Sunday in Hell, page 59
Meyer ordered the gunners to “…lock and load and follow the planes with their guns, but don’t fire until directed.” A few seconds later, he saw tracers striking the water about 100 feet forward of the PBY’s bow and passing about 30 feet from the hull on the port side. One of the gunners reported the planes were firing at them, and Meyer directed return fire.
The first few planes attacking came from astern and above in a very shallow dive, most pulling away to the side from which they were attacking, while they avoided passing forward of the PBY’s tail. Nevertheless, the “Rising Sun” insignia was plainly visible as they rolled away and pulled up from their intended victim. The attacks continued: coming in from the beam at about twenty degrees angle of elevation and some at about seventy degrees; directly overhead in a vertical dive; from the (stern) quarter; and from almost directly astern, but not in such a position that the PBY’s tail offered the enemy cover.
Nearly all the attackers except one were Zekes, Meyer noting he and his crew could see streams of smoke coming from the upper cowling, as they were firing from fixed, nose-mounted guns firing through the propellers. There was one exception, and after the mission, Ensign Meyer reported, “At least one of the attacking planes was a two seater for it pulled up on a parallel course, range about 100 yards and from about sixty degrees off our port bow, fired back at us from a single flexible gun and then retired.” His PBY had been attacked by a Kate horizontal bomber, which was evidently leading, and being escorted by the fighters, back to their carriers.
Meyer’s report also indicated the fighters didn’t press their diving attacks, and probably pulled up earlier on each firing pass because the PBY’s belly was so close to the water.
When the Kate retired from its attack, Ensign Meyer promptly executed a sharp 180 degree turn to starboard to head toward Oahu. From at least one of the enemy planes, the crew observed a streamer of smoke, but there was no way of knowing if 14-P-2’s gunners had inflicted damage. The attacking group appeared to rejoin and were lost in the haze astern before their retiring course could be determined.
During the five to six minute engagement one of the radiomen transmitted word of the attack by voice radio, while gunners struggled to defend the aircraft. Later the first and second radiomen transmitted word of the attack by key on both circuits they were guarding.
At the outset of the attack the starboard gunner found that his machine gun would fire only one round at a time. He had to recharge the gun for each round. During the attack, he succeeded in replacing his .50-caliber gun with the .30-caliber gun from the tunnel hatch, and fired about fifty or sixty rounds from his gun. The rotating hatch locking lever on the bow turret broke off during the action, and the bow gunner had nothing to assist him in holding the gun against the slip stream. His efficiency was thus greatly impaired.
The PBY took at least eleven hits, four in the tail section, one of which would likely have been fatal to a tail gunner. None of the other seven hits did prohibitive damage. Having shed the pursuing enemy and returned to within four or five miles of Oahu, Ensign Meyer and his crew reversed course and continued their assigned search mission to a distance of approximately 380 miles, finding nothing but clouds and whitecaps. In the meantime, at Pearl Harbor and Kaneohe, the scramble was on to find additional aircraft from among the remaining undamaged Navy and Army Air Force planes on Oahu to dispatch in the search for the Japanese carrier force.
At Kaneohe, radiomen in the communications section lost contact with 14-P-2 and nothing further was heard from Ensign Meyer’s crew until mid-afternoon. When contact couldn’t be re-established following word of the attack, VP-14’s boss, Lieutenant Commander Thurston B. Clark apparently assumed the airplane was down, and sent the remaining two VP-14 PBYs airborne to both cover the unfilled “hole” and search for the “missing” PBY. Unfortunately, Admiral Bellinger wasn’t informed of that decision, and continued working to send more airplanes to the same search area. Because of difficulties and delays in communicating with Kaneohe at the outset of the attack, Bellinger’s ability to coordinate patrol wing search activities was hampered.
