Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (2 page)

Nagumo’s anxiety had not abated once he had put to sea. If anything, his fears increased. He seemed to draw little comfort from the
fact that he commanded the most powerful carrier task force the world had ever seen. More than fifteen thousand officers and enlisted men stoked boilers, manned guns, and stood lookout across some thirty-one ships, from submarines and oilers to battlewagons and flattops. The nineteen-day-old moon occasionally punched through the storm clouds to silhouette this forbidding armada. The last of the strike force’s eight oilers had turned back only hours earlier, leaving the combatants to make the final charge south through the swells toward Oahu at twenty-four knots. An arrow formation of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers shielded Nagumo’s flagship, the
Akagi
, and five other first-line carriers that steamed in two parallel columns. Some 350 fighters and dive and torpedo bombers crowded the flattops, ready to roar down the wooden flight decks at dawn.

Nagumo’s fears were not wholly unfounded. His orders stipulated he execute the dramatic opening act of war against the United States, a surgical strike that would mortally wound America’s powerful Pacific Fleet, anchored in the cool waters of Pearl Harbor. Even if he could make it 3,500 miles across the Pacific without running into a submarine, merchant ship, or patrol plane, Nagumo understood that an attack on Pearl Harbor was like kicking a hornet’s nest. Shore batteries along with battleships, cruisers, and destroyers boasted 993 antiaircraft guns that could shred Japanese pilots. Army and Navy airfields scattered around Oahu could throw up another four hundred fighters and bombers. Those planes could devastate Nagumo’s carriers and doom Japan before the sun set on the first day of war. The incredible risks of the mission were reflected in Nagumo’s final message from the Combined Fleet commander. “The fate of our empire,” Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto warned, “depends upon this expedition.”

These worries had kept the husky admiral awake at night, even though he knew strategists had perfected the plan down to the wooden torpedo fins needed to run in Pearl Harbor’s shallow waters. On the eve of the task force’s departure sailors had stripped the warships of all flammable and unnecessary equipment, from gangways and practice weapons to the paintings and flower vases that enlivened the destroyer
Akigumo
’s wardroom. To increase the task force’s range, workers had pumped extra fuel into trimming tanks, while sailors bedded down next to oil drums. Fuel conservation demanded that the ships dim lights, forgo heat, and
limit bathing for the duration of the mission. One by one the warships had slipped port, rendezvousing in Hitokappu Bay off Etorofu Island, a desolate outpost a thousand miles north of Tokyo in the Kuril Islands that was home only to a handful of fishermen. A gunboat had arrived in advance of the force, shutting down the town’s wireless station and post office.

To throw off American eavesdroppers, the task force operated in radio silence. The chief communications officer went so far as to pluck out an essential component of his transmitter, hiding it in a wooden box that doubled as his pillow. The Japanese flooded the airwaves with dummy messages to disguise the task force’s departure, while busloads of sailors from the Yokosuka naval barracks arrived daily in Tokyo, paraded around the city on sightseeing tours for American diplomats to see. This charade had allowed Nagumo’s task force to depart undetected from Hitokappu Bay soon after daybreak on November 26. War planners had consulted a decade of weather data before setting a course across the stormy northern Pacific, one that promised a December average of just seven days of clear weather. Few ships would risk such turbulent seas. Those that did, orders demanded, should be destroyed: “Sink anything flying any flag.”

Those orders had so far proven unnecessary. Despite the task force’s good fortune, Nagumo couldn’t shake his fears, refusing to change out of his uniform even as he lay awake at night in bed. The graduate of Japan’s prestigious Eta Jima Naval Academy summoned subordinates at all hours to hash over trivial matters. Was his staff certain that the American ships would be in Pearl Harbor and not at the Lahaina anchorage off Maui? He dragged his flight commander from bed one night distressed over his unfounded suspicion that an American submarine was shadowing the force. To his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka, the nervous Nagumo confided his true concerns. He felt he had overreached, taking on a mission that was too risky. If only he had been strong enough to refuse the operation. Now that the task force was at sea—each day steaming closer and closer to Hawaii—the admiral droned on about the mission’s chances for success. “I wonder if it will go well.”

“
Daijobu
,” his patient chief of staff repeated. “Don’t worry.”

But Nagumo did.

THE JAPANESE ADMIRAL
wasn’t the only anxious one. The breakdown
in relations between America and Japan had left little doubt that the two nations were marching toward war. The questions seemed more about when and where the conflict would begin. The Navy only nine days earlier had ordered Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Husband Kimmel to take defensive measures. “This despatch is to be considered a war warning,” cabled Admiral Harold Stark, the chief of naval operations in Washington. “Negotiations with Japan looking toward stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days.” His Army counterpart Lieutenant General Walter Short, who commanded a garrison of 42,959 officers and men trusted to protect Pearl Harbor, had received a similar alert that same day from Army chief of staff General George Marshall. “Japanese future action unpredictable,” Marshall warned, “but hostile action possible at any moment.”

Most expected the first punch to land in the Far East—Thailand, Malaysia, or perhaps the Philippines or Guam—but not Hawaii. Not the Paradise of the Pacific. That Saturday night as Nagumo’s carriers charged through the swells toward Oahu, Admiral Kimmel dined at the Halekulani Hotel while General Short attended a charity dance at Schofield Barracks officers club. Off-duty troops cruised down Honolulu’s famous Hotel Street, lined with tattoo parlors, pinball joints, and shooting galleries. Others laughed through the variety show “Tantalizing Tootsies” at the Princess Theater or danced to jukebox tunes at favorite watering holes, like Two Jacks, New Emma Café, and the Mint. Airmen over at Hickam could catch Clark Gable as a frontier conman in
Honky Tonk
, while the new Bloch Recreation Center at Pearl Harbor hosted the finals in a battle of the bands that pitted the ships in the fleet against one another. The battleship
Pennsylvania
’s band claimed victory that night before everyone sang “God Bless America.”

