an air raid attack was on and that it was ‘no drill.'” It appeared, he said, “as if the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.” “NO!” Roosevelt shouted.

After he hung up with Knox, Roosevelt told Harry Hopkins the news. Hopkins was convinced the report was wrong. “I expressed the belief that there must be some mistake and that surely Japan would not attack in Honolulu,” he noted in a memorandum he wrote about the events that day. Roosevelt likely hoped that it was a false report, but his instincts told him otherwise. “The President thought the report was probably true and thought it was just the kind of unexpected thing the Japanese would do, and that at the very time they were discussing peace in the Pacific they were plotting to overthrow it,” Hopkins observed. But it is unlikely that Roosevelt anticipated the extent of the disaster that was unfolding in Hawaii. Like most military officials, FDR considered Pearl Harbor largely invulnerable to attack.
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FDR had only a skeleton crew on hand in the White House when he learned of the attacks. There were few aides, and no support staff, working on Sunday afternoon. With the exception of his war cabinet, most of the White House staff, and many other aides, were away.

Suddenly, the switchboard lit up, initially with calls from Hopkins and FDR trying to contact staff, and then with officials calling the White House for more information. Since it was a Sunday, and expected to be a slow day, there was only one operator on duty, a new recruit named Jesse Gill. The veteran, Louise (Hackie) Hackmeister, who had been the chief operator since 1933, was at home. Hopkins instructed Jesse to track down a handful of trusted aides and tell them to get to the White House. FDR insisted that she get in touch with his senior foreign policy advisers so he could speak with them. In addition to placing these calls, Jesse asked Hackie to come in and help. It was going to be a busy day at the White House switchboard. “I didn't leave my position at the board from 2 pm until 11 that night,” Hackie told a reporter. “My legs almost collapsed me when I finally got up.”
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Roosevelt's secretary Grace Tully was relaxing in her apartment at 3000 Connecticut Avenue when she received the call from the White House operator. “The President wants you right away,” she said. “There's a car on the way to pick you up. The Japs have just bombed Pearl Harbor.” Tully reflected that she was “too stunned” to react to the news. “The President needed me. He had confidence in me. My only objective was to get to the White House as fast as I could.” She “dressed like a fireman” and “jumped to like a fireman.”
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The White House also contacted FDR's son Captain James Roosevelt, who was taking an afternoon nap at his home in Washington. He was told only that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and that his father wanted to see him right away.

 

 

T
he first phone call the president made was to Secretary of War Henry Stimson. According to Hopkins, FDR made the call at 2:05 p.m. Stimson had been in his office that morning but had gone home for lunch. When he picked up the phone, he recognized Roosevelt's voice. In “a rather excited voice,” FDR asked him, “Have you heard the news?” Stimson was not sure what news FDR was referring to. “Well, I have heard the telegrams which have been coming in about the Japanese advances in the Gulf of Siam.” FDR replied, “Oh, no. I don't mean that. They have attacked Hawaii. They are now bombing Hawaii.” Stimson quickly finished his lunch and returned to his office.
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Given his hawkish stance, and his belief that war with Japan was inevitable, Stimson noted in his diary that he felt a sense of “relief ” when he learned of the assault on Pearl Harbor. His “first feeling was of relief that the indecision was over and that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people,” he wrote.
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After hanging up with Stimson, Roosevelt contacted Secretary of State Hull. The secretary was in his office, waiting to receive Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura and special “peace” envoy Saburo Kurusu. They had called the State Department at noon and requested a 1:00 p.m.
meeting, but they were running late because Tokyo had insisted that only staff with high-level security clearance could translate the final message. Neither of the diplomats knew how to type. Realizing they would not make the 1:00 p.m. deadline, they rescheduled for 1:45 p.m., but showed up twenty minutes late, which gave FDR enough time to reach Hull.
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While the Japanese envoys sat in the diplomatic reception room, FDR told Hull about the attack on Pearl Harbor. In his testimony before the Roberts Commission, Hull claimed that there was at that point still some uncertainty about whether the original report was accurate. “There was a report that Pearl Harbor had been attacked,” he recalled FDR saying. Hull discussed with the president “whether I would accredit that report as the unquestioned truth of the situation and refuse to admit them or whether in view of the extremely delicate relations I would leave open the one chance in ten or more that the report was not correct.” Roosevelt instructed Hull to receive the representatives but not to mention that he knew about the attack. Hopkins recalled Roosevelt saying that Hull should “receive their reply formally and cooly and bow them out.”
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Hull made the ambassadors wait outside his office until 2:20 p.m. When they entered, Nomura stated that “he had been instructed to deliver at 1:00 p.m.” and apologized for being late. When the secretary asked why he had specified 1:00, the ambassador replied that he did not know why. Hull pretended to read the document, even though he had already seen it, and then, in clear violation of FDR's instructions, issued a blistering rebuke. “In all my fifty years of public service,” he said, “I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions—infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any Government on this planet was capable of uttering them.” Before they could respond, Hull lifted his hand to silence them and then nodded toward the door. The two ambassadors “then took their leave without making any comment.”
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Hull assumed that the ambassadors knew of the assault and were part of the conspiracy. In reality, they had not been informed of the plan and learned the news only after they returned to the embassy. Nomura was shocked. For him, it meant that his peace mission had been a failure. And many others in the embassy were extremely worried about the prospect of war between the United States and Japan and far less sanguine than the Japanese military planners about their prospects of victory. As one secretary told his wife, “Oh, it's terrible! Why did they do such a terrible thing? Japan is doomed.”
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F
DR realized that reporters would soon learn of the attack, and he wanted to control the flow of information. He had devoted a great deal of time developing close ties with the press, and he did more than any previous president to manage the news. His trusted partner in that effort was Steve Early, the first full-time White House press secretary.

The two men had met at the 1912 Democratic Convention in Baltimore. Early was working as a wire reporter for United Press International (UPI), and FDR was a Wilson supporter in the New York delegation. The two men struck up a friendship. In 1920, when FDR was running as vice president on Ohio governor James Cox's ticket and needed to create a campaign staff, he hired Early to be his advance man. While Roosevelt spent most of the 1920s fighting to overcome polio, and reemerging as a political figure, Early took a job with Paramount Pictures, where he oversaw the production of Washington newsreels. After FDR won election to the presidency in 1932, Early joined the White House staff. He had planned to stay for only two weeks, but he was still on the job twelve years later when Roosevelt died.

Early had expected a slow news day. On Saturday, he met briefly with reporters, joking that “the President decided you fellows have been so busy lately and Christmas is coming so close that he would give you a day off to do some shopping.” A journalist, picking up on the light atmosphere, said, “I suppose he is over at the House writing a declaration
of war, isn't he.” Early admitted that he was at the White House, but said he was not writing, “he was shaving.” He told reporters to take the weekend off. FDR “will stay over the House this morning; and is not coming to the office. No appointments for today and none tomorrow; and I don't assume there will be.”
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Early took Sunday off and planned to lounge around his house. He was still in his bathrobe, sitting in the second-floor study at his home on Morningside Drive in Northeast Washington, when the special line that connected him directly to the White House started ringing. There were no pleasantries this morning. The first words he heard were, “Have you got a pencil handy?” Early assumed that Roosevelt was playing a practical joke. “Do I need it?” Early replied. Roosevelt was all business. “Yes,” FDR responded. “I have a very important statement. It ought to go out verbatim.”
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