The painful reality was the American command on Oahu didn’t know the direction from which the Japanese carrier force and airplanes had come. Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, chief of the Pearl Harbor intelligence unit learned the Japanese commander “bore either 357 or 178 [degrees].” Because of “a limitation of aircraft operations he could be expected to be found within 200 miles.” Direction-finder readings, always ambiguously opposite in their presentations, suggested the enemy was either due north or south, and the commands, long inclined to look to the south, southwest and west as likely avenues of approach by an enemy expanding into Southeast Asia, eventually concentrated their search to the south.21
Captain Charles E. “Soc” McMorris, boss of Kimmel’s War Plans Division was “inclined strongly to believe that the attack had come both from the northward and southward…” Because the American carriers at sea were “already in the southward area,” War Plans “felt that the chance of intercepting the northern route was probably quite remote, while the chance of of intercepting the southern route looked, at least, to hold some promise…” Kimmel made the wrong choice, and at 1046 notified Halsey’s Task Force 8, “D/F [direction finder] bearings indicate enemy carrier bearing 178 from Barbers Point.”22
When Commander Charles Coe reached his office on Ford Island he was told “to get on the operational telephone, call Army Air, and find out where the hell the Japanese planes were coming from and try to get any other information.” Coe did his best, but everything was chaos, confusion and demoralization at the time. “Lines were not manned,” he said, “and I could not get through to anybody.” The entire situation suggested that even had they found Nagumo’s carriers, they couldn’t do much about them. Commander Coe said, “We were simply not in a position to retaliate.”
Other indicators pointed northward. When Major Landon was leading the B-17s into Hickam from the north, northeast that morning, he noticed that some of the Japanese airplanes were flying in the same direction. After he reported to Hawaiian Air Force headquarters, he tried to interest someone in his information, but it seemed to him nearly everyone was more interested in fitting helmet liners into helmets in anticipation of another attack than in locating the Japanese force and hitting it before it could launch further strikes.
The Opana Station Radar plotted a clear northbound track for the withdrawing Japanese aircraft, which the control center at Ft. Shafter recorded at 1027 and 1029, but according to Major General Martin, “there was no indication of that course being an important one at that time.” In fact, no one brought it to his attention until they analyzed the history of the control chart sometime later.
In the meantime, during the morning, senior Navy operations officers apparently concluded the strike force lay to the north, because in early afternoon, the remaining airplanes in Enterprise’s beleaguered VS-6 launched a planned, briefed search north from Ford Island and Oahu, a search that proved to be too little too late, and probably would have been suicidal had they encountered the Japanese strike force.
Their fruitless good fortune was augmented with searches by other Navy aircraft, some launched by Pacific Fleet ships that departed the harbor during the attack, others with Task Force 8, plus unarmed utility aircraft dispatched or commandeered by determined and brave Navy pilots. Back at Ford Island, VP-21’s Ensign Theodore W. Marshall, at the BOQ when the attack started, commandeered a squadron truck. After driving between the quarters, the enlisted barracks and NAS Pearl Harbor, ferrying officers and men to their battle stations - practically oblivious to the bomb fragments and strafing that nearly riddled the vehicle - Marshall proceeded to the flight line. Although unfamiliar with landplanes he climbed into a Grumman F4F Wildcat. Finding that it had been damaged by strafing, Marshall, undaunted, spotted a Douglas TBD-1 (Bureau No. 0289, an ex-Enterprise machine that had been assigned to the Battle Force pool on November 18), climbed in, and started the engine. Despite being as unfamiliar with the Devastator as he was with the Wildcat, Marshall took off and attempted to track the Japanese planes as they retired from Pearl. For 150 miles he tried to keep up with the enemy, until his flagging fuel state compelled his return to Ford Island, where he landed the lumbering plane successfully. For his heroism that day, he received the Silver Star.
On the St. Louis Ensigns Raphael Semmes, Jr., and Maurice Thornton took off in their obsolete Curtiss SOC biplanes during the raid and unsuccessfully attacked a formation of Val dive bombers. Neither man had taken along a radio-gunner, and Thornton ran out of gas during the return flight, necessitating his rescue by a destroyer on 9 December.
The courage of Marshal, Semmes and Thornton matched that of the pilots of the utility squadrons who took off in VJ-1s and Sikorsky JRS-1s. Ensign John P. Edwards took up the first followed by Lieutenant (jg) James W. Robb, Jr., Lieutenant Gordon E. Bolser, and Ensign Nils R. Larson. Lieutenant (jg) Wesley H. Ruth with Aviation Chief Machinist Mate (Naval Aviation Pilot) Emery C. Geise as his co-pilot in JRS-1 (Bureau No. 1063), encountered a Zeke from Shokaku 200 miles off Oahu in what was probably the last engagement between the U.S. Navy and Japanese planes on December 7. For courageously piloting utility amphibians armed only with Springfield rifles, Edwards, Robb, Bolser, Larson and Ruth were all awarded the Navy Cross.