The waters of Pearl Harbor that Saturday night resembled a parking lot. The bustling port just a short drive from Oahu’s famed Waikiki Beach counted ninety-four ships, almost half of the entire Pacific Fleet. Eight of the fleet’s nine battleships were in port along with eight heavy and light cruisers, twenty-nine destroyers, and five submarines. The Pacific Fleet’s three carriers, which the Japanese so hungered to destroy, were absent. The
Lexington
steamed to Midway to deliver a squadron of
scout bombers, while the
Enterprise
sliced trough the swells a few hundred miles west of Oahu after ferrying fighters to Wake. The
Saratoga
had returned to the West Coast for repairs. General Short on his drive home that evening at nine thirty looked down upon the lit-up battlewagons, most moored side by side along the southeast shore of Ford Island, the view interrupted only by the occasional searchlight. “Isn’t that a beautiful sight?” the general said, “and what a target they would make.”

Pacific Fleet intelligence officer Lieutenant Commander Edwin Layton tried to shake his fears that Saturday night as he dined and danced on the terrace of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, just down from where Admiral Kimmel finished his dinner. When the evening ended at midnight with the familiar refrain of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Layton stood at attention and fought the urge to shout, “Wake up, America!” Earlier that day the veteran intelligence officer learned that the Japanese consulate had begun torching official records and codes; this came on top of the sudden increased radio security. The Japanese used multiple addresses and blanket coverage—messages sent from nobody to nobody, but that copied everyone—that seemed designed to muddy the waters, measures Layton feared masked an offensive operation. His concerns deepened when the Japanese changed naval call signs on November 1 and then again one month later. Analysts realized in the shuffle that Japan’s main carriers had vanished.

Where were Japan’s flattops?

Layton had struggled to answer that question a few days earlier when he prepared the December 2 intelligence sheet. Trusted to keep Admiral Kimmel informed of when, where, and how the Japanese might strike, Layton could only guess the location of the Imperial Navy’s carriers, writing simply, “Unknown—home waters?”

“What?” Kimmel had erupted. “You don’t know where the carriers are?”

“No, sir,” Layton had answered, pointing out that he had only guessed homeland waters.

“You mean to say that you, the intelligence officer, don’t know where the carriers are?” the admiral pressed.

“No, sir,” Layton replied. “I don’t.”

“You mean they could be coming around Diamond Head, and you wouldn’t know it?”

“Yes, sir,” Layton answered, “but I hope they’d
have been sighted before now.”

But no one had spotted Nagumo’s forces.

NOW AFTER MONTHS
of worry—and just hours before his planes would lift off—a calm washed over Nagumo. No patrol plane had appeared overhead, nor an enemy armada on the horizon. The gentle Hawaiian tunes from Honolulu’s KGMB radio station that emanated from the
Akagi
’s receivers only confirmed that the Americans on that volcanic archipelago a few hundred miles south had no clue of the steel typhoon that bore down on them; pilots would go so far as to dance clumsy hulas that mocked America’s ignorance.

Aircrews on the Japanese task force’s six carriers rose as early as three thirty this first Sunday morning in December. Many had spent the journey east across the Pacific studying silhouettes of American carriers, battleships, and cruisers along with detailed maps, including a six-square-foot scale model of Oahu and one of Pearl Harbor. Others had climbed into the cockpit to grip the controls or peered through the bombardier’s sight so as not to forget the feel of combat. Fighter pilot Yoshio Shiga had painted eight watercolors of a temple. Certain he would not survive the attack, Shiga arranged a private showing for his fellow officers on the carrier
Kaga
. That same fear no doubt triggered the destroyer
Akigumo
’s executive officer to close his eyes night after night and to dream about his wife, Fumiko, and the couple’s children. Many of the airmen spent the final hours before the dawn attack penning letters home to wives and parents, enclosing fingernail trimmings and clips of hair.

The airmen dressed in clean loincloths, pressed uniforms, and special thousand-stitch belts, a traditional bellyband in which wives, mothers, and sisters stood on corners to solicit passersby to contribute a stitch, each one considered a prayer for good luck. The thirty-nine-year-old Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, who would lead the air attack on Pearl Harbor, slipped on long red underwear and a red shirt. He felt that if he were wounded in the raid the color would camouflage his blood and not demoralize his troops. The aircrews paused alongside portable Shinto shrines to pray for victory and sip sake before sitting down to a special breakfast of red rice with
okashiratsuki
, sea bream cooked with the
head and tail, and so-called victory chestnuts known as
kachiguri
. The apprehension that flooded the carriers resonated back home in Japan, a sentiment captured in Ugaki’s diary. “We await the day with our necks craned,” he wrote. “What a big drama it is, risking the fate of a nation and so many lives!”

Nagumo’s carriers battled angry waves some 230 miles north of Oahu, pitching as much as fifteen degrees, while sea spray soaked the flight decks crowded with planes parked wingtip to wingtip. One hundred and eighty-three fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes would lift off in the first wave, followed by a second strike of 167. Across one of the bombs someone scribbled a message in chalk: “First bomb in the war on America.” The propellers roared to life—audible even on the decks of the escort ships—spewing blue exhaust. The faint light of dawn punctured the clouds and illuminated the eastern horizon as the carriers increased speed and swung into the wind. Sailors waved hats and erupted in cheers as the first plane roared down the flight deck, followed seconds later by another then another. The same scene played out across all six carriers as one after the other the planes swarmed into the skies. The moment Nagumo and his superiors had long awaited had finally arrived. There was no retreat.

War had come.

CHAPTER 1