While the brave men accompanying them in their scratch crews received appropriate recommendations, too, only one - Sergeant Thomas E. Haley (USMC) - would receive the Navy Cross. Haley had quit the Oklahoma after she had been ordered abandoned, helped rescue his shipmates from the oily water, and then manned an antiaircraft gun on board the Maryland. Once on Ford Island, he unhesitatingly volunteered to go up in one of the Sikorskys, armed with only a rifle and still wearing only the skivvies in which he had swam away from the capsized battleship.
In addition, pilots of other SOCs proved that courage and initiative were not just the preserve of the fighter pilot. Lieutenant Malcolm C. Reeves and Ensign Frank H. Covington, from the heavy cruiser Northampton in Task Force 8, searching for the Japanese west of Oahu, experienced more success in the unaccustomed role of dogfighters as they battled a Zeke and sent it away trailing smoke. Nevertheless, in spite of the dogged searches individually launched or dispatched, the early search efforts looked primarily south to find the enemy fleet.
By 1127 four of Hickam’s A-20 bombers from the 58th Bombardment Squadron (Light) had taxied out and were ready for takeoff. Led by Major William J. Holzapfel, Jr, they were carrying loads of 300 pound bombs in their bomb bays, after a wild scramble on the ground by men who braved the Japanese raiders’ onslaught to get some slightly damaged airplanes ready to fly, then first load 500-pound bombs, then download them and reload with 300-pound bombs for the mission. The Navy had no instructions for them, so General Martin gave them the mission of finding the carrier that was south of Barbers Point. The takeoff and flight of these “first-off-the-ground,” Douglas, twin-engine bombers was the most inspiring sight of the morning for the downtrodden Hickam troops.23
The large vessel in the location specified for the A-20s to attack was the heavy cruiser Minneapolis, on her way home from the Fleet operating area. Her commander instructed the radio room to advise Kimmel, “No carriers in sight.” Somehow it came out “Two carriers in sight.” Fortunately, the A-20 pilots heading toward Minneapolis recognized her.24
Another United States cruiser, the Portland, had a narrow escape that afternoon. The commander of “a squadron of seaplanes returned from Midway” reported a Japanese carrier and destroyer “well south of Pearl Harbor.” Virtually every member of Kimmel’s staff quizzed the pilot, who insisted he knew it was a Japanese carrier, because “he saw the Rising Sun painted on her deck…and she had the plan of a heavy cruiser painted on her deck as camouflage.” The location plotted proved to be almost exactly that of Vice Admiral Wilson Brown’s task force, returning from Johnston Island with five old destroyers converted to minesweepers. CinCPac immediately directed Brown “to get that carrier.”
Brown replied that he believed his cruiser Portland had been bombed. Unable to credit the reply, headquarters radioed Portland: “Were you bombed this afternoon?” Came the reply, “Yes, a plane dropped two bombs narrowly missing me astern.”
Captain “Blondie” Saunders, who had been named provisional commander of all B-17s, led a three-plane formation from Hickam. They also started off in search of the Japanese carrier force. One aircraft had to abort, however, when his tail wheel started to vibrate and the copilot mistakenly grabbed the lever locking the elevators instead of the tail wheel. This resulted in raising the tail of the B-17 high enough prior to takeoff to ruin all four propellers. The two remaining B-17Ds, piloted by Saunders and Captain Brooke E. Allen, took off at 1140, circled around Diamond Head, and before the day ended were in the air for about seven hours.25
Pilot, aircraft commander, and acting squadron commander, Captain Allen, flew his
B-17 off the Hickam runway in Saunders’ flight of two, and after arriving in the vicinity of Diamond Head followed official intelligence and headed south, despite his private conviction that his prey was northward. That morning, when he heard the first explosions on Hickam Field, he rushed out of his house in his bathrobe, “exposing his nudity,” just in time to see a Zeke completing a strafing pass down his street. Frantically waving his arms and shaking his fists, he shouted, “I knew the little bastards would do it on a Sunday morning! I knew it!” Heading south he in time sighted “this beautiful carrier,” which, according to Allen, fired on him. So he went into a bomb run. But suddenly, in Allen’s words, “God had a hand on me because I knew this wasn’t a Jap carrier.” He had spotted Enterprise. Allen pulled out of range, put his compass on “N,” and decided to try the northern direction, but had no luck.
He turned back toward the south and again saw Enterprise, now much nearer to Oahu. Two Navy Wildcats intercepted his B-17 and looked it over suspiciously as he started back to Hickam. How close he came to the carrier force he never knew but “returned with minimum fuel and a heart full of disgust that I had been unable to locate them.” The timing suggests his initial swing south toward Enterprise had been just long enough for Nagumo’s carriers to speed north beyond his reach.26
Saunders remembered, “the military forces on Hawaii had seen B-17s around the island for six months but they really let go at us, like we were public enemy number one. I thought we were going to be shot down by our own forces.”
A second flight of three A-20s launched at 1300, led by First Lieutenant Perry S. Cole, with Technical Sergeant O’Shea as bombardier and Rod House as gunner. They too were unsuccessful in the search for the carriers. Crew members did get a dramatic view of the damage inflicted by the raiders, plus 20 to 30 holes in their aircraft from alert but angry, frustrated, uncontrolled gunners inadequately trained in aircraft recognition.27
Sometime after the first American carrier hunters launched, the Hawaiian Air Force received a map recovered from the body of a Japanese pilot shot down near Fort Kamehameha. The map had approximately ten courses laid out on it to a point northwest of Oahu, which indicated they had either left the carriers there or expected to return to carriers in that direction. General Martin dispatched planes northward in the afternoon, as did the Navy’s VS-6, and they found nothing. The remainder of the day was spent preparing to fend off another attack, particularly a follow-through amphibious landing.28
Captain Waldron, provisional commander of all B-18s, participated in the search with two aircraft, taking off at 1330 in a northwest direction. His B-18 carried six 100-pound bombs and two .30-caliber machine guns. Men from the 31st Bomb Squadron made up the crew. The B-18 was obsolescent, its bombing capability primitive, and defensive guns completely inadequate. Waldron later considered it fortunate that they didn’t find the Japanese carrier force. “I wouldn’t be here if I did,” he said.
He and his crew also faced heavy antiaircraft artillery fire when he brought their bomber back to Hickam. Although they were operating on radio silence, the routine procedure, he finally got on the radio and said, “This is Gatty, your friend! Please let me land! That went on for some 45 minutes to an hour before he finally got clearance to land.
While Gatty Waldron was out on the search with his B-18, Lieutenant Colonel James A. “Jimmy” Mollison, Major General Martin’s Chief of Staff, was working frantically to establish the Hawaiian Department’s emergency headquarters in Aliamanu Crater. He was hurrying to meet a 1430 deadline for occupancy. He also felt responsible for Martin, who possessed both personal courage and good sense. But Martin’s ulcer drained him of resistance, and the attack shattered his morale. At about 1500 Martin began to show signs of being overwhelmed, and turning to his chief of staff, stammered, “What am I going to do? I believe I am losing the power of decision.” Mollison, realizing his good chief had reached the end of his rope, immediately arranged for Martin’s admission to the Hickam Field hospital, with orders no one was to disturb him. He had a private phone installed at Martin’s bedside so he could communicate with the general when conditions demanded.
At Wheeler, as soon as available fighter aircraft could be patched together and serviced, they were sent up to patrol the skies. They, too, encountered heavy antiaircraft artillery fire, especially over Pearl Harbor, then faced a barrage of rifle and machine gun fire when approaching Wheeler to land. One mission flown by an assortment of ten 15th Pursuit Group planes joined to escort Saunders’ and Allen’s B-17s on the search north-northwest of Oahu, in a 200-mile sweep for one and one half hours, landing at dusk. Another was a twilight scramble by Lieutenant Aloha and other 18th Pursuit Group pilots who took off from Wheeler to investigate a bogey (an unknown), with instructions to climb as high as they could and fly toward Diamond Head. The flight commander, First Lieutenant Charles H. MacDonald, asked what they were supposed to be going after. When the control tower operator told him it was a bright light over Diamond Head, he asked, “Doesn’t anybody know that Venus is bright out there this time of year?” With that parting question they aborted the mission and returned to Wheeler.
